Women compete on level terms in horseracing

COMMENT

One sport where women can compete on a level playing field with the men is in the highly-competitive horseracing environment.

Currently Rachael Blackmore is challenging for the national hunt title after finishing second and third last year and the year before.

On the flat young Meath apprentice Siobhan Rutledge is making a name for herself.

Lisa O'Neill is a well-regarded amateur with Gordon Elliott while in the UK names like Lizzy Kelly and Bryony Frost are well known over jumps and Hollie Doyle on the flat.

However, it wasn't always that way for the ladies, but thanks to the efforts of Meath woman Helen McDonogh that started to change.

She was a trail blazer in the 1960s with her tally of 116 winners in a era when it was generally accepted that women did not have the ability to ride in races against men.

She was the woman who made a difference and was followed in more recent times by the contributions of the retired duo of Nina Carberry and Katie Walsh, two women who broke new ground.

Helen McDonogh challenged the norms of her time with 10 winners on the track and a record-setting 106 on the point-to-point circuit.

Her last winner was on two-time Champion Hurdler Monksfield at Down Royal in March 1980, a groundbreaking feat also as scarcely two months earlier she had given birth to son Declan who later become a champion flat jockey.

That was an era when there was a ladies bar in the local golf club.

Females would most certainly not be permitted to enter the main bar - it was reserved only for the men.

It was an era when most women didn't play any of the major sports save for a bit of the aforementioned golf, maybe some tennis, hockey or badminton.

Maybe now is the time for more groundbreaking changes in terms of labelling although one sport is quite safe in that sense, unless the Camogie Association change to women's hurling?