Rachael Blackmore — The Dyslexic Jockey Who Made History
You are sitting in a classroom in Tipperary, listening to a teacher explain something from a textbook. The words on the page are doing the thing they always do — rearranging themselves, resisting the smooth left-to-right flow that everyone else seems to manage without effort. You wanted to be a vet. You know you are never going to get the points. But this afternoon, you will get on a pony and do something that requires no text at all — something that demands a different kind of reading entirely. The reading of muscle, rhythm, balance, and a five-hundred-kilogram animal moving at thirty miles per hour beneath you.
"I wasn't academic. I was dyslexic. I wish I was better in school."
The woman who said that is Rachael Blackmore. She won 576 races as a professional jockey. She is the first woman to win the Grand National, the first to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup, and the first to be crowned leading jockey at the Cheltenham Festival. She retired on 12 May 2025, at thirty-five, with thirty-three Grade One victories and career prize money exceeding nine million pounds. She is, by any statistical measure, among the greatest National Hunt jockeys of her generation — regardless of gender.
The gap between what the classroom measured and what the saddle revealed is not a feel-good story about grit. It is a cognitive profile. And it tells us something specific about what happens when a mind's strongest processing channels go untested while the most expensive one gets treated as the whole picture.
Was Rachael Blackmore actually diagnosed with dyslexia
Yes. Blackmore has spoken publicly about her dyslexia on multiple occasions. In a 2021 Irish Times profile, she confirmed it directly: "I wasn't academic. I was dyslexic." In a 2025 interview ahead of her retirement, she discussed how dyslexia shaped her relationship with reading throughout her life — preferring audiobooks since childhood, listening to Enid Blyton novels and the Harry Potter series rather than decoding them on the page.
The dyslexia is not incidental to her story. It is the reason she wrote a children's book. In May 2025, Blackmore published Granny National, a story for eight-to-ten-year-olds about a grandmother who dreams of being a jockey. She spent three years working on the book with co-writer Rachel Pierce. The motivation was explicit: she wanted to show young dyslexic readers that reading is not a closed door.
The book was shortlisted for Children's Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards 2025. The dyslexic child who preferred audiobooks wrote a bestseller.
What school was like for Rachael Blackmore
Blackmore grew up in Killenaule, County Tipperary — the middle child of three. Her father Charles was a dairy farmer. Her mother Eimir was a teacher. The family farm had horses and ponies; Rachael was on a pony by two or three years old. The Blackmore children were, by every account, always outside — playing sport, riding, attending Pony Club events, hunting.
School was a different environment. Blackmore wanted to be a vet. She sat her Leaving Certificate with veterinary science as her first choice. She knew she would never get the points. She did not.
She went to University College Dublin to study science. She kept failing maths. After two years — years she has described as "the proper college experience," which is Irish for something other than academic rigour — she moved to the University of Limerick to study equine science. Her mother, the teacher, had impressed upon her the importance of a Plan B. Equine science was the compromise between the career she could not access through examination and the world she already knew through her body.
This trajectory follows the pattern Sally Shaywitz's longitudinal research at Yale has documented across thousands of students. The child with dyslexia is not less intelligent. They are expensive to run on one particular channel — phonemic processing, the decoding of written language — while their other channels may be operating at high or exceptional throughput. The examination system measures the expensive channel. The Leaving Certificate, like the 11-plus that sorted Steve Redgrave into a comprehensive school, treats a single cognitive dimension as a verdict on the whole mind.
Blackmore's mind was already doing things in the saddle that no examination could measure. The question was whether anyone would notice.
How a pony became the first test that worked
Blackmore started riding at two or three. By the time she was in Pony Club, she was competitive. By secondary school, she was entering point-to-point races — the amateur circuit that feeds into professional National Hunt racing in Ireland.
She had her first ride under rules in February 2011, finishing fifth on Stowaway Forever at Thurles. She was twenty-one. She graduated from the University of Limerick later that year. For several years she rode as an amateur, working for trainer John 'Shark' Kelly in County Kilkenny, building a reputation on a circuit where female jockeys were present but far from dominant.
The professional licence came in 2015. The winners did not come quickly. In her first season as a professional, she rode seven winners. The numbers grew: fifteen in her second season, thirty-two in her third. Then, in the 2018-19 season, she rode ninety winners and finished second in the Irish jockeys' championship — the highest placing ever achieved by a female jockey at that time.
What happened next was not a breakthrough. It was a reveal. The cognitive system that had always been there — the one the classroom never tested — was now operating in the only environment with enough bandwidth to show what it could do.
What elite jump racing actually demands from a brain
National Hunt racing is not flat racing. The horses are jumping obstacles at speeds exceeding thirty miles per hour, carrying a jockey who must maintain a crouched position using only their legs to dampen the oscillation of a half-tonne animal's movement. Research published in the journal Animals (2022) found that race-riding jockeys exercise at near-maximal physiological potential, with heart rates reaching ninety-four per cent of maximum, energy expenditure of 17.5 kilocalories per minute, and VO2 max estimates between 42 and 57 mL O2/kg/min — comparable to elite endurance athletes.
But the physical demands are only half the story. A jump jockey must simultaneously:
- Read the pace of a race involving fifteen to thirty other horses
- Track the position and trajectory of every nearby competitor
- Judge the distance to the next fence and adjust the horse's stride pattern accordingly
- Feel, through their seat and legs, whether the horse is balanced, tiring, or about to make an error
- Make tactical decisions — when to push, when to wait, when to commit — in windows of less than a second
- Maintain emotional regulation during a four-minute race where a fall at thirty miles per hour is always one stride away
This is not a test of courage alone. It is a test of processing speed, spatial computation, sensory-motor integration, and the capacity to read a dynamic environment through the body rather than through text.
The cognitive dimensions behind the silks
Three of CognitionType's seven cognitive dimensions map most precisely onto what Blackmore's career reveals.
Sensory-motor integration is where the exceptional throughput sits. A jockey's primary information channel is not visual — it is proprioceptive. They read the horse through pressure, rhythm, and resistance. Is the animal balanced? Is it shortening its stride before a fence? Is it tiring in the hindquarters? This information arrives through the seat, the calves, the hands on the reins — and it arrives continuously, at the speed of the gallop, demanding a motor response calibrated in real time.
Blackmore's trainers and fellow jockeys have consistently described her defining quality as "feel" — the capacity to sense what a horse needs before it communicates distress. Henry de Bromhead, the trainer who employed her as stable jockey and partnered with her for virtually every historic victory, described giving her fewer and fewer pre-race instructions over time. "She gives you so much confidence," he said. The communication between Blackmore and the horses she rode operated below the threshold of language. It was a sensory-motor conversation conducted at thirty miles per hour.
Visual processing is the second channel. Jump racing is a spatial problem. The jockey must compute distances to fences, judge the speed and trajectory of surrounding horses, and read the terrain — all while maintaining their own balance in a crouched posture with their centre of mass shifted forward. Blackmore's tactical awareness — her capacity to place herself in the right position at the right time, to wait when others committed too early, to find gaps that appeared and disappeared in fractions of a second — was consistently cited as elite. The fifteen-length demolition of A Plus Tard's Cheltenham Gold Cup in 2022 was not merely a strong horse. It was a perfectly judged ride — a spatial computation sustained over three miles and twenty-two fences.
Phonemic processing is where the cost sat. Blackmore's brain decoded written language slowly enough that veterinary science was inaccessible through examination, maths was a repeated failure, and audiobooks remained her preferred format into adulthood. The bottleneck was real and permanent. It shaped her educational pathway, limited her career options on paper, and remained invisible to any system that measured minds through text.
Honeysuckle and the partnership that proved everything
If Blackmore's career has a single image that captures what her cognitive profile produces at full throughput, it is her partnership with the mare Honeysuckle.
Honeysuckle ran sixteen times under National Hunt rules. She won sixteen times. She was never beaten. Blackmore rode her in every single race. Together they won three Irish Champion Hurdles and two Champion Hurdles at Cheltenham — making Honeysuckle the first mare in history to win back-to-back Champion Hurdles.
The partnership was not merely statistical. It was a sensory-motor dialogue sustained over four years. Blackmore knew the mare's rhythms, her preferences, her response to pressure. She knew when to push and when to wait. She knew, through her seat and her hands, what the mare was feeling before the mare expressed it in any way visible to the watching crowd. Sixteen races, sixteen wins, zero defeats. That is not luck. It is a processing system operating at extraordinary resolution on a channel the classroom never tested.
Why she never made it about gender
Blackmore's response to her own history-making was characteristically precise.
"I just felt elated that I had won," she said after the Grand National. "Not elated because I was a female who had won."
When asked about gender in racing, she said: "As a jockey I feel male, female doesn't matter anymore. If you're good enough and you work hard, you'll get the opportunities."
She did not deflect the significance. She acknowledged "all the incredible women that have gone before me and done tireless work to put me in the position" where gender was no longer the determining factor. But she refused to centre it. The victory was about the ride, the horse, the computation. Not the category.
This is consistent with someone whose mind was measured on the wrong channel for years. Once you find the environment that tests your actual processing strengths — and you succeed there at the highest level — you develop a precise allergy to being defined by a label rather than a performance. Blackmore was defined by dyslexia in the classroom. She was not going to be defined by gender in the weighing room.
The book that closed the loop
In May 2025, days before announcing her retirement, Blackmore published Granny National. A children's book. Written by a dyslexic woman who preferred audiobooks. Written specifically so that other dyslexic children might find reading less intimidating.
The loop is elegant. The child who could not decode text efficiently grew up to master a domain where text was irrelevant — and then, at the end of her career, circled back to the domain that had cost her most and made something there too. Not by overcoming dyslexia. Not by pretending the difficulty did not exist. But by producing a book that meets young readers where they are — in short chapters, with illustrations, written for the experience of an eight-year-old whose letters jumble.
"I love to read," Blackmore has said. The dyslexia did not eliminate the desire. It changed the format. Audiobooks were the workaround. And now, a book of her own is the contribution.
What this means if you recognise the pattern
If Blackmore's story resonates — the school that measured you on text, the career ambition that required examination points you could not produce, the sense that your body knew things your written work could never express, the feeling of being bright but somehow not academic — that resonance is data.
Not every dyslexic person will become a jockey. But the pattern is the same across every profile we publish: the mind has multiple processing channels, the educational system measures one or two of them, and the result is treated as a verdict on the whole person. Blackmore failed maths at UCD. She also won the Grand National, the Gold Cup, and the Champion Hurdle — three of the four most important races in jump racing — within twelve months. The mind that could not produce examination points could produce spatial-temporal-proprioceptive computations at thirty miles per hour over fences. The dimension was different. The throughput was exceptional.
CognitionType measures seven dimensions of cognitive processing, including sensory-motor integration, visual processing, and phonemic processing. It does not diagnose. It maps — showing where the bottlenecks sit and where the throughput runs fast. Blackmore found her channel through a pony in Killenaule, a mother who insisted on a Plan B, and a trainer in Kilkenny who gave an unknown amateur a leg up. The map does not replace that journey. But it can shorten the years between struggle and understanding.
If you suspect a reading difference, our companion piece Do I Have Dyslexia? is a useful starting point. If what resonates is the connection between body, movement, and cognition — the way exercise reshapes cognitive function — we have written about that too.
CognitionType is an informational assessment, not a clinical diagnosis. If you suspect dyslexia or another learning difference, we encourage you to seek formal evaluation from a qualified professional. A cognitive profile is a complement to clinical assessment, not a replacement.