Hollie Doyle: ‘Hopefully I can inspire others and change a few mindsets’

Racing history is littered with apparent breakthrough moments that turned out to be as good as it ever got, but two years on from the afternoon at Ascot that made her name, Hollie Doyle can rest assured that Champions Day 2020 was only the start.

Well, not rest, exactly. “It’s weird how your goalposts change,” she said at Leicester racecourse on Tuesday, in the brief gap between her 957th and 958th rides of 2022. “When you’re young, you say: ‘I’ll be satisfied once I’ve ridden out my [apprentice’s] claim’. And once you’ve done that, you think: ‘I’ll be happy when I’ve ridden a Group winner’. But you’re still not happy, you want to ride 10. Your goalposts constantly change, and I think that’s the athlete’s mindset.”

Doyle rode two of the six winners on Champions Day two years ago including her first Group One success thanks to a fine tactical ride on Glen Shiel in the Sprint. Her then boyfriend, now husband, Tom Marquand, also had two wins, which ensured a very happy drive back to their Hungerford home with two-thirds of the riders’ spoils from Britain’s most valuable day at the races.

Doyle has since added four more victories at the highest level to her record, including a Classic – the Prix de Diane, or French Oaks – among three so far in 2022. She is also leading a tight race for second place behind William Buick in the Flat jockeys’ championship, and long odds-on to finish in the top three in the title race – which runs from early May until Champions Day – for the first time.

Although she insists that “we’re both focused on riding big-race winners and we wouldn’t be checking each other’s stats really”, a second-place finish would put her in front of Marquand in the championship for the first time, too. “Wind back 10