Talking Horses: is it Hollie Doyle’s time to become champion jockey?

With the football season all but over and the World Cup shunted off towards Christmas, the stars have aligned for racing to enjoy an unusually high public profile over the next few weeks. First, the Derby will take centre stage during the Platinum Jubilee celebrations and then attention will turn to Royal Ascot in mid-June, when the Queen is expected to have several fancied runners.

And while it might seem to be tempting fate to suggest it, there are early signs too that when the pomp and ceremony of Ascot is done for another year, the race for the Flat jockeys’ championship could keep the sport in the wider public consciousness through the summer months and on into the autumn.

Hopes were high 12 months ago that Hollie Doyle would follow up her third-place finish in Sports Personality of the Year in December 2020 with a serious tilt at becoming Britain’s first female champion jockey. With Tom Marquand, her partner, also expected to be in the running, the PR potential for the sport was immense.

As it turned out, Doyle’s challenge barely left the starting stalls. By the end of June, when Oisin Murphy and William Buick, the eventual winner and runner-up, had 46 and 51 wins respectively, Doyle was already well adrift on 32.

In the first three weeks of the 2022 campaign, however, Doyle has hit the ground running. She rode 15 winners in May 2021 but is already up to 18 so far this month, two behind Buick – who remains the odds-on favourite for the title – and three in front of Marquand. Ben Curtis also has 18 winners but former champion Silvestre de Sousa, a 20-1 shot for the championship, has just nine and some catching up to do.

It is also interesting that Doyle has been the busiest of the likely title contenders in the