Less than 18 months into her riding career, Mollie Fitzgerald leads the NSW jockeys’ premiership. Matt Stewart caught up with the latest rising female star in Australia’s jockey ranks.
From his vantage point in South Australia, where two super-fit, super-skilled, super-confident women have surged to the top of the riding ranks, Dean Pettit has seen a girl in the NSW Northern Rivers who is about to “explode”.
Her name is Mollie Fitzgerald and like Rochelle Milnes and Taylor Johnstone in SA, Fitzgerald is not just on the list but on top of it.
Of the top 30 jockeys in NSW at the moment, 26 are men, but that pendulum is swinging – and none this season has hit the scoreboard more often than 22-year-old Fitzgerald, whose career has barely begun.
Her first race ride was aboard All Too Rosey in a 1600m Class 1 at Taree on August 18, 2023. It ran 10th at $51, an inauspicious start for a career that would skyrocket in unison with careers of young female riders around the country.
The trajectory of Fitzgerald – 50 winners in her first season, leading the state title in her second (57.5 wins), marching onto town on loan to Annabel Neasham/Rob Archibald, aiming for the stars – is a story of revolutionary times.
Fitzgerald told The Straight that her early training exposed her to experiences her father, former prominent Sydney jockey Malcolm Fitzgerald, could not have imagined.
“Dad did the form out of the newspaper. He knew about horses from what other people said about them. There was no media like now, no replays, none of that,” she said.
The moulding of Fitzgerald was first home-spun, then structured.
“From when I first learned to walk, Dad got me to crouch down like a jockey and work my way through a race. That became fundamental,” she said, adding jockey training had been “intense” with regular trips to the races to mingle with jockeys and learn from them.
They’d walk tracks with Glyn Schofield or Nash Rawiller and be welcomed into the female jockeys’ room by Rachel King and others.
“They were great. Rachel is amazing, so patient. We were allowed to ask questions and take in all their different views on things like speed maps and whether you should depend on them or not,” Fitzgerald said.
From the moment she burst from the gates at Taree, Fitzgerald was green but well-armed. All of the kids are these days, and most of them are girls.
It was only a decade ago that Michelle Payne’s Melbourne Cup “misogyny speech” exposed a sport that had not shrugged off perceptions that a good girl was never as good as a good boy.
A former leading jockey of the 1990s and early 2000s once described many women riders as ‘part-hobbyists’ who lacked the strength and fitness of males, mostly only effective with 3kg claims on horses that galloped their way to the front with minimal restraint.
This was blunt and a little harsh given previous eras had featured some excellent women jockeys. It’s just that there weren’t many of them.
Until a decade ago, 70 per cent of riders were male. That ratio, of course, is flipping. Apprentice intakes are almost exclusively female. Simple projection means that in a decade, male jockeys will be a minority, not just in a world of female riders, who have advanced quickly in skill, strength and confidence.
In each state and territory, female jockeys have made what could be described as their second transition.
The bar has been raised. If future champions are inspired by contemporary ones, then this could be described as the Kah effect.
Victorian Jockeys’ Association chief executive Matt Hyland says the female jockeys’ room is now a centre of excellence.
“Back in the day, the male jocks had someone to aspire to, a hero. The females now have them and they share a room with them. They listen and learn and set about emulating it,” Hyland said.
Former jockey Pettit, now the SA jockey coach, says the female riders have improved so much that they are priority picks, and not just for valuable claims.
Rochelle Milnes and Taylor Johnstone are top two and three on the SA jockeys’ premiership, Sonja Logan is vying for the lead in the Northern Territory, Angela Jones sits second in Brisbane, Lucy Fiore third in Perth.
Chloe Wells and Erica Byrne Burke sit in the top four in Tasmania where women are holding the sport together, according to Kevin Ring, the Tasmanian-based OH&S officer for the Australian Jockeys Association.
“Without them we’d have a shortage of jockeys. Thank goodness we have them,” Ring said.
Pettit marvels at the state of play in SA.
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“Funny, I was just in the office today and we were wondering “when was the last time two apprentices, let alone two females, were leading the metro title,” Pettit said.
“They are starting to dominate, not just here but in every state. Rochelle and Taylor … they’re taking rides from very established riders like Todd Pannell, Jake Toeroek and Jason Holder.”
Former champion jockey Corey Brown no longer coaches the Sydney apprentices but he works with a handful and says the growth and development of female riders has been staggering.
“The numbers at the academy say where it’s going numbers-wise. The last intake in NSW was 19 girls, one boy. There are so many they are taking over the male jockeys’ rooms in many places,” Brown said.
The greater the exposure, the more valuable the lesson.
“You’ve got good city jocks going to the provincials; the McEvoys, the Rawillers. If you’re rubbing shoulders with them every day, you’re learning and learning quickly,” Brown said.
Fitzgerald said her shift from bush to provincial – before provincial to Neasham – had been an eye-opener and an important step in self-belief.
“Confidence is such a big thing. I’d had a good grounding and although I spent the first couple of weeks (at the provincials) taking it all in, I feel I’m going to the races fully prepared,” she said.
“They (Neasham/Archibald) gave their confidence in me with their best runners at a meeting recently and we got the job done. It feels like a fresh start,” she said.
The female progress has come from general advances in the training of athletes. No one would dare suggest any of them are “part-hobbyists”.
“From when I first learned to walk, Dad got me to crouch down like a jockey and work my way through a race. That became fundamental” - Mollie Fitzgerald
Brown said greater strength and fitness was now required of all athletes.
“I always drummed it into them fitness-wise; if you had to lose weight, you’re better off working it off on the mechanical horse than in the sauna. Get on that mechanical horse and ride it until you simply can’t go any further,” he said.
“The boys were always a little easier to train that way. They’d just go and do it and some of the girls would need to be prodded … but they quickly learned.”
Female jockeys rarely faced weight battles. Instead of emerging half-wasted from saunas, they’d bounce into the mounting yard.
Mollie Fitzgerald was born for the saddle as the daughter for former Sydney jockey Malcolm Fitzgerald. (Photos: Facebook/Malcolm Fitzgerald)
“They are mentally so much better,” Pettit said.
Apprentice school curriculums are framed by sports science.
“They do gym work, they spent time at the sport institutes; dieticians, nutritionists, heart rates, recovery … it’s just not like it used to be,” Pettit said.
“They have all the tools now,” he said, adding previous generations didn’t.
“Given Therese Payne and the like 400 rides before they came to town, all the stuff we have now and they’d have been 10 times better. But they didn’t,” he said.
Pettit says the superstardom of Jamie Kah - and King - had been a “sugar hit” to a raising of the bar for the girls who came after her.
“We now have a generation of females who are strong, effective, tactical riders. They are a proper, professional outfit,” he said.
“We have learned that riding is about smooth rhythm, flowing with the horse. The girls just seem at one with the horse, natural and organic.”
Like every female rider around the country, Fitzgerald accepts that Kah, King and other established elites have raised the bar but not made it unreachable.
“I was in love with Kathy O’Hara growing up and it’s amazing to see the level that Jamie and Rachel have got to,” she said.
Asked about her ambitions, Fitzgerald said: “It’s a funny question because I feel I’m just at the start. But I do want to be competing at the highest level.”
Pettit has no doubt.
“I’ve been watching that girl. She is deadest ready to explode,” he said.
