I was a record-breaking champion jockey with over £1million in earnings but had my career ended while sat in A&E

SHE was the trailblazing woman jockey who broke down barriers and won well over £1million in prize money.

The first female to be crowned champion conditional jockey, she smashed a 32-year-old record for wins in a season and for years was Britain’s best woman rider.

But Lucy Alexander saw her stratospheric trajectory and brilliant career swiftly ended while sitting in A&E.

Alexander, who was based in Fife in Scotland, set the racing world alight when she exploded onto the scene in 2011.

Gordon Elliott was already a Grand National winner then and was among a whole host of top trainers to book the prodigy for rides.

The only female professional jumps jockey on the northern tracks at the time, her agent Richard Hale underplayed her popularity, saying coyly: “It has not been hard to sell her.”

Trainers certainly took notice and in the 2012/13 season she broke new ground by being crowned champion conditional jockey.

The award is given to the ‘rookie’ rider with the most wins and Alexander recorded 38 – despite missing five weeks with a broken collarbone and another with concussion.

Although she only kept a fraction of it, she won £215,483 in prize money that season too.

She was also incredibly tough mentally.

Recalling what it was like being the odd one out in the weighing room at that time, Alexander said: “As for the jockeys, they wander around with no clothes on all the time, but you get used to that very quickly and it certainly doesn’t faze me.”

That breakout year put her on the map and more success came in the following seasons – although she never again matched that tally of 38 winners.

Like all jumps jockeys endure at some point, though, she suffered a horrific fall and stamp at Newcastle at the end of 2020.

Chanting Hill, the 5-4 fav, was cruising in the lead when falling five fences from home in a Class 4 mares’ handicap chase.

After hitting the deck Alexander was kicked by another horse, crushing her L3 vertabra in the process.

It would prove to be a devastating injury – one which required metal rods to try to rectify – that cut short one of racing’s most promising careers.

Almost nine years to the day after she became champion conditional, Alexander announced her retirement.

The situation surrounding it was heartbreaking.

Then just 31, she said: “It’s obviously not the way I’d have wanted it to end.

“Anyone would want to end when the time is right. I was enjoying it.

“My back has improved but it’s still incomplete healing and it’s been 17 months now.

“I think I knew pretty early on that a comeback was unlikely.

“When I was in A&E, they told me it was career-ending, which wasn’t their call and wasn’t necessarily true.

“But I suppose I was always thinking, it would be a bonus if I could come back.

“I’m stiff the whole time. But I feel very lucky, considering it could have been a lot worse.

“I don’t feel like I can jump on a horse and take a fall, basically.

“I went from collar bones to concussions. I was probably saving my collar bones and landing on my head instead.

“And then there were the annoying ones that were pure fluke, just getting a hoof in the wrong place.

“I did my jaw, my eye socket, my cheekbone and chin, all in separate things.

“They were kicks. It’s not like you’re breaking because you’re fragile.

“You’re breaking because the horse has trodden on you.”

Anyone who watches racing knows the risks riders put themselves through.

AP McCoy used to say it was the only job where an ambulance followed you round all day.

And it’s a tragic fact that, sadly, not all make it out alive.

While Alexander was forced to retire early, at least she could look back on years of groundbreaking success.

The same could be said for Martin Lane – a champion apprentice on the Flat who quit to live on a ‘paradise’ island.

While George Baker won millions until a fall on a snow-covered, frozen lake changed his life.

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