Timeform profile record-breaking jockey Hollie Doyle, who made yet more history when partnering Nashwa to victory in Sunday's Prix de Diane at Chantilly.
From a background in pony racing, Hollie Doyle had ambitions to be a jump jockey like one of her heroes Nina Carberry but ‘never quite grew big enough’ and instead started out in her teens with an amateur licence on the Flat.
Initially with David Evans, her very first ride was a winning one on The Mongoose in a lady riders’ contest at Salisbury in May 2013. Having served her apprenticeship with Richard Hannon, Doyle rode out her claim in 2017, her 59 wins that season putting her third in the apprentice ranks.
A big boost to Doyle’s career came when linking up with another of racing’s rising stars Archie Watson in 2019. That season, Doyle finished ninth in the calendar year jockeys’ table with 116 winners, becoming the third woman to ride more than 100 winners in a season on the Flat after Hayley Turner and Josephine Gordon and breaking the latter’s record of 106.
Doyle improved on that score again in 2020 when setting a new record with 151 winners. Only Ben Curtis had more winners than her in the calendar year and she finished fourth in the Flat jockeys’ championship which ran from June 1 to the end of the turf season.
Watson again provided more of Doyle’s winners that year than anyone else, but more than 50 different trainers in total contributed to her tally, among them John Gosden and Sir Michael Stoute.
It’s high-profile successes rather than cumulative totals that tend to make headlines and there was no shortage of such moments for Doyle in 2020. She became only the third woman to ride a winner at Royal Ascot when successful on Scarlet Dragon in the Duke of Edinburgh Stakes and then claimed her first Group race when Dame Malliot won the Princess of Wales’s Stakes.
Doyle also rode a five-timer on a card televised by ITV at Windsor when one of those winners, Extra Elusive in the Group Three Winter Hill Stakes, came in the colours of Derby-winning owner Imad Al Sagar to whom she became retained jockey earlier that summer. Doyle had won another Group Three, the Rose of Lancaster Stakes at Haydock, on the same horse earlier in the month.
The highlight of Doyle’s year came on Champions Day at Ascot when Trueshan’s wide-margin win in the Long Distance Cup was quickly followed by the Watson-trained Glen Shiel holding on by a nose to become the jockey’s first Group One winner in the Champions Sprint Stakes.
Wider recognition for Doyle’s remarkable achievements followed later in 2020 when she was crowned the Sunday Times Sportswoman of the Year, while she also took third place – behind Formula One ace Lewis Hamilton and Liverpool captain Jordan Henderson – in the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award.
Never one for resting on her laurels, Doyle kicked off 2021 with a notable international success when guiding the Willie Mullins-trained True Self to victory in the Neom Turf Cup in Riyadh, a race worth £437,956 to the winner.
Back on home soil, the partnership between Doyle and Trueshan continued to go from strength to strength, the pair teaming up to win the Goodwood Cup – the second Group One success of the rider’s career – before later defending their Long Distance Cup crown. Doyle also struck at Royal Ascot for a second time when Amtiyaz won the Copper Horse Stakes.
Those three wins contributed to another personal-best tally for Doyle who ended the calendar year with 172 winners in Britain, a tally surpassed by only two riders in 2021. One of them was champion jockey Oisin Murphy (183) and the other was Doyle’s now-husband Tom Marquand (176), with whom she tied the knot in March this year.
If that was a memorable day, then there could be more to come for Doyle in the coming weeks and months, particularly if the events of the last seven days are anything to go by.
One horse we didn't get to see last week was Trueshan, whose appearances this season will continue to be dictated by the ground (yet to race on going firmer than good). Doyle will surely have been doing a rain dance during Royal Ascot, but the heavens didn't open until it was too late and Trueshan was forced to miss not just the Gold Cup but also his back-up engagement in the Queen Alexandra Stakes.
Incidentally, Glen Shiel was also a non-runner in the Platinum Jubilee Stakes due to the going, so it turned out that neither of the horses who had previously carried Doyle to Group One glory were in action at the Royal meeting.
However, it's testament to the quality of rides that Doyle is now getting that those setbacks did nothing to derail her prospects of big-race success last week. In fact, quite the opposite was true and by Sunday evening Doyle could reflect on arguably the most productive seven days of her career in the saddle to date.
First up was the two-year-old Bradsell, who provided Doyle with her third Royal Ascot victory in as many years when winning Tuesday's Coventry Stakes in the manner of a colt destined for bigger and better things. He is likely to have Group One races on his radar before too long, with the Prix Morny at Deauville appealing as an obvious target later this summer.
Doyle is certainly no stranger to top-level success on French soil, at least not anymore. After all, it was a French classic in which she enjoyed arguably the most significant victory of her burgeoning career at Chantilly on Sunday.
The filly in question was Nashwa and the race in question was the Prix de Diane. Sent off the 3/1 favourite after finishing a good third in the Oaks at Epsom just 16 days earlier, Nashwa responded gamely to her rider's urgings in the final furlong as the pair fought off La Parisienne and Gerald Mosse to get the verdict by a short neck.
The win made Doyle just the second female jockey to land a European classic – Sibylle Vogt won last year's German 1000 Guineas on Novemba – and it was achieved on a filly trained by John and Thady Gosden and carrying the colours of owner/breeder Imad Al Sagar.
Just the latest in a long line of record-breaking achievements by Doyle, it seems that this one will take a while to sink in.
"If you'd said to me two or three years ago I'd be riding in a classic for Mr Gosden and Imad Al Sagar, I'd have laughed," Doyle admitted after the race.
"I’ve got a lot of people to thank. Without Imad Al Sagar, I don’t know if I would ever have been in the position to get an opportunity like this. These types of horses are hard to come upon and I’m only 25, so it’s relatively early on in my career and I feel pretty lucky."