Bridget Andrews

The 23-year-old jockey tells Martha Terry about girls lacking opportunities to race-ride and why women might have the magic touch with some racehorses.

- Martha Terry

BRIDGET ANDREWS is doing her best impression of not being a jump jockey. A pretty, eloquent blonde in a bright pink thermal, with her long hair scraped back into a high ponytail after riding morning lots, she’s admitting to a crisis of fear. Surely jockeys don’t get scared?

“I went skiing for the first time last week and I was so nervous,” she says, sipping coffee in the sunny bungalow she shares with boyfriend Harry Skelton at his brother Dan’s overflow National Hunt yard. “Once we went up so high, I was petrified. I thought I was going to fall off the mountain. Harry said, ‘What’s wrong with you?’, but he didn’t realise that if you can’t do it, it’s scary. “I thought, ‘The quicker I ski, the quicker I’ll get to the bottom,’ but that wasn’t a good idea — a few big crashes.”

It seems at odds with the girl who muscles in with the boys in the rough and tumble of jump racing. But then, she had always said she’d “never turn pro”. Her lack of self-belief is contrary to her obvious ability. Now, with just 3lb of her claim left and a Grade One run under her belt, she’s almost part of the weighing-room furniture. So how has she made the break — and how does she cope with being a girl in man’s world?

‘I tried to keep out of the way’

“I still feel like the little girl who goes to the races and it’s mad, me riding against the likes of AP McCoy and Dickie Johnson,” says Bridget, 23. “At first, I just tried to keep out of the way; I didn’t want to annoy them or be shouted at. Over time, you earn their respect and now when I go to the races, it feels like going home.