Debunking some palpably untrue claims about female riders

This is a free sample of Paul Kealy's Betting World, an email that is sent every Wednesday to Members' Club Ultimate subscribers as part of The Ultimate Daily, our evening email newsletter service.

You can join now and pay just £9.99 for your first two months of Members' Club Ultimate Monthly, where you can access exclusive daily tipping insight from Pricewise guru Tom Segal, top tipster Paul Kealy, pro punter Johnny Dineen and more.

There's nothing quite like the Shergar Cup for sending punters into a rage over the effectiveness or otherwise of jockeys, and I ended up in quite a heated debate with a few mates on the subject (drink-fuelled obviously) on Saturday afternoon.

The source of one punter's ire was Joao Moreira on Fox Tal, a horse he'd backed at 20-1, getting caught by Thore Hammer Hansen on Perotto in the Shergar Cup Mile.

He wasn't interested in the fact that Moreira had nearly stolen the race on a 20-1 shot who had won just one three-runner race in nearly four years and was pointing his head to the sky throughout the final furlong, but only the fact he was outridden, or "outstrengthed" by Hansen.

"These foreign jockeys are all the same, weak." was the response to my assertion that he'd actually ridden a great race on a horse notoriously difficult to win with.

Moreira had almost pre-empted the discussion in a pre-Shergar Cup interview in the Racing Post in which he said: "In this country there's definitely a different style of riding. They are much more energetic on a horse's back.

"It is very different to how I learned to ride in Brazil, where we adopt the North American style of riding, which involves staying very stable in the saddle."

Styles make fights, so they say. They also make jockeys.

Hayley Turner, Saffie Osborne and Hollie Doyle - the Ladies team were Shergar Cup winnersCredit: Edward Whitaker

Anyway, we dipped in and out of the debate in between backing more losers, and the subject inevitably came to female jockeys as they completely dominated at Ascot, as they seem to do more often than not in the Shergar Cup.

"I suppose you're gonna tell me Hollie Doyle and Saffie Osborne bagged a double each because they are as strong or stronger than the men," I said, assuming I'd closed down the strength argument for good.

Wrong."Of course they are, especially Doyle, you can see she's one of the strongest around," said one.

Followed by: "You wouldn't beat her in an arm wrestle."

Now while I am quite prepared to concede that any Flat jockey, male or female, would beat a fat, lazy couch potato aged nearer 60 than 50 in an arm wrestle, that doesn't make it any more likely that Doyle or Osborne is a physical match for their male counterparts.

You've got be careful when it comes to subjects like this these days as the hard of thinking can quickly get the wrong idea, so let me say right now that I have long been a big fan of Doyle and am a growing one of Osborne, who provided my only highlight of the day when sneaking Scampi, another horse hard to win with, home on the line in the Challenge.

I'm happy to see their names next to any horse I'm considering backing.That doesn't change things, though. Men are stronger than women and that's a simple statement of fact.

There isn't a single sport in which physical strength is the key factor to success that women can compete equally with men.

Men run faster, swim faster, cycle faster, jump higher, throw further.

You could, of course, argue that in all other sporting disciplines there are no built-in limits to size and that the men in those are all considerably bigger than the female competitors.

It sounds plausible enough but you would be wrong there too.

Notwithstanding the fact that Osborne (lowest weight in last 12 months 7st 13lb) and Doyle (8st 2lb) are among the lighter jockeys in the weighing room, there have been studies to prove it.

Saffie Osborne: has enjoyed a fine summerCredit: Edward Whitaker

I dug one up online without much effort from the US National Library of Medicine, entitled 'Gender difference in strength and muscle fiber characteristics', which found that "women were approximately 52 per cent and 66 per cent as strong as men in the upper and lower body respectively".

So what is it about Doyle, Osborne, Rachael Blackmore etc, that allows them to compete with and beat the men?

I'm not going to attempt to answer that as I'm no expert on riding, but I know it's not strength.

The perception still clearly exists, though, which is why you'll find people making claims that are palpably untrue.

And making such claims is potentially damaging to the chances of more young women making the grade. If you're going to tell them that one of the key requisites is superhuman strength hitherto unrecorded in sport, then some are going to shelve their ambitions there and then.

What we ought to be telling them is they don't need anything more than talent, dedication and the luck to find connections not still convinced by the rather backward notion that physical strength is the be-all and end-all when it comes to race-riding.

Thanks to the likes of Doyle, Hayley Turner, the sadly underused Josephine Gordon and now Osborne, there are surely fewer of those than there used to be.

Read this next:

'He will be at an enormous advantage in his own backyard' - Simca Mille heading straight for Arc after Berlin win 

Roger Varian to give King Of Steel 'more time' and miss York in favour of Irish Champion Stakes 

Racing Post Members' Club: subscribe for just £9.99 this summer 

Subscribe to Racing Post Members' Club Ultimate Monthly and pay just £9.99 per month for your first two months!

Available to new subscribers purchasing Ultimate Monthly using code SUMMER. First two payments charged at £9.99, renews at full monthly price thereafter. To cancel please contact us at least seven days before subscription is due to renew. Offer expires 30/09/2023.