My sisters had been through it all before and had prepared me for the prejudice. And I was walking in the footsteps of pioneers like Bev Buckingham, Clare Lindop and Maree Lyndon, women with a voice who had proven over and again that we could ride on the big stages just as well as men. So I tried not to let it affect me. I had a dream and I wouldn’t be deterred.
But for a young woman trying to make her way, it was tough. I tried to shut out all those negative voices demeaning me and what I was trying to achieve, and diminishing what I was capable of. And I did my best to hold my tongue whenever a horse I’d educated and conditioned in trackwork was handed to a male jockey for its big race.
“Women just don’t have the strength to hold a racehorse when it really wants to go,” some men would tell me.
“When it comes to using the whip at the end of the race, girls are reluctant,” others said.
“In a hard game like racing, that soft heart is what costs women,” went the cliché.
Once, a male trainer criticised a protest I’d put through as “schoolgirl tactics”. The fact my horse had nearly been put through the running rail at the 1800-metre mark didn’t matter to him. That one made me so wild.
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By that stage of my career, I’d fractured 12 vertebrae and my skull. Yet I’d come back from all that, the hardest of times, and then I had this guy accusing me of “schoolgirl tactics”? It was so disappointing and embarrassing, and it still grinds my gears years later. It was another form of intimidation, which women jockeys so often had to endure.
But it didn’t make me sad. I was beyond that. It made me angry. How dare he? How dare he deny me the right to speak my truth? How dare he ridicule my right to call out illegal riding when I saw it? Was I just supposed to cop it sweet?
Angry as I was at the time, I didn’t let it affect me in the long term. I’d been in the game a while by then and vowed to myself that nothing they said or did to me would alter my personality. But the older I got, the more I thought about younger women coming through, female apprentices who were less secure in themselves and more vulnerable to spite.
Like I once had, those young women would tell themselves: “That’s just how it is.” Yeah, I’d be thinking, older and wiser, but that isn’t how it has to be.
Rather than let those feelings get to me, I vowed I wouldn’t be bullied on or off the racetrack and that I would concentrate on what I believe, not what others say. I have made perseverance and patience, not power, my trademark. There’s no point arguing with ignorant people, because usually you won’t win. The old guard have made their minds up about what they believe and how they want to treat you.
I knew that the best way to beat the haters was on the track.
Edited extract from Ride On (Allen & Unwin) by Michelle Payne with Angus Fontaine, out now.
Styling by Alicia Marshall; Hair & make-up by Elisa Clark. Michelle Payne wears dress by Simone Rocha and Midas boots.
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