by Unbreakable- The Woman Who Defied the Nazis in the World's Most Dangerous Horse Race (retail) (epub)
Many British riders tried their luck in the same period. Those who did so in the 1980s included George Saunders, an SAS veteran of exotic lineage who rode in 1982 and 1983, part-funded by the generosity of Christopher Collins, who wanted to put his still unretrieved prize money from a decade earlier to good use. Saunders was respectively sixty-two and sixty-three years old and left both times on a stretcher. This failed to deter others from following in his footsteps, among them George Goring (a London hotelier); and William Sporborg (an accountant from Hertfordshire); and, after the Velvet Revolution, high-profile jockeys such as Charlie Mann, Marcus Armytage, Gavin Wragg, Richard Dunwoody and Ruby Walsh. There is no space to describe all their adventures. Mann’s story can stand for them all.
Oktavian Kinský would have recognised Mann as a kindred spirit: someone for whom the boundaries between riding and partying are indistinct. ‘I rode in six [Grand] Nationals,’ says Mann proudly, ‘and was pissed for three of them.’ He first went to Pardubice in 1989, not to ride but to support some fellow jockeys. The Communist regime was still in place. Pre-race celebrations got out of hand, and the group spent a night in the cells of one of Eastern Europe’s most feared security services. They made it to the race, even so, and Mann was impressed. He resolved to come back and win it – and in 1994 he reappeared in Pardubice with that in mind. This was madder than it sounds. Mann had been unable to obtain a jockey’s licence since breaking his neck in a fall at Warwick in 1987. Unable to race without one, he scoured the world for countries whose racing authorities might be less picky, but not even the Bahamas would touch him. So he printed his own licence, figuring that no one would ever check, and presented himself at the start of the 1994 Velkà Pardubickà on his nine–year–old chestnut gelding, It’s A Snip (‘as slow as a hearse’, according to Mann, but an utterly reliable jumper). The plan might have worked had Mann not made the mistake of coming second. The resulting headlines alerted the Jockey Club, who fined him £1,000, perhaps hoping that it would teach him sense. The following year, wanting another go, he once again printed his own licence, calculating (correctly) that ‘No one would believe I’m that stupid.’ He not only got away with it but won the race – and, like Christopher Collins before him, found himself a local hero. ‘I’m a legend out there’, he still likes to boast.
Mann’s irresponsible antics are not to everyone’s taste, yet his spirit somehow feels closer than most to the original spirit of the race: wild, macho, reckless, stubborn, and possibly a little unhinged. But he’s not the only one. In 1994, he wasn’t even the only jockey to have shrugged off a broken neck to get to the start line. You could still see the scars on André Bocquet’s neck, left by emergency surgery after the Frenchman fell badly at Taxis two years earlier. And both men seemed relatively sane compared with Josef Váňa, who, as previously mentioned, had been clinically dead a few months earlier, but was now having another shot at the world’s most dangerous steeplechase.
Is it right to celebrate the spirit that inspires such recklessness? Probably not. Yet Velká Pardubická enthusiasts find it difficult not to – because that is what the race really inspires: celebration. ‘I have a theory,’ wrote the journalist Alastair Down about the Irish Pardubice regular Ken Whelan, ‘that Ken is locked up somewhere very secure for 364 days of the year and on the 365th they let him out. If he flies out to Pardubice for yet another crack at it they know it’s right to lock him up again for the next year.’ That caught the spirit of the race perfectly. So did Marcus Armytage, when he told readers of the Daily Telegraph how his own days as a Velká Pardubická jockey had ended. Armytage, who rode Mr Frisk to victory as an amateur in the 1990 Grand National, started three times in Pardubice, in 1990, 1991 and 1992. But, he explained, he had seen the light – ‘actually, the flashing blue light’ – after sharing a post-Taxis ambulance ride with a fellow jockey who was receiving emergency heart massage to keep him alive. ‘He spent three weeks in a coma,’ wrote Armytage cheerfully. ‘But five years later he was back riding in the race.’ The note of admiration was unmistakeable. Some detected a hint of lingering doubt as well – as though Armytage still felt tempted to have another go himself.
That’s a crucial part of the Pardubice mindset: an inability to contemplate a challenge without wanting to rise to it. That was true in Oktavian Kinský’s time and it is true today. Velká Pardubická jockeys are people who look at footage of Taxis and, instead of wincing, see something life-affirming in it – and feel like having a go themselves. The danger is part of the point.
In fact, there is a lot less danger in the race than there was in Lata’s day. The obstacles have been repeatedly toned down, especially following demonstrations from animal rights protesters at the 1992 race. (Some of the protesters were later alleged to be professional agitators. Even so, it’s hard to look at historical footage of the race and not see what they were getting at.) Today’s Taxis ditch is half as deep as the one Lata jumped. The number of runners is strictly limited, fallen riders are forbidden to remount and there is half as much ploughed land to be crossed in the course of the race – which means far fewer horses attempting jumps when they have no strength left. The result has been a race that is faster, less lethal and, overall, more like an ordinary steeplechase. A few traditionalists complain that this has sapped the race of its drama. Most people feel that there is still more than enough drama and danger to justify the much-repeated claim that the Velká Pardubická is the world’s ‘most dangerous’ and ‘most extreme’ steeplechase. Some dispute the continuing accuracy of that claim; crucially, however, the extremity remains the central point. Like mountaineering or sky-diving, this is a sporting niche defined by its dangers. Velká Pardubická jockeys attempt the challenge not because they consider it prudent, but because they know that it isn’t. And that in turn creates a special bond between them: a community of shared thrills.
Of course, it is neither big nor clever to expose yourself to gratuitous risk. Yet there is arguably something noble about the way that these riders accept the possibility of injury and even death with a casual cheerfulness that eludes most of us. None of us has more than a temporary hold on life, no matter how tightly we cling. Those who relax their grip reveal, in doing so, a form of wisdom.
There may still be Velká Pardubická jockeys who, like Lata, ‘don’t feel all that attached to life’. Others just prefer to focus on what might go right rather than what might go wrong. That doesn’t make them mad, in either case. They are drawn to the challenge because it’s there, and so are they, and that might not always be the case; so they might as well have a go. This is what feeds the graveyard camaraderie of the starting line, and the wild joie de vivre of the post-race celebrations. (Czechs were still talking about Gavin Wragg’s exuberant encounter with an equestrian statue at Slatiňany a decade later.) The occasional excesses of the partying are in close harmony with the spirit of the race’s founders. The shadow of death sharpens participants’ appetite for life.
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Perhaps that all sounds ridiculously macho. But the jockeys who celebrate their shared enthusiasm for the Velká Pardubická are no ordinary community of elite sporting performers. If they sometimes get carried away, there is nothing boorish or intimidating about them: none of the testosterone-fuelled disdain for outsiders (and women) that we associate with words like ‘jock’ and ‘locker–room’. In Pardubice, anyone willing to submit themselves to the great ordeal-by-steeplechase can expect to be toasted as a kindred spirit, irrespective of background. It doesn’t matter if you’re professional or amateur, old or young, rich or poor, Communist or capitalist, Czech, Slovak, German, Russian, British, Irish or French. If you’re up for it, you can join the club. It is, if you like, a brotherhood; except that, thanks to Lata, that word no longer applies. It’s not about gender. It’s about spirit. To put it crudely: you need balls, but not a penis.
None of the British Velká Pardubická veterans I spoke to when researching this book had heard of Lata Brandisová before I
mentioned her. But the race they experienced would have been a very different thing without her. Like most of the rest of the racing world, and like much of Czech society, it would have been an event in which all the most important roles were taken by men. Its toughness and its maleness would have been interwoven. It would have been what it began as: a test of manhood. Instead, thanks to Lata, it has become what it is today: a battlefield on which any woman who is brave enough can fight on equal terms with men, and be judged on her performance, not her gender. Women do still get their own changing room, as stipulated by the English Jockey Club; but that is the only special treatment they can expect.
Only a few women have attempted the challenge, but enough have done so for the point to have been made: Eva Palyzová in the 1960s, Jana Nová and Charlotte Brew in the 1970s; then, after a gap, Renata Charvátová (who got as far as Taxis on Monka in 1990) and Lucie Baluchová (who came third on Gretty in 1997 but failed to finish when she tried again on Ligretta in 2010). Above all, there has been Martina Růžičková (now Růzžičková- Jelínková), whose obsession with the race has been a recurring subplot in the story of the Velká Pardubická in recent decades. She first started the race in 1991, on Monka. In 1998, she had another go, on Damion. Then there was Chailand, in 2006, followed by Rubín, in 2010. Each attempt ended with a painful fall (two at Taxis), leaving her with a list of Pardubice-related breakages (shoulder, hands, spine, collar bone, legs, arms) that makes you wonder how she found the courage to keep coming back.
Finally, in 2014, Růžičková tried again with Rubín. They tailed off badly at the end, but still managed to finish in fifteenth place. Her sheer doggedness had made her a Pardubice favourite, and she was rewarded with the kind of applause that must have greeted Lata’s last place in 1927. Her fellow jockeys were delighted, too – she was fifty by then, and had known some of them as children. (‘I’d raced against their fathers. I used to say to them: “Boys, if you lose, I won’t buy you ice-cream.”’) No one seemed more thrilled by her achievement than the great Josef Váňa.
‘Now I can die peacefully,’ said Růžičková-Jelínková. In fact, she then began to concentrate on being a trainer, and in 2016 one of her horses, Charme Look, actually won the Velká Pardubická, fulfilling her lifelong wish to win the race, although not exactly as she had hoped. (‘My advice,’ she says, ‘is that if you make a wish, you should be specific.’) Meanwhile, she has played a significant role in the fact that, over the past decade, Lata has begun to enjoy a partial rehabilitation.
‘Lata’s story is a very important one,’ she says – and twenty-seven years of wrestling with the Velká Pardubická’s challenge have made her unusually interested in it. ‘It’s important not just in sport, but politically, and in terms of women’s rights and liberation.’ In today’s world, she explains, ‘women can drive cars, they can choose careers. I think Lata Brandisová was a model for the kind of lives we have today. Women spectators loved her. They didn’t want to spend all their time in the kitchen. She showed that they could do other things instead.’
For a long time, she has been trying to raise money to make a film about Lata’s life. It has yet to come to anything, but her enthusiasm for the story has encouraged the Velká Pardubická’s organisers to take more interest in the Brandisová legacy. In October 2017, eighty years on from Lata’s most glorious day and ninety years on from her first, controversial attempt, they organised a reunion of women who had ridden in the Velká Pardubická. There were only five: Eva Palyzová died in 2011. But Nová, Brew, Charvátová, Baluchová and Růžičková-Jelínková were warmly welcomed and enjoyed an ebullient eve-of- race dinner. In the paddock on race day, they were chatting and laughing like old friends. Brew was on Czech soil for the first time since 1977. She had flown from Bristol with EasyJet, sharing the flight with a spectacularly drunk and offensive stag party (two of whom ended up spending much of the weekend in custody). Instead of cringing like the other passengers, Brew stood up, ticked off the swaggering stags one by one and shamed them into quietening down. It seems an apt embodiment of the strength of character required by a woman who wants to make her mark at the highest level of a rough, male-dominated sport; and, for that matter, by a woman who wants to make her mark in any way in a rough, male-dominated world. In both cases, the same qualities are required: self-confidence; principle; a calm contempt for male boorishness; a willingness to stick one’s neck out; a refusal to be constrained by fear.
Each of the five guests of honour at the 2017 Velká Pardubická had encountered discrimination; each, in her different way, had beaten it. Baluchová spoke wearily of the many times she’d patiently schooled a horse to realise its potential, only to see the ride snatched from her and given to a man. ‘I only got to ride Gretty in the Velká Pardubická because it was my own horse.’ Růžičková- Jelínková encountered disparagement when she was starting out, but, again, believed in herself. ‘People might say “She rode badly because she’s a woman.” Some even claimed that I was only getting rides because I was sleeping with trainers. But it was usually just journalists or bookmakers: people who’d never achieved anything themselves.’ The jockeys themselves were never hostile, and prejudice was mainly encountered at small provincial meetings. As she progressed to a higher level, the shared severity of the tests seemed to engender respect. ‘The harder the race, the better they treated me,’ says Růžičková-Jelínková. ‘We always joked at the start, and made fun of each other. Everyone knew that in a couple of minutes we could be half-dead or leaving in an ambulance. And, yes, there was partying afterwards, even though I’m not much of a drinker. There is friendship between Velká Pardubická riders – much greater than in flat racing.’
What she doesn’t add is that there is also more genuine respect between the genders in the Velká Pardubická than in almost any other major sporting event, anywhere. That’s not to say that the playing field is entirely level. Crucially, prejudice persists further down the horse-racing food chain. I can’t find a comparable set of statistics for the Czech Republic, but a recent set of UK figures will, I suspect, strike a chord for women in horse racing (and other sports) in many nations: women account for 74 per cent of people who ride horses, 51 per cent of stable staff, 11.3 per cent of professional jockey licences and 5.2 per cent of actual rides in races. The figures barely need dissecting. The story tells itself, as you watch the opportunities diminish in proportion to their increasing attractiveness. Yet a fourteen-year study at the University of Liverpool, whose findings were published in 2018, concluded that the gender of the jockey had no significant effect on the outcome of races, once you took into account the quality of the horses they were given. To put it crudely again: the only thing between your legs that has any real bearing on the outcome is the horse.
Slowly, the broader picture is changing. In the 2018 Grand National, three out of forty jockeys were female: Rachael Blackmore, Katie Walsh and Bryony Frost. There was much talk in the days leading up to the race about whether this might be the year in which, finally, a woman won the National. In the event, Frost’s fifth place on Milansbar was the best any of the trio could manage. But it can only be a matter of time – perhaps it will have happened by the time you read this. Walsh, who has now retired, had previously won the Irish Grand National (in 2017) and come third in the 2012 Grand National. If women could get a fairer share of the best rides, of course one of them could claim the big prize at Aintree; just as one could – again – in Pardubice. Change is happening. What slows the process down is lingering prejudice among trainers and owners. What speeds it up is each headline-making female breakthrough, which weakens the grip of those who keep women down while simultaneously inspiring more women to strive to work their way up.
No female jockey has changed more attitudes with the headlines she made than Lata Brandisová. Her name was subsequently expunged from her nation’s sporting history, thanks to her knack of getting on the wrong side of totalitarian regimes; as a result, it dropped from the world ‘
s, too. But the ripples of change that began with her achievements never stopped spreading. Her metamorphosis – in one glorious decade – from scandalous intruder to national treasure enabled a wider process of change, as breakthroughs in elite sport often do. Male domination of horse racing continues to recede, while her nation’s ultimate symbol of sporting manhood – the steeplechase she was accused of dishonouring when she first tried to compete in it – is now honoured in many nations for its mature, inclusive approach to gender, and for the encouragement its story offers to all women with sporting dreams.
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A few minutes before the start of the 2017 Velká Pardubická, the runners and riders walked past the main stand in a long line, in the traditional pre-race parade. At the head of the line, in Lata’s honour, rode a young woman in Kinský colours on a golden isabella Kinský horse. A commentator explained, for the benefit of mostly baffled spectators, that she symbolised Lata Brandisová: ‘první a jediná žena, která vyhrála Velkou Pardubickou’. It was a phrase that even an inept language learner like me could recognise: I’ve encountered it so often, I know it by heart. It’s her label, attached to her, with minor variations, whenever her story is introduced. Tomáš Masaryk was ‘prezident-Osvoboditel’: the ‘president– liberator’. Lata Brandisová was ‘the first and only woman to win the Velká Pardubická.
