Cheltenham trailblazer Pitman: ‘I didn’t want special favours, just fair play’

Ahead of the race’s 100th anniversary, Pitman relives the day she made history in becoming first female trainer to win the Gold Cup

Jenny Pitman, the first female trainer to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup, will be among 100 surviving winners at a lunch to mark the race’s 100th anniversary in the new Centenary Restaurant at the racecourse on Monday.
Having not been to the meeting since Covid, Pitman will host an annual get-together at her home this week for her former veterinary surgeons that involves lunch and a television viewing as Cheltenham prepares for a significant Gold Cup milestone.
Until Pitman won in 1984 with Burrough Hill Lad, female involvement in winning jump racing’s blue riband had been restricted to owners. She led the way for women jump trainers, having won the Grand National a year earlier with Corbiere.
“It wasn’t too difficult [being the first], there weren’t many of us,” Pitman, 77, recalls in the kitchen of her Berkshire home, where she will watch this year’s Festival. “I think women were viewed very differently then. I didn’t want special favours, just fair play.
“I will tell you what women trainers miss – perhaps not all of them but a lot of them – having a wife. Somebody who has done it all so you don’t have to come home with nothing in the fridge, sorting stuff out at home.” Eek.
On his day, Burrough Hill Lad was as good a staying chaser as there was in the 1980s.
“He wouldn’t have come to me if he wasn’t written off,” Pitman remembers. “My folks knew [owners] Stan and Kath Riley. He had only one clean leg. The rest had been injured in some form or other. His big problem was that he stood very straight in front. I wouldn’t have bought him.
“The first time I saw him was falling at the last in a race Corbiere won at Kempton. About three weeks later I asked his trainer how he was getting on and he replied the horse couldn’t lift his head up from the floor.
“I said the only person who might be able to help was Ronnie Longford, a physio. He must have had another problem because I got a phone call from my folks saying Stan wanted me to have a look at him. I wasn’t very keen on taking horses from other trainers. This was a favour for my folks.
“He came to me because he was a crashed car. You mended him, something else broke. He had also fallen down an embankment with Stan as a young horse which left him with this big scar on his hind leg where the nerves were very close to the surface.
“If he knocked it or the weather was wet, it was a nightmare. Because he was trying to protect that off hind it used to make him imbalanced in front. You were always on a wing and a prayer.
“There wouldn’t have been many who would have spent the time I did with him but it was a challenge. My reward was getting him back on the track.”
His owner Stan was a character. The horse was by a local stallion who cost ‘five bob’ because he would not pay for the one he wanted. He once suggested purchasing a trailer to cut down on transport costs and his wife Kath knitted the colours to save on buying them. After a celebratory lunch for the Gold Cup, he even presented winning jockey Phil Tuck with a bill.
“Phil was just brilliant when you were talking about a race,” Pitman says, taking up the story of the race. “Brown Chamberlin [runner-up] could be a little eccentric. We knew he might run wide off the bottom bend. The tactic was sit handy, expect Brown Chamberlin to lead the field down the hill and when he went wide nip up his inner and nail him. Johnny Francome’s horse chucked his race away.
“Burrough Hill Lad had a devastating turn of foot that would beat any five-furlong horse – bear in mind he was by a sprinter. But it lasted only 50 yards. You could turn the turbo and he would put it to bed but then you’d had it. You needed to hold on to it.
“The Queen Mother presented the trophy and they said she would like me to come up to the Royal Box. I had put my lucky jumper on with a big hole where I had burnt it with the iron.
“As we got to the door the commissionaire said, ‘Can I take your coat?’ I remembered the hole in the jumper, I said, ‘No, I can’t stop long’. He must have thought I had nicked something because I was clutching the coat around me so people couldn’t see the hole.”
With son Mark riding Garrison Savannah, she also had the emotions of a mother as well as trainer. ‘Garry’ had also been beset by problems, injuring a shoulder in December that required six weeks’ box rest and acupuncture. The owners kept asking if he was definitely running and Pitman would reply, ‘If you see him in the pre-parade ring he definitely is’.
“We hadn’t even talked about how to ride him until Mark came out,” she says. “I said, ‘Ride him the same as you rode Toby Tobias (runner-up 1990), only this time don’t get beaten’. I was shocked at myself. I thought, how could you say that? The horse hasn’t raced since December and has been in his box six weeks. To this day I don’t know how he won that race. Mark said when he walked out on the course he felt him grow four inches.
“As a mother with your kid riding I used to detach myself from the fact he was my son. I used to get my coat from under the stairs when I went racing – that was my armour, nothing got through that. He rode it with control and conviction. At the last he asked the horse for everything and it gave him everything. Peter O’Sullevan was saying, ‘The Fellow is getting up’. I was stood between two women and if we hadn’t been packed in the stands like sardines I would have collapsed.
“You ask yourself questions when they have a bad fall and think, ‘If I wasn’t in this job he wouldn’t be in this situation – if he’s beaten again, though, it will destroy him’.
“People were saying, ‘You’ve won, Jenny’. You don’t go through Crisp and Red Rum and other close finishes thinking it’s in the bag until it’s in the bag. I just switched onto autopilot. My proudest moment was when Mark and Adam Kondrat [on The Fellow] shook hands when they didn’t know the result.”
Within two hours her son was in the back of an ambulance on his way to Cheltenham General with a broken pelvis.
“I blame myself,” she reflects. “When he was working at the races I couldn’t allow myself to be his mother. After Garry’s race he said, ‘Do you want me to ride in the last because I will have to go in the sweatbox?’ I said the owners are expecting you to ride it and I do. I couldn’t say, ‘I’m your mother and here’s a big favour for winning the Gold Cup’. If it had been anyone else I probably would have done. I regret that.”