Interview with one-time leading apprentice set to ride at Oaklawn’s lucrative winter-spring meet after taking the plunge and quitting Britain when a series of major blows derailed a promising career at home
The late great Yogi Berra, more famous for a motherlode of malaprops than a Hall of Fame baseball career, once said: “If there’s a fork in the road, take it.”
Like most ‘Yogi-isms’, there’s wit and sometimes a smidgeon of wisdom. Jane Elliott, 29-year-old British jockey, came to a fork in the road in career terms after she crossed the the Atlantic Ocean in 2022.
Her choices were the US to “see if it would improve my riding and add another string to the bow”, or to stay put in England, where a once-promising career needed serious rejuvenation.
The impasse was reached mainly via a massive blow to her primary employer, trainer Tom Dascombe, who in early 2022 parted ways with senior owner Michael Owen, the former England football superstar.
Gone were most of Dascombe’s horses – he is now re-establishing himself in Lambourn – and therefore most of Jane Elliott’s rides. Without new business, she had only 14 rides before leaving England for the US – so she took that fork in the road and jumped on a plane bound for Florida.
“My agent in England had worked briefly for Brendan Walsh,” she explained. “I said to him, ‘I'd really like to go over there and get experience just track riding, track work.’”
Working holiday
As a result, Elliott caught up with him at Gulfstream Park in Florida, following standard practice for several of her compatriots every year riding track work across the pond. “They come over here during the winter, a lot of the time, then go back home just for experience – a summer and a sunny holiday – a working holiday,” she explained.
Elliott wasn’t content, however, with any such ‘busman’s holiday’. She moved north to Kentucky with Walsh in the spring. Soon after arriving, Elliott gave her book to veteran jockey agent ‘Big Steve’ Krajcir to launch herself as an afternoon rider.
He succeeded in getting Elliott’s boot in the door with trainers – and not just at small tracks in Kentucky and Indiana but also the major-league venues of Keeneland and Churchill Downs.
A couple of years later, results would suggest that Elliott chose the right road. In 2023, her first full year on American tracks, her mounts earned $821,528 – almost doubling the earnings from her best year in England, where lower-level purses are notoriously poor. Most notable, however, was an eye-popping win rate of 25% from 32 mounts at Belterra Park in Cincinnati. Such an effort did not go unnoticed: she more than doubled her rides at Belterra this term with 68 rides. (At time of writing, her mount’s 2024 earnings were close on $740,000, with 24 winners.)
Elliott’s best season at home came in 2019 with 33 winners when she was apprenticed to Dascombe’s Manor House operation. She rode out her claim – in US parlance, lost her bug – at the end of the following season, when British racing was decimated by the Covid pandemic.
“It was a bit of a slow year,” she admitted, with a degree of understatement. “I wasn't able to travel and hustle rides very well.”
Perfect storm
Not far off a perfect storm of circumstances conspired against Elliott. No longer did she receive a weight allowance, but Covid meant there were fewer rides to chase – and then came Dascombe’s travails. The trainer’s numbers dwindled and he had to leave his yard, part-owned by Michael Owen.
Covid halved her starts to 176 in 2020. Wins and earnings nosedived – she scored only eight times in 2020. “It's a different system in England, where all the trainers are on the private properties scattered around the country,” she explained. “I used to go in five days a week to this one trainer to give me most of my rides, and then I'd have a couple of days to go into other trainers apart from the Covid year. I just basically rode for one trainer pretty much.”
Things are different now she is based full-time in the States – and serious progress has been made as Elliott will ride exclusively at the richly endowed winter-spring meet at Oaklawn Park in Arkansas from December 6 through May 3 of 2025.
Again, she is taking a fork in the road; again, choosing the less obvious route. Elliott lives in Louisville, with Turfway Park in northern Kentucky less than 100 miles away compared to the distant Oaklawn. What is more, Turfway houses trainers with whom she is already familiar – and the resident jockey colony is not nearly as strong as the Arkansas-based troupe.
Elliott is betting on herself and ‘Big Steve’, for whom Oaklawn is a home venue. She has already ridden for D. Wayne Lukas – always a formidable presence at the Oaklawn meet.
England seems far in the distance in more ways than miles with earnings eclipsing her homeland’s less-than-prodigious bounty.
Swift learner
That is not to say that the transition is easy, though fortunately Elliott appears to be a swift learner. Very quickly, Elliott learned that her schooling in the UK at the British Racing School and then the nation’s turf tracks offered scant preparation for dirt surfaces in the US and how it dictated a whole new way of riding.
First, she learned it required good “gate riding” – hustling a horse out of the starting gate and into a desired position, something completely different from England where horses break and then almost lope along before “going through the gears” followed by a sprint to the wire. “I'd always just ride horses with a long rein and get them to relax,” she explains. “Here you want a lot more early speed.”
The emphasis on speed, besides placing a premium on a good break, also meant attention to pace – and Elliott could not have had a better teacher than Walsh when it came to creating a clock in her head, so essential in US dirt racing.
“The way he trains, you have to be on the dot,” Elliott explains. “He would have radios with the exercise riders so you knew exactly how fast you were going.”
Equally critical but not surprising, American racing demanded a change from a European riding style to an American seat crouching over the horse’s back.
“Sometimes I still look a little European on horses, I guess, but I try and make myself look as American as possible. Americans are very still, very low.”
With no hesitation she says she tries to ‘ride like a guy’. “You don't really want to stand out for looking like a girl,” she says, citing world #1 jockey Ryan Moore as a role model.
“I always loved the way he looks on a horse. When I was working with my jockey coach, I would always want to try and model myself as close as I could to Moore.
“I’m a long way off,” she adds, with a smile.
Keen watcher
Elliott is a keen watcher of replays, not just of her own horses she’ll ride but her competitors. “I might look to see if they did anything, if they have a trait of maybe getting out or getting in,” she says. “I always try and do as much homework as I can.”
Already she has learned the practices of many of the jockeys she competes against. She named one small track where she says she knows “exactly what they’re gonna’ do” – but the “high-class lads” at Kentucky’s major tracks are more difficult to predict.
“If I can drop in on a conversation about some jockey--what he might do--then I will,” she said, adding: “I heard the other day one of the jockeys say of another rider, ‘He always comes off the rail a little bit coming into the lane, so there’s a little gap on the rail you can get.’”
To conclude, let’s return to the sagacious Yogi Berra, who also said: “If you don't know where you're going, you might not get there.”
Fortunately, Jane Elliott knows where she’s going – Oaklawn Park, and a high-class jockey colony. Don’t bet against her making her mark.
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