Jockey Michelle Payne was raised to be tough. It is how she survived on a country property as the youngest of 11, with brothers who used her for target practice and raced her around the garden like a horse.
It is why she has succeeded in the masculine world of horseracing.
And it is what helped her carry on despite losing two key women in her life – her mother, Mary, who died in a car crash when she was six months old, and her eldest sister, Brigid, who suffered a brain aneurism.
Michelle Payne from The Weekly photoshoot.
The Payne family is famous in racing circles.
Michelle is the eighth Payne sibling to become a jockey.
Her brother, Patrick, rode 19 Group One winners and her sister, Therese, paved the way for female jockeys in the late ’80s.
Michelle, won her first Group One race, the Toorak Handicap, on the Bart Cummings-trained Allez Wonder, in October last year, the same horse she rode in the Melbourne Cup weeks later.
Female jockeys still struggle in the male-dominated industry, so Michelle says she has to convince owners and trainers that physical strength is not necessarily the way to bring out the best in a horse.
“I think, on the right horse, I’m better than a male jockey,” she says.
“Some horses have to be made to go because they’re lazy – that would suit a male jockey. But others, especially fillies and mares, resent it if you hit them too hard and go worse.”
The hardest part of Michelle’s job, mentally and physically, is keeping her weight down.
“You have to put up with people asking you every day,” she says.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a girl.”
For one Caulfield Cup, she had to lose two kilograms in a week.
She even cuts out all fluid before a race.
In 2004, Michelle’s father begged her to give up racing when she had a fall at Sandown Park Racecourse, in Melbourne, fracturing her skull and bruising her brain.
Yet, after months of crying herself to sleep, fearing she wouldn’t be able to ride again, the girl who once slept holding her father’s hand so he wouldn’t forget to take her riding in the morning climbed back into the saddle.
Michelle is not afraid because she believes her mother is watching over her. “She’s my guardian angel,” she says. “I think if I have a close call, she’s up there helping me out.”
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