Saffie Osborne pictured at last week’s Derby meeting at Epsom. Photograph: Mike Egerton for The Jockey Club/PA
‘Flying start’ does not really do justice to Saffie Osborne’s run of form in the six weeks since the 2026 Flat jockeys’ championship got under way on the first weekend in May. Before racing on Friday, the 24-year-old was fifth in the title race with 22 winners from 132 rides – more wins than the former champions Ryan Moore and William Buick combined. Any punter backing her blind since Guineas weekend at Newmarket is sitting on a 45-point profit.
A Season of Success
“I’ve been loving it,” Osborne said at Newbury this week. “I kicked off the season with three winners on Guineas weekend, and had lots of winners through May at the big festivals, and at nice tracks, a nice quality of horses and stakes winners too.”
Osborne is well aware of “how quickly this game can change”, having had only one injury-free season since starting out as an 18-year-old apprentice in July 2020. Just 12 weeks after riding her first winner that month, she suffered injuries including a broken arm, dislocated wrist and punctured lung in a fall at Windsor that kept her off the track for five months.
Royal Ascot Ambitions
Her latest run of form is a perfect platform for next week’s Royal Ascot, the showpiece event of the Flat racing season and a meeting where Osborne has endured several near-misses but has not, as yet, celebrated a winner from a total of 34 rides.
“If that was a strike rate at any other track, you’d think: ‘God, that’s awful,’” Osborne said this week, “but we all know how hard it is to ride winners there and Ascot’s actually been a really lucky place for me. I’ve had lots of winners there but haven’t managed to ride a Royal Ascot winner and that’s just the level of competition.
“I grew up understanding that Royal Ascot was the pinnacle of our sport. I was very lucky to watch Dad [the former jump jockey Jamie, now a trainer] train Royal Ascot winners growing up, and as a jockey, all you want to do is ride Royal Ascot winners.”
Best Chances for a First Royal Winner
Osborne does not hesitate before naming the Richard Spencer-trained filly Gold Digger, owned by Phil Cunningham, in the Palace of Holyroodhouse Handicap on Friday, as her best chance of a first Royal winner next week.
“She’s so talented,” she says. “She looks like she could be a Group horse in a handicap and hopefully she can go and show that next week because Richard and Phil have had this plan for a long time with her, and they’ve been really patient with her.”
Osborne will also be back aboard Owen Burrows’s Touleen, sixth home in the 1,000 Guineas in May, in Friday’s Group One Coronation Stakes – “She’s a really lovely filly and I don’t think we’ve seen the best of her yet” – and her father’s course-specialist, Hickory, in either the Royal Hunt Cup on Wednesday or the Buckingham Palace Stakes the following afternoon.
“We love Hickory and Hickory loves Ascot,” she says. “Punters probably hate him because he has to be dropped on the line and ridden pretty cold, but he’s a really cool horse.”
Family Background and Early Years
Osborne’s choice of career might seem preordained given that her father is a jockey-turned-trainer and her mother, Katie O’Sullivan, is a renowned equine artist. She admits too: “I probably wasn’t very obedient at school [because] I was constantly trying to sneak out to go and ride horses.”
But she is the only one of four siblings to ride, and her early years in the saddle were focused on eventers rather than thoroughbreds.
“I’ve got three older brothers and they wouldn’t know how to ride a horse if you put them near one,” Osborne says. “They wouldn’t even know how to put a head collar on one. And as dad says, I’ve probably won the genetic lottery in that sense, because they’re all over six foot.”
Competitive Spirit
Having three older brothers also honed her naturally competitive instincts. “I don’t think competitiveness was ever going to be a worry with me,” Osborne says. “As a child, I just loved competing and I loved riding, and it all kind of fell into place. You’d think having two fairly horsey parents, that it would have been fairly driven by them, but it never was.
“I loved the eventing, the show jumping, all that stuff, and was very lucky to do three European championships at youth levels, and it was when I started riding out at 13 or 14 that I was really like: ‘I love this. This is amazing.’”
Overcoming Injury
Osborne’s career of choice was duly decided, and even an early reminder of the risks attached did not persuade her otherwise. “I still can’t remember any of it, and I can watch it back without feeling anything towards it. I think your brain blocks out certain things and I’m probably happy, I don’t remember it.
“But I knew that [injuries happen] before I started. I grew up in a racing yard. I grew up knowing that Dad was a jockey and I’ve been watching racing every day of my life since I was tiny. I think it’s more stressful for them [her parents] than it was for me as they weren’t at the races, so they see me fall but then the camera keeps going and you don’t know whether I’m all right.
“But there was never any question about whether I was going to keep going or not as part of this game.”
