Born in Ivington, near Leominster, Herefordshire on October 11, 1996, Hollie Doyle rode her first winner under Rules, the Mongoose, in a lady amateur riders’ handicap at Salisbury on May 5, 2013, while still at school. Fast forward a decade or so and the ‘Pocket Rocket’, as Doyle is affectionately known, is firmly established at the top of her profession.
One of the strongest, most reliable and hardest-working jockeys in the weighing room, Doyle has made a habit of breaking records during her career. In 2019, for example, she rode 116 winners, thereby beating the previous record for winners in a calendar year by a British female jockey, 106, set by Josephine Gordon two years previously. Doyle beat her won record in 2020, with 150 winners and again in 2021, with 172.
Officially stable to jockey to Archie Watson in Upper Lambourn, with a retainer for Imad Al Sagar, Doyle nonetheless receives plenty of support from elsewhere, not least from Alan King and Richard Spencer, and remains a bona fide for the 2024 British Flat Jockeys’ Championship. In 2023, she finished fifth, behind William Buick, Oisin Murphy, Rossa Ryan and her husband, Tom Marquand (whom she married in March 2022), with 89 winners.
