In March and April, as racing sought to get over the image of Gordon Elliott sitting on a dead horse and the Cheltenham Festival nervously prepared to race behind closed doors having borne the brunt of the blame for the coronavirus pandemic a year earlier, Rachael Blackmore rode to the sport’s rescue.

She took Cheltenham by storm, winning the Champion Hurdle on Honeysuckle and the Ruby Walsh Trophy for leading jockey with six winners. Then, in April, she and Minella Times won the Grand National – a feat once so far-fetched for a woman jockey that it had only been achieved by a female in fiction. Overnight, the farmer’s daughter from Tipperary went global.

Ed Chamberlin, the host of ITV Racing, says he has a great deal for which to thank Blackmore. “It was so gloomy going into Cheltenham,” he recalls, “and Honeysuckle changed it in an instant. I remember going into a break after she had ridden five winners saying: ‘Blackmore five, Britain four.’

“You left Cheltenham daring to dream that she had a chance of doing the impossible. Des Lynam was my hero. His Grand National interviews stick in my mind and the moment I’ll treasure for evermore was when she said: ‘I can’t believe I’m Rachael Blackmore.’ That’s her in a nutshell; self-deprecating, engaging, charming but, at the same time, with this incredible will to win and with ice in her veins.”

Blackmore’s first chance in racing came from trainer “Shark” Hanlon when she was an amateur and – it appeared from the results at any rate – an average one at that. Unlike many of her weighing-room colleagues, however, she had back-up in the form of a degree in equine science from Limerick University so, to some extent, a comfort blanket if things did not work out.

Turning professional was, nevertheless, an “unusual course” but, in typical Blackmore fashion, when people questioned it, it would only spur her on.

Hanlon’s bigger concern was that she was riding too many bad, unschooled horses in point-to-points, so it was he who persuaded her to turn professional.

“I said ‘give it six or seven months as a conditional jockey and you can ­always turn back to amateur if you’re not happy,’ ” Hanlon recalls.

“I suppose the first thing I spotted in her was that she was a great girl to get a horse to jump a fence. She got horses to jump better than anyone else. She had a great eye for a fence and was a great worker. She was a great trier – no matter what horse you put her on she’d try on it and usually without too many instructions.”

Blackmore, 32, shares a house with her boyfriend, fellow jockey Brian Hayes, and the most successful amateur jockey in Irish racing history, Patrick Mullins. “There are a couple of technical things that she’s very good at,” observes Mullins, who rides against her. “She’s very good into a fence so horses jump well for her and she’s very good at getting horses to settle. She’s 9st so it just goes to prove it’s not about strength. She settles them by letting them go forward rather than holding and fighting them.

“On the ground she is very good at dealing with people. If there’s a disagreement, say with an owner or trainer, about what went on in a race, she is very diplomatic, which is a very underrated quality in my book. Ruby Walsh had that.

“The other thing is that she got her success relatively late on. I think that’s a massive advantage. She doesn’t take anything for granted and she understands the value of hard work, showing up and being there.”

The winning ride in the National is always a good one, but Blackmore’s was perfection; she rarely left the inside – the one time she did she avoided the fall, broadside on, of Double Shuffle – she got Minella Times into a superb rhythm with his jumping, and she always seemed to have a pocket of space around her. She made what was once considered the impossible look easy.