Saffie Osborne has launched the 2026 Flat jockeys’ championship with a remarkable run of success in the six weeks since it began on the opening weekend of May. Before Friday’s racing the 24-year-old sits fifth in the standings, boasting 22 winners from 132 rides, a tally that exceeds the combined wins of former champions Ryan Moore and William Buick. Anyone who backed her without hesitation since Guineas weekend at Newmarket now holds a 45-point profit.

“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 knows well “how quickly this game can change”, having enjoyed only one injury-free season since launching her career as an 18-year-old apprentice in July 2020. Just 12 weeks after her first winner that month, she sustained a broken arm, dislocated wrist and punctured lung in a fall at Windsor that sidelined her for five months.

Yet her current streak provides an ideal springboard for next week’s Royal Ascot, the highlight of the Flat season where Osborne has come close on several occasions but remains without a winner from 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.”

Osborne quickly identifies the Richard Spencer-trained filly Gold Digger, owned by Phil Cunningham, in Friday’s Palace of Holyroodhouse Handicap as her strongest opportunity for a first Royal winner.

“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.”

She will also partner Owen Burrows’s Touleen, sixth 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 on Thursday.

“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.”

Osborne’s path may appear inevitable given her father’s background as a jockey-turned-trainer and her mother Katie O’Sullivan’s reputation as an equine artist. She concedes: “I probably wasn’t very obedient at school [because] I was constantly trying to sneak out to go and ride horses.”

Still, she is the sole rider among four siblings, and her early riding 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.”

Her competitive drive was sharpened by those three older brothers. “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.’”

Her career choice was set, and an early taste of the dangers did not deter her. “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.”