Through the vest 🤔 /WyMv3bvFIL- Michelle Payne May 23, 2016 Off to the Alfred tonight to check out Pancreas and liver. Payne is slowly coming to terms with the impact she has made on the racing world and the boost she has given women in sport. I never in my wildest dream imagined I’d meet Roger Federer.” “I think anybody in elite sport knows how hard it is to be successful so he just sort of congratulated me on that,” she adds.

Read: Phar Lap’s 90th birthday celebrated My hero’s Roger Federer and they’re not making a movie about him but they are about me.”Ī clear high of the past year has been to meet her idol, whose first words regarding her Melbourne Cup triumph were simply “well done.” “The hardest part has been the stress in my life but you have to take the good with the bad,” she says. This year, she won’t get a chance to ride in the “race that stops a nation.” The Godolphin stable confirmed jockey Chad Schofield as its final rider for Tuesday’s race.

Payne is no stranger to drama, last year becoming the first female winner of the Melbourne Cup, befittingly in the purple, white and green colors of the Suffragettes.īut much like her life – laid bare so honestly in her autobiography “Life As I Know It” – the fairytale, as she calls it, has been punctuated by massive pitfalls, most recently being replaced as the jockey of last year’s winner Prince of Penzance.įor the 31-year-old, there have been a lot of highs since that famous win, but for all her effervescent personality – her “get stuffed” reaction to her victory has gone down in horse racing folklore – being in the spotlight has not always been a pleasant experience. It just may have been an extreme way to get to that point!” “So in some ways it was a good thing, in some ways I’m grateful. There was no media near me, I got to get back on top of things mentally. The surgeon saved it after cutting through layers of muscle to reach it, her liver was lacerated and for days she recalls thinking: “I can’t go on.”īut last year’s Melbourne Cup winner told CNN: “It was a blessing in disguise as it breathed life back in. Three-quarters of her pancreas was severed. The choice of word seems odd when you consider that she had her stomach trampled on by half a ton of racehorse just five months ago. Michelle Payne knows how crazy it sounds to be grateful for a fall – but she’s grateful nonetheless.

Life As I Know It by Michelle Payne