Teenage jockey breaks the record for the most wins in a calendar year this century

A New Year’s Eve win at Lingfield put an exclamation mark on the results of the 2025 calendar year for jockey Billy Loughnane.

His win on Invited rewrote the record books for this century (the modern era) as it took Loughnane to 222 winners in 2025, taking him past the previous record of 221, which ironically had stood for 22 years. That record had belonged to Kieren Fallon who registered those 221 wins in 2003 from 1055 rides.

Loughnane achieved that feat from 1321 rides, taking out the record with his penultimate ride pf the year.

In 2019 Oisen Murphy came agonisingly close to the rearranging that leaderboard with 220 winners, falling by just one winner to put his name alongside Fallon’s.

With that narrow miss relatively fresh in the memory. Loughnane’s final week of the season was an anxious watch, but, in the end, his run was perfectly timed with a win at Newcastle on Monday and another at Wolverhampton on Tuesday, which brought Loughnane level with Fallen … setting up a grandstand finish in on the final day of the year, where you could say Loughnane got up in a photo-finish.

Gordon Richards remains the holder of the record number of Flat race winners in a calendar year having ridden 267 winners in 1947.