Sean Bowen: the champion jump jockey from Pembrokeshire

Last updated 8 September 2026. Career details verified against published racing records.

Sean Bowen is the best jump jockey in Britain and he comes from a village of a few hundred people in Pembrokeshire. Two championships in two years, and the second one was not close.

The basics

A racing family

The Bowens are the closest thing Welsh jump racing has to a dynasty. Peter Bowen has trained at Little Newcastle for decades. Karen Bowen was a champion point-to-point rider. Older brother Mickey took over the family training licence in May 2025, and younger brother James rides.

Sean came through pony racing and the point-to-point field, taking the Wilkinson Sword as top novice rider, then won the conditional jockeys’ championship in 2015 along with two Lester Awards. He was 17.

Career record

The two championships

The first title took a while. He lost a tight one to Harry Cobden in 2023/24, then went again.

In November 2024 he rode 30 winners, the most he had managed in any month of any season, and on 9 December he became the first jockey to a century of winners in Britain that season when Dominic’s Fault won at Lingfield. He was typically level about it at the time:

It did. He finished 2024/25 with 180 and was champion for the first time. The following season he went past 200 for the first time and ended on 241, which turned a title race into a procession.

The half-million pound question

In November 2024, midway through his first title-winning season, Bowen was one of four riders at the launch of the David Power Jockey Cup, a £1.5 million competition scoring jockeys on their finishes in ITV races with £500,000 to the winner. Asked to choose between that and the championship he had spent his career chasing, he did not hesitate:

It is a more honest answer than most sportspeople give, and it says something about the economics of jump racing. A jockey’s riding fee is modest, the falls are guaranteed and the career is short.

What 241 winners actually takes

The championship runs from early May to late April, roughly 51 weeks. Riding 241 winners inside that means racing six days a week, often at two meetings a day, in a sport where every ride carries a real chance of injury.

Bowen has been open that it is not a solo effort. He credits his agent Alain Cawley for the volume of outside rides on top of the Olly Murphy book, and his family for the rest:

The Welsh Grand National

The one that mattered at home came on 27 December 2025, when he won the Welsh Grand National at Chepstow on Haiti Couleurs for the Pembrokeshire trainer Rebecca Curtis. A Welsh jockey, a Welsh-trained horse, Wales’ biggest race. That combination is rarer than it should be.

Backing him

A champion jockey riding for a strong yard is rarely a price, and Bowen’s strike rate means the value is usually in his outside rides rather than the obvious ones for Olly Murphy. Odds on every card he rides are on the DragonBet horse racing page, and the betting glossary covers anything unfamiliar.

More Welsh jockey profiles: James Bowen and Ben Jones.

Sources: career record and championship totals per published racing records; quotes from DragonBet’s own reporting, December 2024. Correct as of 8 September 2026.