Carberry is bred to be a winner

Irish Times/Mitsubishi Electric Sports Woman award for March: Nina Carberry (Horse Racing): "Along with Catherine Gannon on the Flat, who will undoubtedly make her mark this summer, Nina Carberry is the most promising female jockey I have seen," said the BBC's horse racing presenter Clare Balding last month.

Well, Gannon was the overall winner of the 2004 Irish Times/Mitsubishi Electric Sports Woman of the Year and now Carberry is in contention for the 2005 award after being chosen as our March winner. Our jockeys, you could say, are well and truly leading the awards' field.

The March decision was an easy one, too. Carberry became the first woman rider since 1987 to win a professional race at the Cheltenham Festival - and only the fourth ever - when she triumphed on the 20 to 1 outsider Dabiroun, trained by Paul Nolan, in the Fred Winter Juvenile Novices' Hurdle. It was her first ever ride at the Festival - and she beat a field of 24 by eight lengths and Dabiroun's first win in four attempts.

A rapturous reception from the large Irish crowd greeted the 20-year-old as she entered the winner's enclosure, before which she had received especially warm congratulations from one of her fellow jockeys.

"I heard someone shout 'Go on Nina, you have it won', so I thought I'd better get on with it," she said, discovering after the race that the jockey offering her the encouragement was none other than her brother Paul, who finished in 10th on Rolling Home.

Famously, after winning the Grand National in 1999 on Bobbyjo, Paul, when asked about following in the footsteps of his father Tommy (trainer of Bobbyjo and Gold Cup and Grand National winning jockey on L'Escargot in the 1970s), insisted that Nina was, in fact, "the best of all of us".

Six years later Nina is happy to deflect her big brother's commendation in to the path of another Carberry - "There's another one coming along, Peter John, he's 16" - but admits to being content with her progress so far, and positively elated about her Cheltenham success.

"It was just very special to win there, the festival is the Olympics of racing really," she said. "It was a great day, brilliant. It was always an ambition to win at Cheltenham, since I was a kid, so it really was just a dream come true."

Next ambition? "A good spin in the Grand National wouldn't go amiss," she laughs, although with an ever-growing reputation and 22 winners to her name, Carberry is hopeful that the good spin will come her way, sooner rather than later.

For now she's dividing her time between racing and studying anatomy and sports physiotherapy at Plunkett College in Dublin, with equine physiotherapy her ultimate goal "down the line".

She remains undecided whether she will turn professional in time for the new season, but at just 20, she says, there's no great hurry. She will make her decision at the end of the current National Hunt season.

Her 'pedigree', of course, is impeccable. Daughter of Tommy, sister of Paul and Philip, another jockey, granddaughter of Dan Moore, her mother Pamela's father who trained L'Escargot, and niece of another former jockey and successful trainer, Arthur Moore. How could you go wrong?

Having alerted us to her talent when she was just 14 Paul, speaking after the two Carberrys experienced wildly mixed fortunes in the juvenile novices' hurdle, ruefully noted: "I shouldn't have taught her all I did."