She was the unexpected winner of RTE’s Dancing with the Stars last year; the shy, unassuming former champion jockey who thought she couldn’t dance.
But it seems that Nina Carberry has well and truly come out of her shell. She’s back on our screens in the latest series of Ireland’s Fittest Family on RTE and is enjoying the experience. “It’s just brilliant,” she says with a grin. “I’m competitive by nature and I enjoy the challenge of motivating a family to win.”
Carberry is vying with Davy Fitzgerald, Donncha O’Callaghan and Sonia O’Sullivan on screen, and she’s slightly in awe of O’Sullivan. “I mean, she was one of my idols growing up. I can remember a TV being pushed into the classroom so we could watch her run in the Olympics, and now here I am appearing on a TV programme with her!”
She may seem introverted, but the 39-year-old from Ratoath, Co Meath, is clearly able to cope with the pressure of TV — and no doubt her career as a hugely successful jockey has helped.
Learning how to lose, however, has been a big part of the challenge. “Losing is difficult if you’re competitive like me,” Carberry says. “You have to condition your mind to get used to it. It’s never easy, but it’s the only way to cope.”
It isn’t something that Carberry has had to deal with too much during her career. She won the Grade 1 Championship Bumpers at Punchestown in 2006 and again in 2007. Then, in 2011, she became the second female jockey to win the Irish Grand National, with a horse trained by her uncle Arthur Moore. “That was an amazing moment for me and one of the highlights of my career,” she says. “I hadn’t expected to win, so I was walking on air!”
While it may seem glamorous, especially when they’re winning, the life of a jockey is hard. “It’s physically demanding and there are no holidays or weekends off,” Carberry says. “You can end up working long hours, often into the evening.”
But even with a career as successful as hers (which included a triumphant return to racing after having her first child), she’s not sure that it’s a world she would encourage her daughters to join. “They have ponies and they’re learning to ride. I’d encourage them to try different types of sports, but I wouldn’t push them to do racing necessarily. They can make up their own minds when they’re older.”
Born into a famous Irish horse racing family, one of six children and the only daughter of the jockey and horse trainer Tommy Carberry, she was riding from an early age. “It was an idyllic childhood,” she says. “We all had ponies, and we’d rush home after school to ride them each day.”
Growing up with five brothers, did Carberry ever feel she had to prove herself? She says no. “I’ve always been competitive by nature,” she says. “I don’t think it was anything to do with being a girl among the boys.”
As a child she applied that sense of competition to sport of all forms and excelled in particular at basketball. In fact, she qualified for the Ireland national basketball team at one point and flirted with the idea of going to the US on a sports scholarship. But racing won out.
After school, she spent a year studying holistic health and sports injury. But in the same year she rode at Cheltenham and became the first female jockey in 18 years to win in the inaugural running of the Fred Winter Juvenile Novices’ Handicap Hurdle. After that, she worked for the trainer Noel Meade. There was no looking back then; racing was in her blood, and it was becoming all-consuming.
Racing is a male-dominated industry, so being a woman could be a disadvantage. But Carberry says that she never experienced misogyny in any form and believes that, far from working against her, being female helped her career. “People gave me chances because I was a woman,” she says. “I got to ride, for example, in the Irish National because I was a girl doing well at the time. I always found there was support for me as a woman.”
It helped that she was used to the company of men. “I’ve always been comfortable talking to men and been able to hold my own in the weighing room. It helped, too, that I had my brothers around to support me.”
If women show talent, she says, they’re encouraged and pushed forward. “Just look at Rachael Blackmore, who has gone all the way, or Katie Walsh, or Lisa O’Neill.”
But she agrees that fewer women are drawn to the sport than men. “Unfortunately there’s not much take up of horse racing among women. I think it’s because their bodies are not built for the falls. I’d love to see more women taking it on, but it’s a hard life, and I can understand too why they might not.”
She met Ted Walsh Jr, the son of the trainer Ted Walsh and the brother of the celebrated jockey Ruby Walsh, through his sister Katie. The couple married in 2012 and she says her husband supports her in everything she does. He has a more outgoing personality and they complement each other. “Ted is very much a people person,” says. “Sometimes he gives out that I hide behind him a little bit, but he pushes me to try different things that increase my confidence, and I’m grateful for that.”
Ted was behind her when she made the decision to give up racing after having her first child, Rosie But four months later, Carberry was back in the saddle. “I was missing riding too much,” she says. “But my body had changed. I’d lost muscle tone and it took a while to regain it and build myself back up.”
Despite this, she won her first three races in a row. Now she has two daughters, Rosie, six, and Hollie, four, and admits that motherhood has changed her priorities. “They are my world and everything I do now is for them,” she says. “Hollie is like her father, she’s outgoing and talks to everyone, while Rosie is more reserved and a little bit shy like me.”
Last month, inspired by reading stories to her daughters and her experience with horses, she published a children’s book, Ride to the Rescue. It’s the first in a series of three, and now she’s working on the second.
On top of being a children’s author, a mother, a TV personality and buying and selling horses, Carberry has signed up to mentor young jockeys as part of a Horse Racing Ireland initiative, and she’s excited at the prospect. “I can’t wait to get started,” she says. “It will mean that young jockeys, even if they don’t have a background in it, can learn the skills. I’ve never been one to sit still. I’m always like, ‘What’s next?’ ”
Ireland’s Fittest Family is on RTE1 and RTE Player tonight at 6.30pm
