Nina Carberry

Following her retirement from racing, jockey Nina Carberry found herself in limbo. She tells Donal O'Donoghue how Dancing With The Stars changed everything ...

Mum was never going to stop me and I’m never going to stop the girls, even if I wish that they did something else." "There still is, I believe, but I have to say how it was from my experience and because I had my brothers in the weigh-room, I was never going to get any hassle. "With my other bits and pieces," she says. It was something that I didn’t want to leave too late in life either, always in the back of my mind and I worried about it. Everything I do is for my girls and to do the best by them." Everything I worked for was going to be for her and that’s how I look at it now. "I thought that I was going to be the quiet one but I definitely wasn’t." I was ready to retire because I had Rosie and she was my focus, but when the business isn’t going as well as you want it, you definitely get down about things. I would have regretted my whole life if I didn’t make the time to have children. I was trying to find my way again and at that time I didn’t have my business set up properly. "I missed it massively in the beginning," she says. "I think everyone expected me to be quite rigid because that's how they see you as a jockey," she says.