Hollie Doyle: the inside story of the breakthrough jockey’s remarkable rise

At the ripe young age of 24, Hollie Doyle may not yet be the finished article, but 116 winners last season and somewhere north of that already this time around, as well as a breakthrough Group 1 success in the bag thanks to Glen Shiel completing a dazzling Champions Day double, suggest she's coming along rather nicely.

In fact, some of the statistics tell us she's the most successful female jockey Britain has ever produced, with annual tallies well in advance of Josephine Gordon and Hayley Turner and another record already in the bag in this sorely curtailed campaign, while her current fourth place in the table surely marks her out as a live contender for next year's championship.

Those are the numbers, but, as ever, there's a lot more to the story than numbers. Accidents of birth can play a major role, and it didn't hurt Doyle that she started life as the daughter of two former jockeys with a passion for Arabian racing, but in the long run champions are made, not born, and the mighty atom from Ivington in Herefordshire was never one to rest on the advantages of a genetic head start. Yes, she was compact and, as the story so often goes, was first put on a horse before she could walk, but there's a long, hard road between there and the top of the game.