The new racing season means fresh adventures for Sara Ryan and Nacim Dilmi. But before Ryan hands over her training responsibilities to Dilmi at Domeland and heads out on her own, they will have a few days to reflect on how a one-time biochemical engineering student from Sydney and an aspiring but unsuccessful French jockey found themselves on the precipice of their next big opportunity.
Go back five years and Sara Ryan, who will next month depart the Domeland operation for a Wyong-based solo career in training, will tell you she never saw racehorses in her future.
“I would have laughed if you’d told me I’d be a trainer,” she tells The Straight. “I had very little exposure to racing growing up. Pretty much none, really. When I started working for Domeland, that was the first time I actually went to the races.”
In the affluent North Shore suburb of Turramurra in Sydney, Ryan grew up far removed from a racecourse. Her father was a doctor, her mother a nurse, and straight out of high school she enrolled in a biochemical engineering degree at the University of Sydney.
Nearly three years into it, the boredom was eating her.
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