The wording on the skull cap says it all, as with just two meetings to go, Mandy Radecker is home in the Brisbane Apprentices premiership and will be crowned "champion apprentice". I consider this is the best photo I have taken of her during her career to date. It was taken after she won on Fabiarna one day in town.

It seems like an eternity, but in reality it is only just on four years ago, yet I vividly remember the day as if it were just yesterday. It was a fine and sunny day in Gympie and my widowed 84-year-old mother was not in the best of health. As I travelled the Bruce Highway to visit her, I was aware that there was a TAB race meeting on at Gympie that afternoon – and one of about three Gympie Cup’s they run each year was being run later that day, so I figured I’d pop in and do a story or two and continue driving to my mother’s place. Gympie was busier on this day than it was in its gold rush days, as the boot skootin’, toe tappin’ Gympie Muster was on in the nearby Amamoor Forest and people from all over Australia – and around the world – had rocked into town for the popular annual event.

As I entered the modest enclosure at Gympie racetrack, I noticed a young lass sitting on the seat outside of the jockeys room. “Poor little bugger”, I thought to myself, just another hopeful that was chancing her arm as an apprentice jockey, like many thousands before her all over the country. And being a girl made it harder, as it is fair to say that even in 2004 female jockeys had achieved limited success and from my experience to that point, most males in racing – from the ranks of owners, trainers and other male jockeys just call them “hopeless sheilas” – that’s when the girls weren’t in earshot.

So I introduced myself to this young slip of girl and found out her name was Mandy Radecker and she was decked out in her race colours and was obviously all ready to rock and roll out on the racetrack of dreams. The thought crossed my mind that she could have probably earned a quid being a model had she not wanted to chance her arm at being a jockey – but I guess given the benefit of hindsight, she’s not tall enough. She was sitting next to a woman I knew as former Gympie premiership winning jockey Desiree Gill, and the thought also crossed my mind that if she listened to Desiree Gill’s words of advice she might just make it in the bush – and might even one day win a Gympie Cup – but then I thought, well young people being young people this kid Mandy will probably be like the rest of them - and keep her ears shut and her mouth open - and finish up another also ran in the Apprentice Jockey Stakes.

I recall Mandy being an interesting young person to sit down and spend some time with. I found her well spoken – and very measured in her thinking for a then 18-year-old. She had a smile that could melt an iceberg. So I did an interview with her and after attending to my mother, I came home and penned the story on this youngster from Gympie. She told me it was her goal “to win a Doomben 10,000 or a Doomben Cup”. I suppose if you are going to aim high, you may as well shoot for the stars.

I then didn’t see young Mandy Radecker for some months, when I again popped into Gympie track one day to another TAB meeting and Mandy and I had a bit of a heart-to-heart. Things weren’t happening like she would have liked them too, for reasons best kept between us, and she told me how she was contemplating a move to Deagon trainer Pat Duff and was hoping he would agree to have her indentures transferred to him. Eventually Pat Duff agreed to take on the Gympie gal and the rest as they say in the classics, is history.

Pat Duff has been master to some of Queensland’s best apprentice jockeys and he has been instrumental in taking Mandy Radecker to where she is today. They have proved a formidable combination on Brisbane racetracks, culminating in Mandy easily winning the Listed Ascot Handicap aboard stable runner Cocktail Supreme on 5 July at Eagle Farm in a non-claiming race.

When Mandy wins the Brisbane apprentices premiership in this 2007-2008 season, it will only be justice being served, as she was two wins ahead in the Brisbane apprentices premiership in the 2006-2007 racing season when her world came crashing down around her one day in April, after she had had an horrific fall at Eagle Farm, which put her out of the saddle for four months as she battled catastrophic bodily injuries to her pelvis, neck and hip. It is history now of course that Ric McMahon went on and won that 2006-2007 apprentices premiership. Visiting Mandy regularly in Brisbane’s Princess Alexandra Hospital after that fall, it wasn’t difficult to see that the one thing that was really bothering her was not so much her horrific injuries, but her regret on missing out on her opportunity to win that premiership. This year things are a bit different though, as she is still that same number of wins ahead as she was at one point last year - two - but she would still be the one to beat even if, God forbid, she got a bad strain of the flu and couldn’t ride at the two city meetings that remain before the season draws to a close. In any event Mandy is due to come out of her time in November, whereas her only challenger, young Michael Palmer, will have his chance to win another Brisbane apprentices title, as he is not due to come out of his time until April 2010 and due to Equine Influenza, he can probably get that extended by three months to encompass the time up until the end of the 2009-2010 season.

So when Mandy Radecker is officially declared the leading Brisbane apprentice for the 2007-2008 season, she will finally get her just desserts. The efforts of Mandy and young female jockeys like her, serve as inspirations to young girls all over the country, as the racing industry has no option but to accept vast numbers of females into the apprentice jockey ranks in both the short term and the long term, due to a population that is simply getting bigger all the time.

Nothing succeeds like success, and the Mandy Radecker’s of the world have proven to many of the male doubters in the incestuous world of thoroughbred racing, that some of those “hopeless sheilas” go okay – in fact she’s living proof that some of them go well enough to win a premiership.

Mandy Radecker has certainly come a long way since I first met her outside that jockeys room at Gympie, in fact after just a few more sleeps her dream of winning a Brisbane apprentices title will become a reality. Idipsmelid.