Orange's Lindy Maurice is a pioneer in every sense of the word and she now has the silverware to prove it.
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Maurice was named National Racing Woman of the Year at a lavish awards ceremony on the Gold Coast during the Magic Millions.
While she has spent two decades working in the thoroughbred industry, the past five years have revolved around her not-for-profit start-up Thoroughbred Industry Careers and more recently, the founding of the National Pony Racing Series.
Maurice said it was the culmination of countless hours of hard work by her and her team.
"It was really lovely, we've been working pretty hard over the last five years so it's nice for the work to be recognised," she said.
"I'm not really someone who looks to be in the spotlight ever, it's not really where I feel most comfortable but the team and I, we've been working really hard, so it's really nice for them the work has been recognised."
Having spent time working in Sydney and overseas in the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates, Maurice and her family returned home to Orange.
It was while watching her kids at a pony camp in Geurie she had a chance conversation with a parent which set her on a path.
"I think I was just frustrated that the industry didn't have a solid strategy when it comes to recruiting our workforce," she said.
"I was at Geurie pony camp with my children and a mum said to me, 'my son loves his horses, are there any jobs in the thoroughbred industry that he might be able to do as a career?'
"I responded with 'yeah so many.' My whole career had been very much in Australia and international so you see all these amazing jobs people do and what a huge industry it is.
"I mean, it employs in Australia alone about 250,000 people.
"So you can imagine how many jobs in media, writing, sales there are. You name it, you can do it.
"If you love horses, you can pretty much combine anything else you're good at in the industry and make a very good career out of it.
"So I walked away from that interaction and thought, what are we doing to engage people?"
TIC was then born and has been running grassroots programs, training, education to help promote careers in the industry ever since.
Pony racing arrives Down Under
Maurice's other big passion is pony racing, a sport popular overseas but not in Australia.
Through Thoroughbred Industry Careers, which has the backing of racing heavyweights such as Gai Waterhouse and Chris Waller, she's been able to get it up and running via a series of races in 2023.
"We've been training industry staff and then we've moved on to another initiative, pony racing," she said.
"Pony racing didn't exist in Australia like it did in European countries and in America and Japan so we introduced that.
"We've just been doing pop up races over the last couple of years and then we developed this series over the last 12 months.
"So we've been on the road in every state and flying around the country."
