Cut from a different cloth

Don't you just hate people who make you feel lazy and inadequate. Bloody achievers. All they really achieve is to wipe away that sense of accomplishment when the slothful among us manage to open the car door without sweat staining our "Under-Achiever And Proud Of It" T-shirts.

If, in addition to that look, they also turn out to be perfectly pleasant human beings, some of us have been known to start frantically searching for some rope and a beam. At Naas racecourse on Wednesday evening there was plenty of timber, but rope was mercifully in short supply.

Frances Crowley was granted a licence to train racehorses at the start of June. Since then, 15 horses in her care have passed the red lollipop in front. Before June she had ridden 71 times past the lollipop in front during a career as a jockey. Before that, she collected a B Comm degree from University College Dublin.

Anything else? "I did a postgrad course in equine studies at the veterinary college in Ballsbridge, but that was only for a year," she smiles, unaware that the recce for bailer twine is well under way. Frances Crowley is 25.

Clearly 25 means different things to people. Some think back to it as a time when they finally learned what beer they could drink for any sustained period without decorating the bathroom. Others are different.

Crowley's older sister Anne Marie was a champion trainer before 25. Anne Marie then married Aidan O'Brien, a young man who has altered racing's boundaries and is still only 28. And now, with O'Brien concentrating on flat racing's rarefied heights, his sister-in-law is continuing the flow of winners from the Piltown, Co Kilkenny stables without missing a beat. Clearly the family, with their father Joe providing a wealth of knowledge and experience, is cut from a different sort of cloth.

In the circumstances then, the cliched query about what is it like to be a woman in such a male-dominated pursuit as racehorse training was one that justified the T-shirt.

"I honestly don't see what being a woman has to do with it. I'm so used to it, having grown up in racing that I've never thought of there being a problem," Crowley says. Quite right too. Her sex is not an issue, but what about her youth?

"Well possibly some owners expect me to listen to them more," she grins wryly before adding: "But if I was paying a lot of money to have a horse in training, I'd like to give my opinion too."

Maybe it's the accountancy training, but Crowley isn't one for baldly outrageous statements. Comments are measured, balanced and quietly shorn of any loose threads. Accessible and amiable, the quietly-spoken trainer is nevertheless as unlikely as her brother-in-law to send a marauding press pack into a swoon with a "this horse is a champion and all the opposition are bums" quote.

Indeed, quiet and balanced could also be descriptions of the riding style which first brought Crowley to public notice. With the opportunities presented to her and her measured crouch in the saddle, she was an easily identifiable figure. But opportunities are one thing, it's another to take them as Crowley did to such effect that she was amateur champion for two seasons. She then took out apprentice forms on the flat and even rode two winners for trainer Paul Cave in Sydney before crying "enough".

"You have to be realistic when you're a girl riding. I loved it and as an amateur I felt I was as good as any of them. Maybe as an apprentice I wasn't good enough, but I did as much as I wanted to and it served its purpose. Training is always what I wanted to do," she says.

Which is not an easy option. More and more, training is being viewed as a young person's game where the work is stressful and constant, the pressures immense and the income, if we are to believe some of what we hear, not sufficient to keep you in pipe cleaners.

"I know you hear trainers moaning, but if it wasn't for selling on horses, many would not even manage to break even. It's very hard to make money from training alone because the costs are huge, staff are scarce and there are many other things such as owners not paying," she says. Evidently it's been an educational two months since taking over the reins at Piltown and Crowley's assertion that training takes "a lot of energy" is said with a fatalistic laugh.

One thing Crowley insists, though, is that this is her choice and not something inevitable. "I have five sisters and none of us were ever forced into racing. In fact we were encouraged to do everything else we might have wanted to do. Anne Marie is with Aidan and another of my sisters works in our office, but one works in an art gallery, one is a graphic designer and another is in Australia," she says.

Nevertheless being so closely associated with Aidan and her father it has been important that she has had such a blinding start to her new career and established her own credentials. "If a yard that had been turning out winners suddenly started not to, people would have been asking why, so it's good to have had such a good start," she says.

From Monday on the task will be to snare some more success at the hardest festival of all to snare anything bar a hangover. The level at which Crowley already operates is such that she imagines having an average of three runners a day at Galway. Of those, Oakler and Corket will go for the biggest pot of all, Wednesday's Plate.

Corket has been kept fresh for this task and his jumping has improved, but a victory for Oakler would mean a lot. "If it's soft Oakler must have a good chance, but he's a real character, one of those horses who always saves a bit for himself," she says.

Another to note is Just Little in the GPT Amateur race, as well as Golden Echo and Golden Rule on the flat - but their trainer is not underestimating the task.

"Lots of horses are put away for Galway and there is almost always one down in the handicap that is very hard to beat. I'm afraid I haven't put anything away. I haven't had time!" Crowley smiles with the air of someone who is not too bothered.

That's the problem with the talented. They have the infuriating habit of making things happen. For the thousands who turn up at Galway next week, it should pay to keep that and the name Frances Crowley in mind.