It is one of the many vagaries of horse racing that leading lady rider Emma Sayer will henceforth be known with a prefix. Miss, to be precise. This is as a result of her relinquishing her professional status in favour of a return to the amateur ranks that from within she came.

The switch won’t make her any less accomplished as a rider. It just means that we shall see less of her, riding, much like an Olympian, not for money but for the hope and glory.

It was a conscious decision taken by the 24-year-old from Hackthorpe, near Penrith, when the opportunity to become a PE teacher at nearby Ullswater Community College presented itself.

She could hardly have dreamed of a better send-off.

An initiative by Jockey Club Racecourses North West offered a £20,000 bonus to any lady rider successful at Carlisle’s Ladies’ Day fixture going on to ride the winner of a showpiece race at Haydock.

And attractive, dashing Emma grasped the chance with both hands.

The specifics of what the cash will cover are to be thrashed out at a meeting later this month with racing executives at Aintree, but the winner has some ideas of her own.

Firstly she would like a chunk of it to put down on a house she would like to call her own at the family’s Town End Farm, a working operation with 1,200 lambing ewes, 30 cows and the 16 racehorses trained under the watchful eye of her mother Dianne.

“I’d like to train myself eventually,” says Emma “and I can think of no better place to start. There are significant costs involved in becoming a trainer, with all three modules each costing £700 and that may be another aspect of the money-spend.

“I’d like a little keepsake of the achievement, too – maybe a nice bracelet.”

It was possibly prophetic, then, that the big double she rode was on horses named Gold Chain and I Am Not Here.

Emma has come a long way since pony Domino was the apple of her childhood eye, her rides with the Cumberland Farmers Hunt and her ninth place at the Horse of the Year Show on her granny’s fell pony Stennerskeugh Brighteyes.

She became a jockey at 16 and home-trained Front Rank provided her first winner both on the Flat and over hurdles. She’s won nine times on Cool Baranca and her reward from the owner is that the mare will be gifted to her to breed from.

The total so far is 29 National Hunt winners and 24 on the Flat in a career which has seen her much-travelled and is certainly not without incident.

In Abu Dhabi I rode in the first ever race that ladies were asked to ride in. It was a very strange experience

“I broke my neck in a fall in a race in France and when the Jockey Club said that it would be five months before I could get my licence back I took a job at Whitehaven Academy teaching PE based on my qualification from the University of Cumbria at Lancaster,” Emma explains.

“I have been fortunate to have travelled to ride in Ireland, Turkey, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Italy and Switzerland and enjoyed a working holiday in Australia.

“In Abu Dhabi I rode in the first ever race that ladies were asked to ride in. It was a very strange experience in that it goes right against the culture there. It was something of a strained atmosphere. You could tell they were not comfortable with it.”

Emma rode a winner in Qatar but she sounds a note of caution over football’s World Cup to be held there in 2022.

“It was blistering hot,” she says. “You couldn’t stop sweating after you’d ridden and it became a case of wearing the baggiest clothes you could lay your hands on to try to cool down.”

Is there a danger, then, that life may become a little duller without the regular glam and glitz of the racecourse?

“Not a bit of it!” laughs Emma.

“Fairly recently I was out at a restaurant with friends and I sat throughout with a glass of water with three chunks of lemon in it. No food. My life has constantly been about weight-watching. Boiled eggs and salad. That’s been it. I’ve got a great bunch of friends who love dinner parties and now I’ll be able to tuck in a bit.”

But whoa. Emma’s back, this time as an amateur, riding at Perth tomorrow.

Gold Chain, her significant Carlisle winner, will be lining up and Emma explains: “She’s a lovely mare but she can make a right fool of you. She’s refused point-blank to race in the past and once, at Ayr, we were halfway down the back straight when I couldn’t keep her galloping. We were almost at a trot. Then, on the corner, she consented to gallop again and finished well past tired horses.

“The stewards wanted to know what had happened and my explanation was that she had been trying to pull herself up. A hood has been fitted on her ever since and that has helped her a lot. It keeps her calm and focused.”

Emma has always had the full support of mum and dad, Andrew, sisters Joanna and Natalie and brother Tom.

“We’re a close, tight-knit family,” she says “and as well as our racing we enjoy family holidays.”

As she goes forward Emma will certainly be flying in the face of those who maintain that you should never work with children or animals.

“I get great pleasure out of both,” she says. “Look at mum. She always said she wanted to breed her own staff. It’s cheaper that way.”