Other days begin at Randwick, waiting with other jockeys for trackwork rides while trainers stir three sugars into coffee cups.

"It's a struggle to get out of bed sometimes," she says. "All you want to do is sleep in but you've got to get up and do it all over again."

Before dawn breaks, she is back home in Chipping Norton, drinking cranberry tea on the couch, feet up in ugg boots while studying the form guide. Her racing strip is in the clothes dryer. Empty vases collect dust by the big-screen TV.

Fixed across a door frame is a chin-up bar. In the corner is a guitar that O'Hara has struggled to play since breaking her hand in a mid-race fall in January.

The neatest thing in her three-bedroom townhouse is the tall cabinet filled with trophies from Sydney, Wagga, Mudgee and Albury.

"I threw heaps out recently," she says. "I just kept the good ones."

O'Hara, 28, is the leading women's jockey in Sydney, one of the most competitive ranks in the world. It is tougher still for a woman. Before the Sydney Spring Carnival, which starts on September 13, The Sun-Herald spent a day with her.

She has four races to ride today in Goulburn but first we drive to her friend's farm in Bringelly, with eucalyptus drops and a bag of carrots in the car. It is almost 9am when O'Hara arrives at the stable that houses Gremlin, her three-year-old chestnut filly, which she is training to be a showjumper.

O'Hara is short and slight, all of 51 kilograms, with long blonde hair she corrals into a braid under her helmet. She uses a milk crate to climb onto her horse.

"She is young in her mind and in her heart; very playful but very sweet," she says.

"A lot of jockeys need to get away from it all but I enjoy this. I have always had horses or ponies. Other jockeys prefer to do golf – I don't like golf."

Her first horse – at least the first she can remember – was a Shetland pony named Sheba, which she and her sister Tracy, who is also a jockey, would ride on the family farm outside Goulburn. O'Hara was introduced by a friend of a friend to trackwork riding as a young girl and started her jockey apprenticeship upon turning 16.

"It's not all the glitz and glamour people see on race day," she says as we drive towards Goulburn, past dirt foundations of future housing estates and signs advertising "animal holistic therapies".

"In the country you get more of a go as a female rider. But, in the big races and where the money is at, the girls are still few and far between."

There are separate change rooms for jockeys at the racecourse, by a television and a table topped with sandwiches and deep-fried spring rolls. There was a time O'Hara had the women's room to herself. She shares the small space today with a handful of female apprentices, who adjust their saddles and stand by the heater between races.

There is a chilly wind and a small crowd at the racecourse. O'Hara finishes second in the first race, bolting from the outside and drawing level with the winner before fading. Congratulations, I say, when she returns to the jockey's room. "On what?" she says. On coming second. "No prize for second place," she says.

One in four Australian jockeys is a woman – among apprentices it is roughly one in two. In NSW, while about 37 per cent of jockeys are women, they get only 28 per cent of the rides.

"There's still a lot of stigma about female riders," O'Hara says. "It's the perception that the male jockeys are stronger than the girl jockeys but it's not always about strength. They're 500 to 600-kilogram animals, so if they don't want to do something you can't force them ... It doesn't matter how strong you are."

Some beasts, particularly troublesome ones, respond well to a softer touch, she says.

"I find sometimes girls are just a little more patient with them, giving them a pat and saying 'hey listen, it's OK'," she says. "Horses are like people. They're not machines."

In the barriers before race three, she strokes her horse's mane and leans in close to its ear, cooing "easy pet, easy girl".

"With racing there's the adrenaline, galloping, going fast," she says. "There is a bit of excitement that kicks in but mostly it's just focus."

She finishes third but has a winning smile for the trainer and the owner.

"Jockeys are basically self-employed so it's a game of self-promotion," she says. "You have to schmooze, which is difficult for me because it is not in my nature."

O'Hara rates race four as her best chance but is left flat-footed in a sprint. Later, she sits in the jockeys' room and watches the TV run the race on a loop – showing her horse finish third over and over.

"There are more disappointments than highs in racing," she says. "It's just something you learn from the very start to deal with."

From her four races today, she runs a second, two thirds and a fifth. She showers and carries her gear to the car. "It's the travelling that knocks it out of you," she says.

Her day begins and ends in the dark, when she arrives home at 7pm. She makes herself sweet potato soup and and goes to bed at 9.30pm. The sun is up by the time she is back on the road for the next round of races, this time in Wyong. "It is just another day," she says.