Nina Bach - up and coming female German racehorse trainer

By David Connolly-Smith
First Published: 05 March 2010 - Issue Number: 29

After winning more than 100 races as an amateur and then as an apprentice jockey, Nina Bach set up as a trainer in 2004 in the Rhineland-Palatine in Germany. Through hard work and a level head she has had an upward curve of success ever since.

Woman trainers have played an increasingly prominent role in German racing in recent years. Erika Mäder in Krefeld has perhaps the highest profile, having won a couple of Group Ones, while Elfi Schnakenberg in Jerusalem (yes, really; it’s near Bremen) is the champion National Hunt trainer here. Much younger than this pair is 32-year-old Nina Bach, who trains 30 thoroughbreds at Hassloch in the Rhineland-Palatinate.
She was involved with animals from a very early age, as both her parents Franz and Christine are vets and run a practice in Schriesheim near Heidelberg, where she was brought up. She was soon on horseback and as a teenager began riding out for permit-holder Horst Rudolph at Mannheim.
She then did an apprenticeship with local trainer Ingo Schalter, much helped by ex-jockey Erwin Schindler, who famously won the German Derby on outsider Ako in 1982, easily the best horse so far trained in Hassloch. She first rode as an amateur for many of the trainers based in that area of south-west Germany, including her father, often known as “Doc”, who was a permit-holder with usually about half a dozen horses in training.
In all, she estimates that she won over 100 races in the saddle as amateur and then apprentice, some of them on the lesser tracks, but also plenty on the major German courses such as Baden-Baden and Cologne. In 2004 she set up as a trainer in Hassloch with financial help from her parents. The stabling, a block with 31 boxes, was bought from the defunct racecourse at Gelsenkirchen, which had gone out of business at the end of 2002.
Although it would be an exaggeration to claim that she has set the world on fire, her statistics show a steady upward curve. Having sent out nine winners in her first season, and six in 2005, she then won 10 races in 2006, 12 in 2007, 19 in 2008 (plus two in France) and 17 last year (plus one in France). Although 2008 was numerically the best sea...

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