• Mick Doonan 27
• Edinburgh
• Scotland

From when I was young I was always a sports fanatic, I was into absolutely everything from snooker to football. Football was my real passion, where it was morning, noon and night before it was taken away from me at 16 where not getting released from one team to another left me on the side-lines for a year and started to fall out with the sport. I had all the energy and passion to turn it to other sports but none where football. At 17 I broke my foot in 3 places so that meant 6 months on a couch at home, by myself most days I started to suffer from depression as sitting at home and not being active got me really down.

I had always been a follower of racing but mostly big Meetings watching it at my grans with my cousins guessing what the winner was, picking horses on names, jockey names and such. As the first month went in I was depressed, I was in the routine of Jeremy Kyle and that would depress anyone so I decided to look at horse Racing much more as it had the following positives - it was on daily, it was easy to access and then I started to challenge myself each day to go through the cards see how many winners I had. With all sports, I throw myself right into it so the daily picks on form, soon started to look at more tools of picking race winners as they were released. Video replays, form guides, blood stock you name it I was into it through time. The moment which caught me and got me hooked was the way Authorized won the 2007 Epsom Derby that was it after that.

As a relative novice I took to the BBC forum 606 (which is sorely missed in my opinion) to enhance my knowledge. On there I met some very knowledgeable people some older and some of the same age who I still keep in contact with online.

My best moments in racing for me personally, finding winners for people for free on a daily basis gives me a huge buzz but also get young racing fans and new racing fans in DM’s asking questions or opinions and I’ve built some good conversations back and forth. For actual moments in racing there are so many special ones for me.

• Yeats - 4 x gold cup
• Zarkava’s Arc
• Sea the stars as a 3 year old
• Frankel
• Camelot
• Australia
• Kingman

Are just a number of high class horses that have all made moments in racing worth it. Recently on a personal note Wings Of Eagles winning the Derby, many will write it of but running the Irish Derby with a broken foot for most of it and losing by 1/4 of a length shows how much a serious horse he was. I am quite sad we won’t see him again.

Trolls now where do I begin with them. They are very easy to deal with these days thanks to social media allowing the simple blocking and muting of accounts. There are some lads with far too much time on their hands and seem to complain about racing 24/7 for me if you hate the sport that much why spend all day watching it? They mostly often do it behind an account which isn’t their own those accounts get muted or blocked soon as they follow. If someone does it from own account and not hiding I will humour them and often banter back. I get very little trolls but the same few pop up every few days never let them put you off racing.

What I would say is anyone reading this and wants to get into racing more there is a whole world out of it out there and it doesn’t have to be defined by Flat, National hunt or All-weather racing. There is so much more to the sport than the couple of minutes when the race is on. The bloodstock world is fascinating and interesting when you get into it. Go racing they are very good days out and what’s great about racing is all you need is transport to get to course be it your own or public transport, some readers will often agree it’s not all about betting or it’s not all about going for day out on the booze with friends, some of the best days racing I’ve had is going myself with no restrictions

Follow Mick on twitter - @TheMicktorious