Six winners in the week leading up to Christmas, and a further double on Boxing Day, has put Andrew Tinkler in line for title honours as the new year dawns.

The teenage riding sensation (pictured right) now finds himself on the heels of the leaders in the conditional jockeys' championship, a position the Malton-born youngster could only dream about at the start of the season, when he reckoned that 15 winners this term would rank as a satisfactory score. Tinkler, who switched from amateur to professional in May, is currently on the 26-winner mark.

He said: "Things have gone brilliantly. I have already achieved my target of winners halfway into the season and the run I have had recently has done me an awful lot of good.

"I am riding for the right people, successful trainers and wonderful owners, and my confidence is sky-high. It's going great. I just hope it continues."

Tinkler, the youngest son of Carol and Colin Tinkler, was always destined to follow in the footsteps of his father, a highly-successful jump-jockey before he turned his hand to training.

No sooner had he left school - after riding a 100-1 winner on his first ride in public while still a pupil at Norton College - Andrew joined the powerful stable of Nicky Henderson at Lambourn in Berkshire.

Henderson has brought him along gradually, as he tends to do with aspiring jockeys, but is now giving him more and more opportunities, just as he did with Marcus Foley, last season's conditional jockeys' champion.

December has proved a major month for Tinkler. Not only did he ride his first Cheltenham winner on Got One Too - just 48 hours after acting as best man at his brother Nicky's Ryedale wedding - he rattled up half-a-dozen successes in the space of a week leading up to Christmas.

"That was the most extraordinary week," he said. "Everything I rode either won or pulled up. The six horses I won on were the only ones that completed the course."

Two further winners - one trained by Charles Egerton, one of his biggest supporters, and the other a 'spare' ride for Venetia Williams - at Towcester on Boxing Day - added to Andrew Tinkler's burgeoning reputation as a rider with a bright future.

Who knows? As we go into 2004, he could well become the season's champion conditional jockey.

Updated: 13:01 Monday, December 29, 2003