Getting work because of your parents isn’t exactly a new thing. In the United Kingdom, for example, the Royal Family only exists because of the fortune of their birth, so it’s little wonder that other careers see people making it on the back of their family name.
Would Stella McCartney’s fashion label have been as successful as it has been if not for the surname she boasts? In the case of Megan Nicholls, the daughter of one of the country’s most successful trainers, Paul Nicholls, has worked hard to live up to the privilege that she’s been given thanks to who he is.
Megan Nicholls in the Media
When your father is Paul Nicholls, it is fairly inevitable that you will enter the world of horse racing in one form or another. When she retired as a flat racing jockey, it didn’t take long before ITV snapped her up in order for her to become a pundit on ITV Racing. She had already been doing some bits and pieces of broadcasting whilst in the saddle, so it was an easy transition for her to make. Her impact was almost immediate, which was recognised by the fact that she won the Horserace Writers and Photographers Association Emerging Talent Award in 2023, jointly with Alex Fussey.
It isn’t just ITV Racing that has taken advantage of Nicholls’ decision to turn to a career in the media. She has also appeared as a presenter on Racing TV, offering her opinion on the horse racing that the channel is covering when she’s not working for ITV. In spite of her obvious privilege in being the daughter of a well-known trainer, she has proven to be adept at offering thoughts and insight into what is likely to be going through the minds of jockeys as they prepare for a race, as well as talking the viewer through how a race has gone once it has reached its conclusion.
Life Before Becoming a Pundit
Megan Nicholls was a horse lover from an early age, which isn’t all that surprising when you consider her lineage. She was only a toddler when Paul Nicholls trained See More Business to success in both the Cheltenham Gold Cup and the King George VI Chase. She began by racing ponies, working in the yard of Nicholls after completing just a year of her A-levels because of how unhappy she was. She then began racing point-to-point horses, winning 17 times in her first season and leading many to assume that she would enter the world of National Hunt racing.
Instead, she became an amateur rider on the flat, racking up more than 100 winners, in no small part due to the fact that she raced horses trained by her father. She rode her final winner at Pontefract on the 11th of April 2022, winning on the back of Dereham, before racing for another four months prior to retiring on the third of August 2022 after coming fifth on Oleg at Kempton Park. She announced her retirement live on Racing TV, perhaps suggesting that a career in the media was all but inevitable for the then 25-year-old, much to the annoyance of some Facebook users.
Although most of her time since her retirement from the saddle has been taken up by her punditry work, it isn’t the only thing that she’s using her post-career time doing. At the start of 2025, she confirmed that her television work would continue, but that she would also be working at finding future jump stars for her dad’s stables. She had been buying bloodstock alongside working as a television personality, with one of the highest-profile horses she’d got her hands on being Givemefive, who was owned by golf stars Graeme McDowell and Brooks Koepka.