The world’s top-ranked female jockey has won more group 1 races than any other Australian woman – a record she’s determined to keep.
It’s September and the Victorian Racing Tribunal is meeting on the eve of the spring carnival, the most prestigious stretch of the Australian racing calendar. The tribunal members make notes with nice pens. The steward, a kind of horse-racing cop, drones on. It’s low-vibe, but high-stakes. If things don’t go her way, Jamie Kah, 28, the world’s best female jockey and the face of the carnival, could miss weeks of top-tier racing.
But Kah and her lawyer, the tall and angular Matthew Stirling, disagree. Giving evidence, Kah says she felt unsafe taking that gap. The day was very windy and Kah’s a rider who determines the location of other horses by sound. The gusty conditions, which made the race footage shaky at times, also made it impossible to hear.
Kah had vague ambitions to be a vet or jillaroo, anything, really, that involved a horse, but as soon as she galloped a thoroughbred, her singular ambition was to become a jockey. “I had never felt anything like it,” she says. “Just to let a horse go that fast. It was this rush.” Kah asked MacMillan if she could be his apprentice and, after some discussion, in April 2011, John and Karen took the big step of allowing their daughter to leave school for a jockey apprenticeship.
Following Forrest’s death, Kah went through a rough patch. She got in trouble several times with the stewards, once for being dishonest about a medical certificate. As a late-teen, she was earning huge amounts of money and, says MacMillan, that would have been a heady situation for anyone. He recalls one year that Kah was earning so much, she got a tax bill for $85,000.
Racing is still a male-dominated sport. Racing Australia’s form guide still puts “Ms” next to Kah’s name while the male jockeys have no “Mr”. Within the industry, Kah, one of Australia’s best athletes and a fully-grown woman, is constantly referred to as a “girl” or a “young lady”. Putting aside the intense scrutiny though, Kah does not think the industry is generally sexist.
Kah in March this year with three of the late Dean Holland’s four children after winning the Newmarket Handicap, the race she missed after her serious fall at the same meeting last year.She then tells me the story of how Melham, who has three children from his previous marriage, proposed this year on a Valentine’s Day ride with two of her favourite horses, Dollars and Brax. It would be impossible to be with someone who is not a jockey, she says.
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