Andrew Rule: Wild ride but Kah still has eyes on the prize

Jockey Jamie Kah emerged from South Australia in 2019 to take Victorian racing by storm, but along with the sublime rides and big-race success came all the usual temptations, distractions and challenges of life in the sporting limelight.

When Jamie Kah hit Victoria, she seemed to be pure heroine. It was early 2019 and the best scorer out of Adelaide since the Chappell brothers packed her Range Rover and headed east.

She stopped at Strathalbyn races and nailed two winners and a second from six rides, topping up her strike rate of one win in four – about double what merely excellent jockeys manage.

Next day, she rode three placegetters at Geelong, where local trainer Paul Banks benched a Group 1 rider to leg her up. Booking her was a chance Banks knew he might not get once she hit stride.

He was right. Kah won at Cranbourne on her third day in Victoria and at Flemington soon after. The steel magnolia from South Australia was in the big time to stay. There were knockers at the beginning, of course, among punters and “grandstand jockeys” not happy unless they’re bagging brave people who pilot half a tonne of nervous energy at lethal speed.

Fools sneered that Kah would be back riding at Murray Bridge by autumn. They were wrong.

Jamie Kah as an apprentice jockey at Morphettville Racecourse.

The kid who’d been a teenage juggernaut in South Australia took to the big stage the way a young David Hookes had taken to batting at the MCG.

From when she first bossed a Shetland pony as a toddler, Jamie Lee Kah was a natural.

She’d broken in wild Coffin Bay brumbies for fun. Rode raw young horses for her first boss, former jumps jockey John Macmillan, who said she handled horses the way Mozart played piano.

Apart from balance and timing and unusual strength, she had the gift of coolness under fire.

Riding horses is Kah’s work and pleasure.

She’d had her first race ride at Streaky Bay in 2012. Two weeks later, she rode a double at Clare, both winners heavily backed. Two seasons later she won the first of a string of state premierships and sat equal second in the national jockey rankings alongside Nash Rawiller, a gun rider since before she was born.

Jamie Kah is bigger than most female jockeys, with the precision and core strength of a trapeze artist. In a race, her back is as level as an ironing board, head tucked extra low behind the horse’s ears, arms low on the horse’s neck, hands easy on reins and whip.

It’s not a case of what makes Jamie ride but a question of what makes horses run for her. Some day a physics professor might try to count the ways. Maybe Kah’s edge is the sum of one-percenters – less wind resistance; less lateral swaying; less fighting the horse; a smidgen more weight above the horse’s shoulder.

Call it poise. And other things that can’t be measured – instinct or horse sense or black magic. Every horse culture in history credits certain people with being able to charm horses.

Whatever Kah does, or doesn’t do, it works. She’s never frantic. Never flails. Never returns to scale looking as if she’s boxed five rounds. She’s as cool and collected as the elite Olympic equestrian riders she wanted to be and might yet become. Horses respond to her sure touch.

Proof? Try a promotional video from the May 2022 Warrnambool carnival, where Kah and Winx’s star jockey Hugh Bowman were riding.

Libby Hopwood, Clare Lindop, Eran Boyd, Jamie Kah, Amy Herrmann and Lauren Stojakovic.

As a jumps racing booster, the two world-class flat riders agreed to school steeplechasers over a flight of fences alongside master jumps jockey (and trainer) Steve Pateman, the tall horseman admired even by Irish masters of cross-country racing.

Pateman the steeplechase stylist led the way. But freeze-frame his horse jumping slightly ahead of Kah’s and you see she is even lower in the saddle than he is, glued down as if she’s part of the animal, hands and head as low as if stretching out on a sprinter down the Flemington straight. Effortless.

Bowman, brilliant all-round horseman in his own right, miscalculates and bounces high above the saddle in his last jump. To a neutral watcher, Kah’s is the silkiest exhibition of the three. It’s no coincidence that where other jockeys play golf or surf or go to the gym, Kah schools her own showjumpers.

In other words, riding horses is her work and also her pleasure. But it’s not her only pleasure.

In the saddle, Kah is a star. Out of it, she’s only human, albeit a fit pro athlete in her 20s who earns more than most barristers or surgeons twice her age but sometimes acts like an erratic teenager. One who rides some of the best horses in the land in races carrying huge prizemoney and betting pools.

This weekend Kah was in Sydney with other elite riders drawn by multimillion-dollar stakes in The Everest, but misfortune hit when her ride Traffic Warden was a late scratching.

Kah is one of a handful of jockeys in the world who could make half a million bucks in an afternoon.

Jamie Kah is bigger than most female jockeys, with the precision and core strength of a trapeze artist. Picture: Getty Images

In fact, a lucky carnival could give a James McDonald, a Bowman, a Zahra or Kah nearly enough to buy the PM’s new house. An unlucky moment could put any of them in a wheelchair, or worse.

That’s the gamble they take every time they mount. No wonder some of them play hard when they dismount.

For Kah, money and fame came fast for a kid who’d left school at 16 for the unstable life of a racing stable. Her education is no better than if she were piloting a supermarket cash register rather than superstar cash machines on legs.

You don’t have to be in California to get the Mercedes bends. Hot jockeys make mad money in Australia and Hong Kong. Like boxers, footballers and F1 drivers, they attract hangers-on like a magnet picks up iron filings.

Since the retirement of Michelle “Ride Like A Girl” Payne, the perceived PR wisdom is that racing needs Kah to shine. But the reverse is also true: Kah needs racing. A fact that must occur to her as she saddles up in another spring carnival with yet another cloud over her head.

It might be too dramatic to say that this spring is a crossroads for Kah. But a couple of big wins and several impeccable rides would restore lustre to her career after some bruising setbacks.

At almost 29, she needs to leave no room for doubt about commitment to winning on the track – and about avoiding losers off it. Bad falls and bad company are cement boots in a game in which disaster is only a hoofbeat away.

The Jamie Kah fairytale came unstuck in the depths of the pandemic lockdowns.

Whatever Kah — pictured at Flemington riding No.5, Sound — does or doesn’t do, it works. Picture: Getty Images

The fairytale was that racing’s new princess was engaged to a handsome but humble princeling, jockey-turned-trainer Clayton Douglas.

The reality was that Princess Jamie had fallen in with the black knight of the jockeys’ room, Ben Melham, and another money rider with adult tastes, Mark Zahra. If there’s a jockey rat pack, those two are Sinatra and Dean Martin.

Along for the ride at the rat pack’s now notorious Mornington Airbnb party on the night of August 25, 2021 were former star apprentice Ethan Brown and his girlfriend, apprentice Celine Gaudray. They were breaking the Covid-19 curfew and Racing Victoria’s protocols. Racing’s rumour mill says three others were also there, including a disqualified jockey of renown.

The perceived public relations wisdom is that racing needs Kah to shine, but the reverse is also true. Picture: Tony Gough

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but in sleepy Mornington the neighbours were unhappy about the noise. And the cleaners were unhappy with the trashed house, broken glass, wine stains and blood.

The horse manure hit the fan. Especially when stewards discovered that Kah and Melham and Brown and Gaudray “forgot” to mention Zahra’s presence to them. Let alone that of any other phantoms allegedly there.

Result: Long suspensions for all five, ruling them out of the 2021 spring carnival. And a broken engagement for Kah, whose fairy story turned into a soap opera ... and soon a life-or-death drama.

Kah had seen bad falls but avoided being in them until the Sires Produce at Flemington in autumn last year. This time her magic hands were not enough. Her mount Flyball raced waywardly, clipping heels and spearing her to the ground under galloping hooves, smashing wrist, foot and nose.

Caught in the backwash, Craig Williams also fell. But whereas Willo could give the thumbs up minutes later, Kah was unconscious then sedated for five days.

Kah had to admit a failure of nerve in the McNeil Stakes. Picture: Getty Images

What effect it had on her is hard to say. Physically, perhaps not a lot, after a long recuperation. But, for the natural, it was a brutal reminder of how quickly dreams become nightmares.

By this time Kah was living on her own property at Somerville. Her housemate was greyhound trainer Jacob Biddell. Just before she was due to resume riding ready for the new racing season, the “white powder” story broke.

Photographs leaked by a “friend” showed Kah with Biddell and stablehand Ruby McIntyre, chopping up the usual suspect powder with the regulation credit card. That scandal hung over her return. So did the speculation that lingers over any comeback jockey’s mental state.

Critics looked for evidence that Kah had lost her nerve. Picture: Alex Coppel

The critics looked for evidence Kah had lost her nerve and was not riding as fearlessly. But she kept winning, if not quite as dominantly as in her best season when she’d been the first in Victoria to ride 100 city winners.

The injury and the white powder story faded away, but then came that strange ride in the McNeil Stakes at Caulfield last month. Her horse seemed to race erratically into a gap between two others, and she didn’t push it through. The many who thought it looked questionble included the stewards, who charged her with failing to ride with sufficient vigour and purpose.

She pleaded it was a scarily similar situation to when she’d had her fall, saying in each case her horse had “locked its jaw” and was unsteerable. It was enough to have a six-week suspension cut in half and backdated so she could get to The Everest this week.

Now, Kah needs to ride winners to make a point. A victim of her own previous stratospheric success, she had to admit a failure of nerve in the McNeil Stakes, and in doing so risk tarnishing her reputation as a fearless rider.

It’s a cruel conundrum for someone who could have died on the track last year. And not necessarily fair.

The horse that got Kah suspended is named Let’sfacethemusic. Facing the music without flinching is what she has to do in every race this spring. Hemingway said courage was grace under pressure. He never said heroes had to be pure.

Originally published as Andrew Rule: Wild ride but Kah still has eyes on the prize