Jamie Kah, 23, the best young talent in the Australian racing industry
Jamie Kah has been likened to Melbourne Cup-winning jockeys John Letts and Kerrin McEvoy and now she is carving her place in the racing industry with outstanding skill - a talent further enhanced at Flemington on Saturday when she captured her first Group 1 win.
Andrew Rule
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The week Jamie Kah turned 17 she did something that eludes most jockeys most of their careers: she won a treble “in town”.
When she landed her hat-trick at Adelaide’s Morphettville racecourse, she had been riding in races less than a year.
It was no fluke: the kid with the pigtail was already well on the way to winning more than 100 races for the season, as she has every year since.
Her whirlwind journey to the top echelon of Australia's riding ranks saw her claim her first Group 1 success at Flemington on Saturday when Harlem captured Melbourne’s premier autumn staying contest, the Australian Cup.
JAMIE KAH WINS KENSINGTON STAKES ON BELWAZI
JAMIE KAH STARTS MELBOURNE MOVE
JAMIE KAHS WIN IN GROUP 3 SPRING STAKES
Apprentice jockeys can be like speedy two-year-olds: there is always a new shooting star streaking across the sky then flaming out. They hit the headlines then hit the wall. Racing is full of those coodabeen yarns, but this isn’t one of them.
Kah’s first race ride was on Alannan Lad at Streaky Bay in March 2012. Royal Ascot it ain’t: the next stop is the Nullarbor. Distance didn’t stop Kah’s mum Karen volunteering to tow the horse float for 10 hours. She wanted to make sure her only daughter got the ride under her belt out where there were no TV cameras to record her mistakes.
Karen needn’t have worried. Her Jamie ran second and looked good. Two weeks later, the girl with the plait poked under her helmet rode a double at Clare on Magic Tigress and Arthurian Legend.
“We backed them both into favourite from 15-1,” recalls Kah’s then boss John Macmillan happily, repeating a pet story about his protégé. Macmillan says he was no star as a jockey himself — he rode over jumps mainly for pleasure — but he has an eye for talent. He picked the kid as a natural as soon as she started working around his stables for pocket money.
Less than two years after Streaky Bay, she was equal second in the national jockey ranks alongside Nash Rawiller, a gun jockey before Kah was born in 1995. Rawiller’s son will soon be riding against her.
Now, barely half way through her seventh season, Kah has ridden 731 winners and is on track to score 1000 wins in nine seasons. And that is despite months travelling overseas in 2015, a break to decompress after the death of a fellow rider in a fall.
At 23, an age when some jockeys get heavy or burn out, and when others are still struggling to master their trade, Kah seems set to advance to the elite level.
Women jockeys have snagged Group races — most famously, Michelle Payne’s 2015 Melbourne Cup — and run up terrific tallies on the provincial circuit, like the respected Linda Meech and Nikita Beriman. Kah’s role model, Clare Lindop, has just retired from an outstanding 20-year career, during which she won five South Australian jockey premierships and four Group 1 races.
But Kah is something else: a prodigy who outrode her apprentice weight claim in two seasons to win the first of four state premierships.
Last week she moved to Victoria to take on the big guns.
Week in, week out, Australian and New Zealand relies on dozens of women jockeys and hundreds more strappers and track riders. But when the whips are cracking in Group 1 races at the big Sydney and Melbourne carnivals, it is still a man’s world.
So can J. Kah crack the code?
Good judges think she is the best jockey to come from South Australia since Jim Johnson, John Letts and Kerrin McEvoy, all multiple Melbourne Cup winners. Like them, she has come east to test herself against the finest in the land.
A fellow South Australian who has made it internationally, trainer David Hayes, is not prone to overstatement. But he says simply that Kah “is the best female rider I have seen”.
The question is not “What makes Jamie run?” It is, what makes horses run for Jamie?
Watch her behind the barriers. She’s the one with feet out of the irons, hands easy on the reins, legs swinging as if she’s riding bareback on the beach.
Watch her over the last 50 metres and she looks as balanced as the Brazilian star Joao Moreira. And as cool as Hugh Bowman.
The man who rides the world’s greatest racehorse has a favourite female at the track: her name is Winx and she has beaten the best males of her generation for four seasons. But now Bowman is weighing up what makes Jamie Kah a rising star.
Bowman hardly knows her but understands where she comes from and why she “sits on” so easily, something he saw up close when they played in a promotional polo game during the Magic Millions hoopla this month.
Like him, Kah rode as soon as she could walk. Like him, she rode in obstacle races and around livestock and through the bush and over jumps. Like him, she broke in youngsters — in her case, mostly the tough “Coffin Bay” brumbies from the bush near Port Lincoln.
Unlike Bowman — a sixth-generation horseman from cattle country — Kah was the first in her family to be raised with horses.
Her first mount (still her favourite) was Bessie the Welsh mountain pony, who appeared soon after Jamie was born when her parents retired from the sport that brought them together.
John and Karen Kah were speed skaters who represented Australia at three Winter Olympics. Jamie’s uncle, Danny Kah, was Australia’s fastest skater at 15 and is still a force in veteran cycling. The genes run true. Jamie has the thighs and shoulders of a power athlete.
“How do I put this politely?” says Bowman, pondering the problem of paying a compliment that doesn’t sound backhanded.
“She isn’t as petite as a lot of the female jockeys,” he offers. “She’s athletic. A good shape for a jockey — not too tall but not too short and blessed with the strength you need.”
It is the “pocket rocket” physique seen at the top level on the ice rink, the bike track, in martial arts … and in the saddle. The world stage is what Kah wants and not just in racing. She wants to ride for Australia as an equestrian. It is no idle dream.
She didn’t have to learn to ride when she started her apprenticeship in 2012, a point of difference with many modern apprentices. At 14, she represented Australia in the International Mounted Games in England. When she is not riding racehorses, she is training her own showjumper, a reformed galloper she calls Brax.
Not all gifted riders make the grade as jockeys. Talent doesn’t shed weight or steer you around predatory punters and party animals, backslappers and backstabbers. But Kah handled the transition with ease, outriding her claim to be on level terms with riders twice her age — a double-edged sword that cuts down many a promising apprentice’s career.
It all started with the 14-year-old schoolgirl doing weekend and holiday chores around John Macmillan’s stable for pocket money. In no time, says Macmillan, she was breaking in young horses. Then she started riding trackwork.
Macmillan rode with top jockeys Dwayne Dunn and Noel Callow as apprentices. He says Kah was the best 16-year-old he had seen since those two.
“Jamie with horses is like Mozart with a piano,” he says.
Trainer Daniel Clarken was quick to book her for his horses. “Her balance is ridiculous,” he says. She rarely falls. But as the late Roy Higgins often said, it is one thing to be able to ride; it is another to have a race brain. A race turns into a chess game as jockeys switch moves to counter the changing tactics around them. Experience helps, of course. But reflexes and intuition you must be born with.
Kah’s move east began last week. She stopped her Range Rover at Strathalbyn and rode two winners and a second from six rides — the right ratio for someone whose strike rate has hovered around 25 per cent (one win every four rides) in the past year, compared with the average of about 10 per cent.
At Geelong the next day, local trainer Paul Banks booked her for the first race, despite the fact a Group 1-winning male jockey called him for the ride. She ran third behind a well-backed horse, ran second on two others. At Cranbourne the next day, she won.
At Flemington on the Saturday she won on Belwazi, a 15-1 shot. The photograph of the moment they passed the post should be given to every apprentice. It shows what Hemingway called grace under pressure. Only the best have it.
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