Female jockey Jamie Kah could be our best female athlete
Jockey Jamie Kah has made history in riding 100 winners in one season. Remember her name, because she could just be the best female athlete in the world.
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Move along a little, Raelene Boyle. You, too, Evonne and Dawn. Make room for Jamie. If you old-time champions hadn’t heard much about the new girl before her latest riding record, you soon will.
Jamie Kah is racing up to the dais to join Australia’s handful of world-class women athletes. Landing her 100th Melbourne winner of the season is something no jockey has done before.
Kah is only 25 and still has a way to go. And, yes, she is different from other stars in that she rides horses – in races, as it happens, but she’ll ride them anywhere from the showjumping arena, to the stockyard, at speed or over obstacles.
Jamie Kah rides the way a fish swims. She’s smooth and strong, completely at ease in the wafer that passes for a race saddle.
With due respect to Ash Barty, Kah is probably Australia’s best female athlete of her generation, maybe the best female athlete in the world.
Tennis fans might choke on their cornflakes at that. But Kah does something remarkable: she takes on the best males in her field and often beats them, and has done since she was a toddler.
Don’t compare champions, the champion trainer Bart Cummings warned us – just enjoy them. There’s no need to elevate Jamie Kah by trampling on others. Actions spoke for her, even before her first professional race ride in 2012.
She went to Britain at 14, youngest of five riders representing Australia in the 2010 International Mounted Games for riders under 18.
Anyone who sees those competitors fling themselves on and off their speedy “novelty ponies” at the gallop knows the Kah girl didn’t have to learn to ride when she started her apprenticeship two years later. She just had to learn to “ride races”.
Not all gifted riders make the transition to race jockeys. But Kah did it so quickly that she out-rode her Adelaide apprentice claim in under two years to be on level terms with riders twice her age, with hundreds of winners under their belts.
It’s not “what makes Jamie run”, more a case of “what makes horses run for Jamie?” Even before she learned about tactics and pace, horses went sweetly for her.
Her first boss John Macmillan saw how good she was when she came to do chores after school and on weekends at his Strathalbyn stables. Soon, she was breaking in young racehorses. She’d been breaking in ‘Coffin Bay brumbies’ for years.
Macmillan rode with gun jockeys Dwayne Dunn and Noel Callow as apprentices. Kah was the best 16 year-old he’d seen since those two.
“Jamie with horses is like Mozart with a piano – she’s a natural,” Macmillan said when his star pupil moved to Victoria in early 2019.
Adelaide trainer Daniel Clarken couldn’t miss spotting Kah’s talent early. “Her balance is ridiculous,” he says. In a dangerous game in which nearly everyone falls sometimes and in which female jockeys are (despite contrary claims) injured and killed at a disproportionate rate in Australia, Kah rarely falls.
It’s one thing to be able to ride. It is another to have a “race brain”. A race can turn into a moving chess game in a split second: the top jockeys switch moves intuitively to counter changing tactics around them.
Experience helps but it can’t replace the reflexes that makes a game “slow down” for a footballer. It’s no accident that one of the finest apprentices in memory, Darren Gauci, was a talented schoolboy sportsman. Or that the venerable Damien Oliver, in his late 40s, is a gun surfer and golfer and competitive at anything he tries.
The odds against young jockeys are not much better than those against young horses. A lot can go wrong and often does. Each crop of promising apprentices are like early two year-olds: they go fast early, burst on the scene like shooting stars and mostly flame out in a season or two. Apprentices can get too heavy or get big heads and bad influences.
So many apprentices never get over losing their weight claim, the edge that lures trainers to use them ahead of senior riders. Once they’re on level terms with older jockeys, rides dry up except for the talented few.
History says the odds were against the pony clubber with the ponytail when she started race riding in South Australia nine seasons ago. She turned history on its head.
Pedigree helps. Kah’s parents John and Karen were Olympic speed skaters. Like Ash Barty, she’s a power athlete: as strong through the hips and shoulders as a trapeze artist, a genetic edge honed by a lifetime of competition riding.
Kah’s first race ride was on Alannan Lad at obscure Streaky Bay in March, 2012. Her mum volunteered to tow a float for 10 hours just to make sure her girl got to debut well away from the broadcast cameras that would highlight any flaws in her style at a bigger TAB meeting.
She ran second that day and liked the feeling. A couple of weeks later, the kid with the plait poking from her helmet rode a double at Clare on Magic Tigress and Arthurian Legend.
“We backed them both into favourite from about 15-1,” recalls Kah’s old boss Macmillan.
Within 18 months, she was equal second in the national jockey ranks alongside Nash Rawiller, a top rider with international experience. By the time she left Adelaide half way through her seventh season, she had ridden 730 winners. She passed the 1000-win milestone some weeks ago.
Plenty of handy jockeys don’t ride that many winners in their careers.
When she headed to Victoria that day, two and-a-half years ago, she stopped off at Strathalbyn and rode two winners and second from six rides – the right ratio for someone whose strike rate was running at 25 per cent, double the average.
At Geelong next day, local trainer Paul Banks booked her for her first Victorian ride as a senior jockey, despite a Group 1 winning veteran asking for the sit. She ran third behind a well-backed horse and ran second on two others.
Racing has its share of reptiles and one of them predicted that week that the Adelaide darling would soon be hitchhiking back to her provincial puddle. Wrong. She won a race next day at Cranbourne. Then she won on a 15-1 shot at Flemington the following Saturday, and hasn’t stopped since.
The picture of her passing the post at headquarters should be given to every apprentice. It shows what Hemingway called grace under pressure.
And pressure, says her old boss John Macmillan, is what makes diamonds.
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