| Jamie Kah | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Jockey |
| Born | 7 December 1995 Australia |
| Major racing wins | |
| Doncaster Handicap Hong Kong Classic Mile | |
Jamie Lee Kah (born 7 December 1995) [1] is an Australian jockey. Since October 2020 she has been the world's top-ranked female jockey. In 2020/21 she became the first jockey to ride 100 winners in a Melbourne Metropolitan racing season.
Jamie Kah's parents John and Karen are former speed skaters who represented Australia at the Winter Olympics. [2] She grew up in Mount Pleasant in the Adelaide Hills in South Australia, where she began working at a friend's stables when she was 13. [2] [3] Her grandparents are Dutch. [4]
She left school aged 15, [4] and began her riding apprenticeship in 2011, rode her first race in March 2012 at Streaky Bay, and rode her first winner 14 days later at the Easter Saturday meeting at Clare. [5] [6]
In her first full season, 2012/13, Kah won the Adelaide Jockeys' Premiership. [5] She won the Premiership for a third time in 2017/18, then moved to Melbourne in January 2019, and won her first Group One race on Harlem in the Australian Cup at Flemington in March. [5]
In October 2020 Kah was ranked the leading female jockey in the world, and 77th jockey overall. [7] In February 2021 she was the world's 41st jockey overall, and the only female jockey in the top 100. [8] She rode her 1000th winner at the Pakenham racecourse on Wednesday, 12 May 2021. She was the third woman, after Clare Lindop in 2008 and Linda Meech in 2013, to ride 1000 winners in Australia. [9] [10] By early December 2024 she had ridden 1,285 winners, including 15 Group One winners. [11]
On 10 July 2021, Kah became the first jockey to ride 100 winners in a Melbourne Metropolitan racing season. [12] She finished the Metropolitan season with 105 winners. [13]
In September 2021 she was suspended for five months by the Victorian Racing Tribunal for breaching COVID-19 regulations and for providing false or misleading evidence to the breach investigation. [14] She appealed against the severity of the penalty to the Victorian Supreme Court, which upheld her appeal on 17 November, freeing her to resume riding. [15]
For some years Kah and Clayton Douglas, [16] a fellow jockey and trainer, had a property on the Mornington Peninsula. [2] [6] In January 2025 she married fellow jockey Ben Melham. [17]
Kah was seriously injured in a fall during a race at Flemington on 11 March 2023, and spent several days in an induced coma at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. [18] She suffered brain injuries and several broken bones. [19] After months of rehabilitation and weeks of trackwork, she returned to racing with four rides at Randwick on 19 August. [20]
The Melbourne Cup is an annual Group 1 Thoroughbred horse race held in Melbourne, Australia, at the Flemington Racecourse. It is a 3200-metre race for three-year-olds and older, conducted by the Victoria Racing Club that forms part of the Melbourne Spring Racing Carnival. It is the richest two-mile handicap in the world and one of the richest turf races. The event starts at 3:00 pm on the first Tuesday of November and is known locally as "the race that stops the nation".
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