Run The Numbers –  King’s latest successes put female jockeys on brink of 50 Australian Group 1 wins

The success of top female riders in Australia, such as Jamie Melham and Rachel King, has become commonplace, ensuring that not every Group 1 win is categorised as “historic”’ and “groundbreaking”.

Since King won her first Group 1 in the 2018 Spring Champion Stakes aboard Maid Of Heaven, 595 Group 1 races have been run in Australia, and female jockeys have won 32 of them, or 5.4 per cent.

Of those 32, Melham has won 20, King has claimed nine and Linda Meech, Kathy O’Hara and Siena Grima have each won one.

Grima claimed her first Group 1 when God’s Window took out the Epsom Handicap.

But since King won her second Australian Group 1 in the 2022 Sydney Cup, female jockeys’ share of elite Australian races has risen to 7.2 per cent.

King, who has also had a Group 1 win in Japan, became the first woman on Saturday to ride a Caulfield Guineas winner, adding to her previous success in renowned Group 1 races such as the Australian Derby, Golden Rose and Coolmore Stud Stakes.

Racing is unique in that, unlike almost any other sport in the world, genders compete on even terms in the saddle. It wouldn’t be worth remarking on statistically, apart from the fact that we are approaching a milestone.

King’s Caulfield Guineas win on Warwoven was the 49th Group 1 win in Australia by a female jockey. When you consider that only three years ago we marked a 32nd victory of this ilk (and there are now 77 Group 1 races in Australia), it won’t be long before we celebrate 100.

All of this is being achieved with fewer opportunities at the top level.

Of the 14 Group 1 races run so far in Australia this season, female jockeys have won three, or 21.4 per cent.  

But only 15 of 163 Group 1 runners have been ridden by a female jockey – or 9.2 per cent. Only one race, the Epsom, featured more than one female jockey.

Of those 15 rides, two jockeys have taken 11: King (six) and Melham (five). The other four have gone to Grima, Winona Costin, Celine Gaudray and Mollie Fitzgerald.  

That female Group 1 representation is less than half of the percentage (20 per cent) of jockeys who finished Top 20 on the Australian metro jockeys table last season. The same figure is current for this season. In fact, that 20 per cent figure persists when you look across the Top 200 jockeys and the number of races won by female hoops.

While there are more opportunities than before, equal footing, at least at the elite level, is still some way off.

In 1982, Kiwi Diane Moseley became the first female jockey to win a Group 1 race in Australia, claiming the Doomben Cup on Double You Em.

Five months later, Maree Lyndon made history in New Zealand and added an Australian Group 1 to her resume in 1987 with Lord Reims’ Adelaide Cup win.

Later that year, Lyndon became the first female jockey to ride in a Melbourne Cup.

It wasn’t until 2006 that an Australian female jockey won a Group 1 race. Clare Lindop, who became the first Australian woman to ride in the Melbourne Cup in 2003, claimed her first top-level success aboard Exalted Time in the Adelaide Cup.

Two years later, she won the Victoria Derby aboard rank outsider Rebel Raider, the first female jockey to win that race in its then 153-year history.

But she wasn’t the first woman to ride a Group 1 winner at Flemington. That honour belonged to Nikita Beriman, who orchestrated her own upset when Tears I Cry won the 2007 Emirates Stakes.

Michelle Payne won the first of her five Group 1 races in the 2009 Toorak Handicap aboard Allez Wonder. Her most famous and final Group 1 success would come in 2015, when Prince Of Penzance won the Melbourne Cup.

Kathy O’Hara became the first woman to win a Sydney Group 1 race, with OfcourseIcan victorious in the 2012 Coolmore Classic, a race where she had to survive a protest from Payne. O’Hara now has three Group 1 wins, the most recent aboard Redeiner in the 2023 Epsom.   

Lauren Stojakovic’s riding career features 169 wins in total but one of those provided one of the great moments in the long history of the Blue Diamond Stakes, when Miracles Of Life won the race in 2013.

Meanwhile, Meech’s long, successful career earned Group 1 wins on Plucky Belle in the 2015 Coolmore Classic and on Pippie in the 2020 Oakleigh Plate.

As a fourth-generation rider, Katelyn Mallyon carried a jockey’s pedigree and hit the ground running, becoming champion Victorian apprentice at 17, but injuries slowed her rapid ascent and made her road to eventual Group 1 glory far from easy.

Mallyon won the William Reid Stakes on Silent Sedition, but less than 12 months later, at age 24, she had her last ride.

Since 2019, the story has been all about Melham (then Kah) and King.

Melham’s first Group 1 came in the 2019 Australian Cup on Harlem. A further 19 have followed, including her historic Caulfield Cup and Melbourne Cup successes on Half Yours last year.

King has trodden a slightly different path. The English-born jockey began her career in National Hunt races in her homeland before arriving in Australia in 2015. Just over three years later, she won her first Group 1.

While her next two Group 1 wins came with Gai Waterhouse and Adrian Bott, she has forged a brilliant connection with the Bjorn Baker stable over the past three years.

Baker’s foreman Luke Hilton is King’s husband and the association has yielded Group 1  victories on Ozzmosis, Arapaho, Green Spaces and now twice with Warwoven.

Grima became the 12th member of the Group 1 female jockeys club with her Epsom victory earlier this month. Remarkably, that was just the second time a female jockey had ridden a Group winner for Chris Waller, who has 208 Group 1 wins in total.