JAMIE MELHAM

On 4 November 2025 Jamie Melham rode Half Yours, a five-year-old trained by Tony and Calvin McEvoy, to win the 165th Melbourne Cup at Flemington, by two and three-quarter lengths from the Irish-trained Goodie Two Shoes, with Middle Earth third. It was the tenth anniversary of Michelle Payne’s win on Prince of Penzance, and Melham became the second woman to ride the winner. Seventeen days earlier, on the same horse, she had become the first woman to win the Caulfield Cup, and so the first to win both.

The Rider

She comes from Mount Pleasant, in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia. She began her apprenticeship in 2011, rode her first race in March 2012 at Streaky Bay, and her first winner fourteen days later, at the Easter Saturday meeting at Clare. In her first full season, 2012 to 2013, she won the Adelaide Jockeys’ Premiership, and she won it for the third time in 2017 to 2018. Until 2025 she rode as Jamie Kah, and most of the records below stand in that name.

She moved to Melbourne in January 2019 and won her first Group 1 that March, on Harlem in the Australian Cup at Flemington. In October 2020 she was ranked the leading woman jockey in the world. On 12 May 2021, at Pakenham, she rode her thousandth winner, the third woman in Australia to do so, after Clare Lindop and Linda Meech.

The Century

On 10 July 2021, at Caulfield, she rode Deep Speed, a McEvoy horse, from the front over 1,100 metres and held on by less than half a length. It was her hundredth winner of the season in metropolitan Melbourne, a number no jockey had reached before; the record she passed, 99.5, had been Brett Prebble’s for twenty-one years. She finished the season on 105. The Victoria Racing Club’s chairman, Neil Wilson, spoke of “her understated approach and single-minded focus on being the best she can be.”

The Cups

The Caulfield Cup is a handicap of 2,400 metres, and she had ridden in it three times without winning. On 18 October 2025 Half Yours started favourite and beat River of Stars, with Valiant King third. It was her seventeenth Group 1, the first woman’s win in the race’s history, and her first in one of the Melbourne spring majors. “I just wanted to come out here and ride him and give him the best ride I could because I knew he was the best horse in the race,” she said.

At Flemington he was 8 to 1, the joint-shortest price of the home horses. She held him in midfield, then went for the inside as Goodie Two Shoes hit the front, and came through the gaps to lead inside the clock tower. “When you’ve got a horse that’s travelling that well it doesn’t matter how big the gaps are,” she said. “He just pulled me through. The next gap was even tighter.” Half Yours became the thirteenth horse to win the Caulfield and Melbourne Cups in the same year, and the race was her nineteenth Group 1. Half Yours was bred by Janice and Col McKenna, whom she called her mentors, and she said of Tony and Calvin McEvoy that they had “been there for me since I was a 15-year-old kid”.

To Nine, straight afterwards, she said: “This is why we get up out of bed every morning at 4am… it’s tough.” On the Nine set at Flemington Michelle Payne embraced her and said: “Welcome to the club.”

What Followed

By April 2026 she had ridden 1,368 winners, twenty of them in Group 1 races, the Doncaster Handicap of 2026 among them.

The Melbourne Cup is run at three o’clock on the first Tuesday of November, and in 2026 on 3 November. Its own Almanac entry records her win, before 84,374 people, as the second by a woman in the race’s history. The Court counts her among the figures of the season for a decade of work done in public view, morning after morning, that arrived at a Cups double no woman had ridden before.