Five days after her headline-grabbing moment in the charity race at Glorious Goodwood, Khadijah Mellah has not quite returned to earth. “It’s basically taken over my life,” she said on Tuesday, during one of many interviews, demand for which reflects the worldwide interest in the previously unknown 18-year-old from Brixton who won a race at the famously tricky circuit mere months after climbing aboard a racehorse for the first time.
Khadijah became the first jockey to ride in – and win – a race in Britain wearing a hijab. The job of steering Haverland to glory in the Magnolia Cup took not much more than a minute. It is a minute that Khadijah has been reliving endlessly ever since.
“I’ve spent a lot of time talking to people about my race, it’s been a busy few days. I’ve been trying to take it all in, to be fair.”
Her mood appears to be happy but on the edge of worn out. Certainly Haverland has never faced such a test of stamina as his rider is now tackling. Great British Racing, the sport’s promotional wing, has struggled to keep track of the media interest but has so far logged more than 1,000 TV broadcasts and online pieces on top of the print coverage that had Khadijah on front pages on Friday.
She has made the news in France, Turkey, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and South Africa. In this country, ITV has given the green light to a documentary about her journey in horse racing, to be called Riding A Dream and due on screens in the autumn.
Khadijah radiates a sense of unreality that any of this is happening to her, as well she may. In January, impending A level exams were the biggest thing in her calendar, before the ITV Racing presenter Oli Bell, a patron of the Ebony Riding School in Brixton where she occasionally rode, started to think she might be a suitable candidate for an ambitious project.
One of the wholly unexpected consequences was that Khadijah found herself at the annual Regency Ball at Goodwood House on Thursday night, mixing with the rich and famous and being introduced to the singer Ellie Goulding. “It was amazing, so grand.”
She takes as much relish in the pleasure last week’s success gave to those around her. “My parents have been really happy, completely over the moon for me. They’ve been posting and sharing every single article there is about me. They didn’t initially think I could do it, so me winning was a massive thing.
“My friends and family and even distant relatives and friends I haven’t been in contact with for ages, have all been messaging me: ‘I’ve just seen you, congratulations!’ My primary school teacher contacted me, I hadn’t spoken to in, like, 10 years.”
Speaking earlier, on the Good Morning Britain sofa, she had said: “I can’t wait to hear a success story where someone says, actually Khadijah Mellah’s been a role model to me.” It might be that such a person shares a roof with her as her younger brother Abdus, now 16, has hopes of making it as a jockey and could apply for an amateur’s licence as early as next year.
“I remember watching him [in a pony race] at Ascot and being so proud of him. He didn’t do that well but it was just so cool to see him riding a race and looking like a proper jockey. He did say: ‘Yeah, I’m really proud of you, but I’m a bit jealous.’”
Khadijah’s story is a gift for a sport anxious to expand its horizons, as is readily acknowledged by Rose Grissell, who joined the British Horseracing Authority last year as head of diversity and inclusion. Noting that Khadijah was the first jockey to wear a hijab while riding in a race in Britain, Grissell says: “When you get the first of anything, it really helps people to imagine the world differently and inspires people to defy expectations about how things can change and what the world should look like.
“I think her success will inspire many different types of people, and not just now but also in future years, whether that’s as a woman, a young woman, a woman of colour or a Muslim, or people from a similar background, growing up in an urban area. To achieve what she did in such a short space of time was really incredible.
“Obviously there’s a lot of work to do but I think it will definitely have an impact. She’s getting exposure much wider beyond racing, which demonstrates that we are an inclusive sport, we welcome everyone, from whatever background. We’re one of the few sports where you can have not only men and women competing against each other but also people with a variety of different disabilities as well.
“We really are an inclusive sport and Khadijah’s success helped us spread that message far and wide. The hope is that people who may not have thought racing is for them, or who may not have had any knowledge of racing, may think differently now.
“This is an ongoing focus, something that’s going to take a long time, to position racing as a sport for everybody and to reach out to different communities that we’re currently not reaching.”