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“It felt like you are a little kid getting told off by the principal, I went to water. I am not good with confrontation. I could not get a word out ... I was a mess, I was this little girl that couldn’t believe it, everything just slipped away,” she said as she reflected on the interviews with authorities when she was first charged.
“The first week of it we had to do isolation, it was probably the worst week of my life, I couldn’t see anyone ... I just had to shut down the phone, [because of] the things that were getting said about us.”
Kah said it had been difficult, on a professional level, to be out of the spring carnival, watching horses she had or could have ridden win lucrative group 1 contests during racing’s richest three months, and she feared trainers and owners would not want to use her when she eventually returned.
“I’ve always wanted to be positive and a good person and a good role model in people’s eyes and everything I built for the last 10 years as a jockey, I felt like in an hour it just disappeared,” she said.
“At that stage, I thought, ‘I’m done, it’s over’. Trainers, owners won’t put me back on after this, I just thought the worst, wasn’t very positive for a few weeks.
“I think I grew up as a person in about five minutes ... I have always wanted to be someone everyone liked, but after that, I knew it was no longer for me.
“I definitely don’t take anything for granted anymore. You just think it’s [success as a jockey] never going to end. I probably was a bit selfish in a way, people were going through such a hard time and I made a mistake and had to learn from it.
“It’s been one of the toughest things that’s happened, but it’s also probably one of the better things that has happened in my life.”
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