The UK\u2019s first Muslim jockey Khadijah Mellah made history by winning the Magnolia Cup at Glorious Goodwood on Thursday 1 August.<\/p>\n
The 18-year-old student is believed to be the first person in the UK to appear in a competitive horse race while wearing a hijab and it was only 3 months ago that she sat on a horse.<\/p>\n
The amateur rider from Peckham, in south London, won the five-and-a-half-furlong charity race aboard the Charlie Fellowes-trained 25-1 outsider Haverland.<\/p>\n
She beat the likes of professional event rider Sophie van der Merwe and Olympic cycling champion turned amateur jockey Victoria Pendleton.<\/p>\n
“There are no words to describe this – I’m lost for words,” Mellah said<\/p>\n
“When I passed the post I couldn’t believe it, and then I saw all my family and friends and started crying. I am quite competitive, so I wanted to win this race, but I never expected to.<\/p>\n
“Horses bring me immeasurable amounts of happiness. I’ve always loved them and always will and I hope to carry on and keep riding.”<\/p>\n
Jockey Frankie Dettori told BBC Sport: “I watched the race. It’s incredible, unbelievable. I met her yesterday and she is such a sweet person.”<\/p>\n
Mellah learned to ride at the Ebony Horse Club charity in Brixton.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The UK\u2019s first Muslim jockey Khadijah Mellah made history by winning the Magnolia Cup at Glorious Goodwood on Thursday 1 August. The 18-year-old student is believed to be the first person in the UK to appear in a competitive horse race while wearing a hijab and it was only 3 months ago that she sat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29845,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,27,112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-national-news","category-sport","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29844\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}