Karaitiana Horne: queen of Kiwi women's motocross
Raetihi's teenage Kawasaki rider is a back-to-back senior women's champion.
By ROOST New Zealand desk · 17 October 2026
Few riders have dominated a national class the way Raetihi's Karaitiana Horne has dominated New Zealand women's motocross.
By March 2025, at only 16, she already had four Junior New Zealand titles and an Australian junior title, and she'd just won her second senior NZ championship. She won six of the twelve women's races that season, never finished worse than second in the rest, and ended up 46 points clear of Taupo's Mikayla Griffiths. She was then picked for the Kiwi team for the 2025 FIM Oceania Women's Motocross Cup in Wonthaggi.
The 2026 season gave her a new kind of test. After a perfect 1-1-1 at Tauranga, she arrived at the Rotorua finale and found four-time women's world champion Courtney Duncan, also on a Kawasaki, making a surprise one-off comeback. Horne finished second to Duncan in all three races. Those results were still easily enough to secure the title, her latest senior crown. Yamaha's Amie Roberts was second in the championship and Whangarei's Hannah Perris third.
Racing wheel to wheel with a world champion in front of a home crowd is about the best education a young racer can get. Horne has been loyal to Kawasaki throughout, and she has a junior record that's hard to match. Plenty of people will be watching to see whether she follows Duncan's path to the world stage.
View this post by Karaitiana Horne (@karaitiana394) on Instagram
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