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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
At 2 years old she was already on horseback. Last year saw her become the first female jockey inducted into thoroughbred racing's Hall of Fame.
Dec 19, 2000 | In 1968, Kathy Kusner went to court to become a jockey in America. That same year, Penny Ann Early was ignored when she tried to get a mount at Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby. Jockey Barbara Jo Rubin's trailer was stoned in 1969. In those days most female riders became regulars at small tracks and never made a mark on big-time racing. Trainers and horse owners didn't think the "gentler sex" could handle the brutal, 1,200-pound beasts.
Then Julie Krone came along. At 4-foot-10 and 100 pounds, tiny even for a jockey (average size: 5-foot-3 and 110 pounds), the energetic blond with the high-pitched voice became the world's winningest female jockey and the only woman ever inducted into thoroughbred racing's Hall of Fame.
In a career that spanned 18 years Krone won 3,545 races and more than $81 million in purses. By the time she retired in 1999, she had put 17 percent of her mounts into the winner's circle. Kusner, Early and Rubin had paved the way for all the firsts in Krone's career, including first woman to ride in the Belmont Stakes and first woman to win a jockey championship at a major racetrack, among other distinctions.
Trainer John Forbes, who often worked with Krone, told USA Today this year that prejudice against female riders is "still out there, and I don't think it will ever go away. The notion that a rider has to be very strong and powerful so he can control a 1,000-pound animal and hit it really hard with a whip is something that has been ingrained. The resistance we had was unbelievable."
"It was like a girl playing shortstop for the Yankees," said Krone's then agent, Larry "Snake" Cooper, to London's Independent in 1990.
What Krone proved was that brute whipping ability isn't always the answer. From childhood on, she seemed to have an ability to communicate with her horses, to discover what made a horse want to work hard -- and what it needed for thanks.
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Julieanne Louise Krone was born July 24, 1963, in Benton Harbor, Mich. She was raised on a farm in nearby Eau Claire, where her parents let her and her brother, Donnie, three years her senior, run wild.
The family never ate dinner together. Julie sometimes feasted on dog food with the dogs. At 5, she led her horse right into the house for her mother to saddle. Occasionally, she slept with her whip. At 9, she harnessed a Great Dane to a sled and went for a ride in the snow. At 13, dressed only in a deerskin tied around her midriff, she stood on the back of her galloping horse and headed into the barn, dropping to a sitting position just before the top of the barn doorway nearly decapitated her.
"I could count on one hand the times my parents made a meal for me, and it wasn't because we were poor," Krone told the New York Daily News in 1988. "I guess I never even realized it until one day when I was older and my friend from next door asked why there was never any food in my house."
Her father, Don, an art teacher and photographer, wouldn't stop his daughter from doing back flips off a horse. Instead, he'd ask her to do it again for the camera.
"Every day was a missile launch," he told Sports Illustrated in 1989. "Yes, there was always that element of possible disaster, but it was just like a missile -- if it goes, god, there's going to be that moment of glory. You can't tell a kid to go for it, to be whatever they want to be, and also tell them to be careful. If we all ride the safe road, who will we look up to? Who will be on the high road? No, we didn't worry about the little things."
Her mother, Judi, a riding instructor and former Michigan State equestrian champion, forged Julie's birth certificate when she was 15 so that she could get work at Churchill Downs as a groom and exercise rider. Why Churchill Downs, where she would have to move away from her family? "Because it's the logical place to become a jockey," Julie has said.
The night before heading to Kentucky, Judi Krone came home from her part-time bartending job at 1 a.m. to find Julie waiting up. Instead of shooing her off to bed, the pair rode their horses into the Michigan night, singing "Don't Fence Me In."
Setting off for Kentucky marked the beginning of Julie's professional riding career, but her relationship with horses had been going on since birth.
Julie's first time on a horse came at age 2. Her mother was trying to sell a palomino and plunked little diapered Julie on its back to demonstrate the horse's gentle nature. The horse immediately began to trot away. Julie's mother didn't bat an eye; she just kept trying to sell the horse. The horse stopped and toddler Julie reached down and grabbed the reins as natural as can be and tugged them. The horse turned and came back.
Krone won her first event at the age of 5 -- in a 21-and-under event. She continued riding and competing in horse shows, but when she was 14, her life changed.
