Julie Krone

After the race, she made it clear how she felt about being the first woman to break into the Triple Crown winner's circle: "I don't think the question needs to be genderized. It would feel great to anyone. But whether you're a girl or a boy or a Martian, you still have to go out and prove yourself every day."

Just two months later, Julie's life took a drastic turn. It was the last day of racing at Saratoga Raceway in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and Krone's third race of the day. Her horse, Seattle Way, was in the middle of 11 horses at the top of the stretch when another horse veered into her path. Seattle Way's hooves became tangled with the other's heels and Krone was thrown free. She landed awkwardly on her feet and bounced grotesquely into a sitting position, and then another horse, aptly named Two Is Trouble, ran directly into her, kicking her in the chest. Her ankle was shattered. If she hadn't been wearing a 2-pound flak jacket, the kick might have killed her. As it was, she suffered a cardiac contusion, a bruising of the heart.

The ankle injury required two steel plates and 14 screws to repair. She was bedridden with morphine dripping into her arm. A friend brought her a horse brush that she called her "aroma therapy."

It took nine months for Krone to get back onto the racetrack. In August 1995, she married TV reporter Matt Muzikar. The same year, she published her autobiography, "Riding for My Life," written with Nancy Ann Richardson. Then on Jan. 13, 1996, at Florida's Gulfstream Park, she went down again, this time breaking both her precious hands.

"When I was lying there on the ground, I knew my life was going to change," Krone told the Associated Press this year. "And as I was getting ready to come back, I had trepidation." She had nightmares about falling. She got lost on streets she'd been driving on for years. She wondered on a daily basis how she would kill herself that night.

That accident "fried" her, she told the Seattle Times this year. "I couldn't talk. The straw didn't break the camel's back; it gutted the sucker, left the camel for dead. I was numb, couldn't think. I was afraid of horses, hated riding."

Upon her return six weeks later, trainers didn't trust Krone and she gave them no reason to, either. She rode long-shot horses and lost handily. She continued having nightmares filled with horses' hooves. She grew more and more timid.

"Horses felt my anxiety, they got weird, they reared up," she has said. "I had been given a magical talent to positive-image a loser right into the winner's circle ... And then suddenly it was all gone, and I was exhausted." All Krone could think of was suicide.

One day at Saratoga in the summer of 1996, after another lousy day that included getting yelled at by a trainer, she bumped into a casual friend, Tom Qualters (a horse owner and frequent Saratoga visitor), who told her, "Well, there's tomorrow."

Krone said, "Well, there might not be any tomorrow."

Qualters, a psychiatrist, suggested she stop by his office, which she did the next night for a two-hour "emotional purge," Krone told Robert Lipsyte of the New York Times. "I felt full and empty at the same time, joyful and like I was peeling off my skin."

Previously, she had resisted any type of therapy. "I'm a jock," she has said. "I can do anything on my own. I thought it was humiliating to get help. Meanwhile, the only real relief I felt was planning my suicide. I saved sleeping pills, but I was going to drink alcohol, slit my wrists and maybe hang myself, too. I wanted to do one thing right."

Qualters diagnosed Krone with post-traumatic stress disorder and began seeing her four times a week. The pair visualized success for her and talked about issues from her childhood. Mostly, though, Qualters talked Krone through each painful experience, each new race -- and slowly, she began winning again. She never returned to her earlier form, but that was one of the mental barricades that she conquered, realizing that she was doing just fine at the level she was performing at.

Two years after meeting Qualters, she found a doctor in New Jersey who prescribed Zoloft. "When I started taking Zoloft, things got better. All the things I lost came back and I got to be myself again. It was a turning point in my career and life," Krone, who has a contract with Pfizer, the maker of the drug, told the Associated Press.

"I'm not sorry I didn't start the medicine sooner. I needed to first get to a place in talk therapy," she told the New York Times. "You don't fully realize how weird it was until you have yourself back. I'd been spending the minutes before a race using all my energy to defeat an anxiety attack, and now, well, listen to this. At the end of last year, in a 60-day period, my mother died, I got divorced and I moved to California. And I'm here, I'm OK."

When she finished second in the jockey standings in 1998 at Monmouth Park, N.J., Krone felt that she had beaten back her demons. "I wasn't the leading rider and I didn't have those multiple-win days, but the fear left me, the trauma left me and it was better," she told the New York Post. "I didn't even think about anything. I would get on horses that people said were wild, and they'd just melt in my hands, relax and do stuff they've never done before."

She retired April 18, 1999, after riding three winning horses and two seconds that day. Not too shabby.

Since retirement, she has worked as a horse-racing analyst for the Television Games Network, done some voice-overs for Nickelodeon ("Having a squeaky voice is paying off," she told the AP) and has taken some correspondence classes toward an undergraduate degree in psychology. She finished her high school degree in the late '90s. In January, she will begin work at Gulfstream Park as a spokeswoman for the track.

Her biggest achievement, though, was to become the first woman accepted into thoroughbred racing's Hall of Fame this year.

At her acceptance speech in August, she said, "I want this to be a lesson to all kids everywhere. If the stable gate is closed, climb the fence."

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