New Surgery Due for Jockey’s Broken Arm

Julie Krone, one of the nation’s top jockeys and winner of more than $26 million in lifetime purses, will undergo a second operation next week to repair a broken arm that is not mending on its own.

Krone learned last week that her left arm, broken in a spill at the Meadowlands the day after Thanksgiving, had not responded to electromagnetic treatments designed to stimulate bone growth. A second operation on March 8 will graft bone from her hip onto the big bone in her forearm.

“When I found out, I almost went into shock,” the 26-year-old Krone said. “I put my head down on the table, and I said, ‘I can’t believe this.’ ”

After the spill last November, Krone had a metal plate placed in her forearm, and doctors predicted that she would be back in action in March. Now, she said, her new target date to return to racing is June 8, “to be exact.”

“The first day I can climb on a horse and leave the paddock again, I’ll be smiling from ear to ear,” she said in a telephone interview from her home near Monmouth Park in New Jersey.

Doctors at Hackensack Medical Center discovered a month ago that Krone’s arm was not mending properly. They tried the electromagnetic treatment, called EBI, but when that did not work, the graft became the only option. The operation originally was scheduled for March 16 but today was moved up eight days, Krone said.

“Otherwise,” she said, “the arm just stays broken forever.

“The EBI normally has a very high success rate, but the ends of the bone died, and when that happens, the part that’s not healthy, the body absorbs it,” Krone said. “The arm is just as broken now as it was.”

She isn’t looking forward to another operation.

“Now, I’m starting to get scared and nervous,” she said. “It’s such a gross feeling when you wake up and they’re pulling tubes out of your throat.”

Krone’s disappointment was sharpened because she will miss what may have been her first chance to ride a competitive horse in the Kentucky Derby. She has skipped past Derbies, she said, because “the horses were going to be really ‘ppphhhht.’ ”

This year, however, she said she was to have ridden a 3-year-old colt named Housebuster, who has won two stakes at Gulfstream, including the Feb. 10 Hutcheson, which also included 2-year-old champion Rhythm.

“He was my mount,” she said.

Krone said she expects to be able to hobble around five or six days after the operation, then she’s got a date to go to the circus. She’ll have a second-row seat, almost close enough to reach out and touch the bareback riders.

“By then, I’ll be ready to ride just about anything,” she said.