COMMENTARY : Riding Is Certainly a Living for Her

Kentucky. May. Saturday. An iridescent sky. A stampede of horses. The chance of a lifetime in a lifetime of chance. Everyone in pastels and hats and flowers, 144,110 people gathered in glad circumstances. “Until you go to Kentucky and with your own eyes behold the Derby,” Irvin Cobb wrote, “you ain’t never been nowheres and you ain’t never seen nothin’.” A race. An emotion. A turbulence. John Steinbeck wrote those words and these, “beautiful and violent and satisfying,” after which, we may guess, he took a nap to rest up from the experience.

Kentucky. May. Saturday, 1995. Her race done, Julie Krone came back with mud on her black boots and mud on her face and mud in her ears. All that had been shiny was now made brown by a fine mud thrown onto her in two minutes and more of her hard and dangerous work. Even iridescent days leave some dreamers dirty with dust.

Julie Krone tugged her yellow silks out of her white satin riding pants and walked in the paddock shadows. Then she ran toward trainer Nick Zito and began a rueful recounting of the race. “Oh, Nick, oh my,” she said. “Oh, Nick, the trip was so sweet, just so sweet.”

Julie Krone’s hands flew in demonstration. She held phantom reins close. She moved them a click to the right. She pushed her hands ahead. “ . . . right where we wanted to be,” she said with a smile. On her teeth, mud.

Julie Krone rides thoroughbreds as well as anyone. She is the only woman ever to win a Triple Crown race, the Belmont Stakes. She feels a race’s pace in ways that can neither be taught nor explained. A broken back, a broken ankle, a broken arm, a dozen concussions and a horse stampeding across her chest have not persuaded her to seek safety. She rides the way Bill Shoemaker rode. Waiting, watching, waiting for the time to move. Racetrackers call it sitting chilly.

She is 31 years old. At 15 she came to Louisville for the first time. She and her mother “saved our quarters and dimes” to buy gas for the camper they drove from the family’s little farm in Michigan and parked across the street from Churchill Downs. You had to be 16 to work on the racetrack--so the mother went to a grocery store for paper, scissors and glue to doctor her daughter’s birth certificate. By such a needful fraud did Julie Krone get $2 an hour for walking horses after workouts.

Kentucky. Saturday. May, 1979. The hot-walker Julie Krone stood on a barn on the backside and watched the horses move toward her, the sound rising, and then saw the stampede flash by, a blur of colors, a painting done by an artist trying to explain power and speed, a moment that all these years later is part of Julie Krone: “I imagined galloping down the stretch. I could hear the thundering hooves and the roaring crowd. I imagined them laying the roses across my lap. It was a great feeling of romance.”

Julie Krone is a pixie. She is 4-foot-10 1/2, 100 pounds. She has outsize blue eyes, pixie-cut blonde hair and a voice so tiny it might be a canary’s. This pixie full of romance works in a game that can break your heart and your body. Her smiling explanation of how she has persevered: “Selective amnesia.” As for injuries: “Mornings, some parts of me wake up slower than others.” Why she does it: “If I’m not on a racetrack, I’m not alive.”

When someone asked Nick Zito about using a woman rider, the trainer said, “I don’t think of Julie as a girl. I think of her as a rider. A great rider. She has courage that cannot be measured.”

So on a Saturday in May, looking to win his third Kentucky Derby in five years, Zito put Krone on Suave Prospect. Four women, including Krone three years ago, had ridden in a Derby--but only Krone this time had a good horse. She said, “This is a horse sitting on a win.”

Suave Prospect ran well early and along the backside past the barn once home to Julie Krone. He still had a chance as the 19 horses came to the last quarter-mile.

“But when I pointed him to the outside, to the daylight,” she said, meaning she needed a way around a wall of horses, “he didn’t give me anything. I hit him with the stick, just to make sure he wasn’t bluffing. But nothing.” Eighth entering the stretch, Suave Prospect finished 13th, a $5 cab ride behind the winner Thunder Gulch.

Mud on her face, Julie Krone walked back to the jockeys’ room. Fans called out. “Julie, you’re beautiful.” “When you gettin’ married, Julie?” “Julie, my boy wants his picture with you.” Julie Krone hugged a small boy with big brown eyes and smiled for a mother’s camera. In the jocks’ room, she watched a replay of the race and said, “Such a sweet trip. Darn.”

To see Julie Krone up close is to see improbability made real. Even among the littlest, bravest athletes in sports, she is small. Both ankles were wrapped and padded; her upper arms were bruised, and under her silks she wore the flak jacket that became standard-issue for riders after Krone’s terrifying fall two years ago put her under hooves. On the jacket, these words: “Julie Krone: Live to Ride.”

She brushed mud from her rosy cheeks and watched it fall onto a shelf. Then she arranged the dustings into a small pile and told a friend, “Kentucky Derby mud. Real Derby mud. Put it in your pocket and keep it. You’ll want it because I’m going to win this race someday.”