Julie Krone is an amazing woman jockey. I remember her when she broke on the scene when I was a young girl. She is a real pioneer. She was inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame in 2000, the same year as Winning Colors, the third filly to win the Kentucky Derby. When Krone was inducted, she had won 3,545 races, or 17% of her mounts, earning over $81.8 million. She was the first woman jockey to win a Triple Crown Race with Colonial Affair in the 1993 Belmont Stakes and to take a Breeder's Cup title riding Halfbridled. At her induction ceremony, she said, "I wish I could put every single one of you on the back of a horse at the one-eighth pole, so you could have the feeling of communicating with an animal you love so much. I got to do that every day of my life." She also said, "I want this to be a lesson to all kids everywhere. If the stable gate is closed, climb the fence." She says that the love of horses "is still in my blood, in my bones, in my heart."
One of the things I think is cool about her is how brave and honest she's been about her struggles. Of the sex bias involved in horse racing, she said, "No person in this world does not have adversity that is constant to them. This is the adversity that I have. I move through it freely. I don't see it, and my numbers don't show it." She also was very honest about her struggles with posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, migraines, and sleep and eating disorders. She had some life-threatening injuries on the track and had not only her limbs shattered and her heart bruised (literally), but felt her confidence shaken.
She said of her struggles with mental illness, "Horses felt my anxiety, they got weird, they reared up. I had been given a magical talent to positive-image a loser right into the winner's circle. I had been possessed; I could pick a horse up with my will and put it right down in front. And then suddenly it was all gone, and I was exhausted." She finally completely lost it after her horse broke down and she was thrown. Her hands were smashed as she tried to protect her head. She said of this experience, "I was fried. 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." She went through extensive talk therapy and took Zoloft and was very open about her experiences as a mentally ill athlete struggling with childhood traumas as well as PTSD. Of all of this, she said, "A little boy once came up to me at the track and asked to hold my goggles. And then he looked up at me and said, 'I want to be like you when I grow up.' A boy said that. A boy! What a feeling of touching people. And then, after I first talked publically about being suicidal and how the medicine made me feel like me again, I got calls and emails from people who said I'd given them hope to keep living." She said, "You don't fully realize how weird it was until you have yourself back."
She says of being an accomplished woman athlete, "The most rewarding moments have been when little girls, 10 and 11 years old, would run up to me and say things like, 'I played soccer with the boys and I was the best goalkeeper out there.' This has happened hundreds of times. They'd say that they read about me in a newspaper or magazine, or saw an interview on television, and that they admired what I had accomplished and how I had overcome adversity. If I had made even a little difference with girls like that, if I had made some little girl more brave than she had been, then that's what's been important for me as far as being a female athlete is concerned."
And she says of horses, "You risk life and limb to share a relationship with a Thoroughbred. You go down the stretch and push on his neck and feel his desire to win is the same as yours. When you nail somebody at the wire, you say, 'This is the coolest thing in the world.'"
Here's a cool news story about her setting a world record on a trotter under saddle with Moni Maker, the richest mare of any breed:
http://horseracing.about.com/library/weekly/aa100600a.htm