04/28/2026
when I watch the Kentucky Derby I think of my friend Julie ! an incredible history of her life!
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She was two years old. Still in diapers.
Her mother had set her on the back of a palomino horse — just to show a buyer how calm the animal was. The horse had other plans. It trotted away across the open field with the tiny girl clinging to its back.
Her mother went completely still.
Then watched in silence as her two-year-old daughter reached down, picked up the reins, and quietly guided the horse home.
Nobody standing in that field understood what they had just witnessed.
Julie Krone grew up on a horse farm in Eau Claire, Michigan. She rode before school. She dreamed of racing at night. She slept with her riding whip beside her like other children slept with stuffed animals.
At five years old, she entered a horse show — not the children's division. The under-18 division. She won, beating teenagers three times her age.
She was not built like anyone's idea of a champion. Four feet ten inches tall. A voice people dismissed in rooms before she ever spoke. In high school, she was mocked and isolated. She retreated to her horses, her poetry, and a fire inside her that no one could reach.
Then at fourteen, she read the autobiography of jockey Steve Cauthen — eighteen years old when he guided Affirmed across the Belmont finish line in 1978, completing the Triple Crown. Something locked into place inside her.
That. She wanted that.
She started winning races on local fair circuits across Michigan. Eventually she dropped out of school, packed everything she owned, and moved to Florida alone. She talked her way into stables. She pestered trainers until they ran out of reasons to say no. She refused every closed door.
On January 30, 1981, she made her professional debut. Weeks later, she rode Lord Farkle to her first career victory.
The racing world was not ready for her.
The male jockey colony treated her like an intruder. They boxed her horse against the rail during races. They cut her off mid-stretch. More than once, a rival's whip drew blood. Julie Krone did not quietly absorb it. She fought back — and earned a reputation that made one thing unmistakably clear to every doubter in every jockey room across the country.
She was not going anywhere.
"I'm only 4-foot-10 and 100 pounds," she said. "But I fight like I'm 6-foot-5."
Trainers said she wasn't strong enough. She joined a gym and let her results answer them. Owners said the big races weren't for her. She went out and won them anyway.
By her mid-twenties, she was one of the top-ranked jockeys in the country. Titles. Records. Magazine covers. The winningest female jockey in the history of the sport.
But the moment that would define everything was still coming.
June 5, 1993. Belmont Park, New York.
The 125th running of the Belmont Stakes. The final jewel of the Triple Crown — a mile and a half of track that had broken more champions than any other course in America.
Her horse was Colonial Affair. A long shot. Tall, gangly, with a tendency to spend himself too early in a race. Most people at the track barely gave him a second glance on the program.
But Julie Krone had worked with this horse for years. She knew his rhythms the way you know the breathing of someone you love. She knew when to hold him back. She knew the exact moment to let him go.
The gate opened.
She rode patient through the first turn. Measured through the backstretch. And then — timed to the second — she angled Colonial Affair wide, felt him find another gear beneath her, and watched the gap open in front of them like a door swinging wide.
Colonial Affair crossed the finish line more than two lengths clear.
Julie Krone had just become the first woman in history to win a Triple Crown race.
The roar from the crowd didn't sound like a normal race day. It sounded like something being released — years of doubt and dismissal and you don't belong here — all of it swept away in one thundering moment at Belmont Park.
She celebrated that night with a slice of pizza.
Three months later, a horse clipped hers mid-race and she was thrown. Four horses trampled her. She suffered a bruised heart and an ankle so shattered that doctors debated amputation.
Instead, they rebuilt it — bone grafts, metal plates, and screws.
She spent months learning to walk again.
Then she came back.
She kept riding. Kept winning. In 2000, she became the first woman inducted into the National Museum of Racing Hall of Fame. In 2003, the first woman to win a Breeders' Cup race. She retired in 2004, having won 3,704 races across more than 21,000 rides, with her horses earning over $90 million in prize money.
USA Today named her one of the ten toughest athletes in America.
Today, young girls still find her and say the same thing.
"You made me believe a girl could do it."
She says that means more than any trophy ever could.
Because here is what her life actually proves — not in words, but in 3,704 wins and a shattered ankle rebuilt piece by piece and a lifetime of doors she refused to let stay closed:
Strength was never about size. It was never about what the record books said, or what every doubting voice insisted was impossible.
It was about a little girl in Michigan who reached down and picked up the reins.
And never, ever let go.
Julie Krone. Born July 24, 1963.
First woman to win a Triple Crown race.
First woman in the Racing Hall of Fame.
4 feet 10 inches tall.
3,704 wins.
She picked up the reins at two years old.
She never put them down.
