Krone’s Triple Crown moment still a quiet one

CARLSBAD —  The 4-foot-10 woman with the squeaky voice and the striking blue eyes will be spending a couple of hours at the Windrose Farm in nearby Encinitas today.

“I go just about every day, except maybe Sundays,” says Julie Krone, the most successful female jockey in the history of thoroughbred horse racing.

At Windrose, she will see friends and familiar faces. She will putter around, chat with other horse owners and equestrian instructors, and work with the horses she owns, Miss Piggy and Peter Rabbit.

“He was born on Easter,” she says.

It is likely that few, or none, of the people she sees will know, remember, or take note of what will always be a special anniversary for her.

On June 5, 1993, Krone rode Colonial Affair to victory in the Belmont Stakes. That was the 125th Belmont, this Saturday’s will be the 139th. No woman before or since has won that race, or any Triple Crown race. Only a handful of women have even ridden in one.

Krone will turn 44 on July 24. She lives here with husband Jay Hovdey, an executive columnist for the Daily Racing Form, and daughter Lorelei Judith, 20 months. She says she is fit enough to get back on a 1,200-pound thoroughbred tomorrow and ride successfully. She says she misses competitive riding every day of her life. She also says she’s almost 100% sure she won’t go back, even though 44 is prime for most jockeys.

“It’s not the riding,” she says, “it’s the crashing.”

In a career that brought 3,704 wins, $90.125 million in winnings and a female-first-and-only Breeders’ Cup win aboard Halfbridled in 2003 to go with her ’93 Belmont title, Krone has sustained fractured ribs, a shattered ankle, three compressed vertebrae, a contusion to her heart and two broken hands in one fall. And those are just the most notable injuries.

She retired in 1999, married Hovdey, moved to California and made a comeback that culminated in her Breeders’ Cup win in the fall of 2003 at Santa Anita. Just weeks later, Dec. 12 at Hollywood Park, she crashed again, was badly injured and tried just one more comeback, Feb. 11, 2004, at Santa Anita. She rode three horses, didn’t do well, and describes the day as horrifying.

“I was just kind of hanging on,” she says. “I kept thinking, ‘I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die.’ I told my friends later that my career ended at about the five-eighths pole.”

If Krone is, indeed, finished with horse racing, she certainly is not finished with horses.

From age 2, when her mother put her, dressed in diapers only, on the back of a horse she was trying to sell to demonstrate how gentle the animal was, Krone’s life has centered on horses. At 15, she left the farm in Benton Harbor, Mich., to go riding. Her mother, Judi, forged a birth certificate so she could start early, then later climbed a back fence with her at Churchill Downs when she was turned away at the front gate.

Besides her mother, her inspiration was sitting on an old trunk, baseball cap turned backward on her head, and watching Steve Cauthen win the Kentucky Derby en route to the 1978 Triple Crown on Affirmed. The trunk still sits in her living room, near a huge picture of Colonial Affair, his horseshoes framed below.

“He was this big, gangly horse,” she says. “He wasn’t the kind where you’d say, ‘Wow, look at how talented he is.’ You’d look at him and say, ‘Wow, look at the size of those shoes or look at the size of his head.’ If he reared up, he’d lose his balance and start to stumble. We used to laugh.”

Krone got the ride like she got so many others back in the late 1980s and early ‘90s -- from the late trainer Scotty Schulhofer. She was winning jockey titles consistently at Atlantic City and Monmouth Park, but she knew that was triple A and she coveted the big leagues.

“We called it, ‘Getting to the other side of the river,’ ” she says.

So she would get up early, go to Aqueduct and Belmont in the morning to breeze horses and meet people, and head back for afternoon racing in New Jersey. Racing was as sexist as any sport then, so she worked the horses in the morning and did the same to the influential people in the barns.

“I learned how to climb inside their hearts,” she says.

One veteran trainer, John Veitch, told her immediately he wouldn’t put a girl on one of his horses. When she started winning races, he relented and she won a big race for him.

“I never said I told you so,” she says.

On the day of the ’93 Belmont, Krone says she never felt more confident or focused. Colonial Affair had skipped the first two legs of the Triple Crown because he wasn’t ready. By Belmont time, he was. And an hour before race time, it started to rain. Some of Colonial Affair’s best works and races had been in wet weather. Typical of a big galoot, he loved the slop.

“When it started to rain, we were all jumping around the barn, we were so happy,” Krone says.

Schulhofer gave her a leg up in the paddock, she patted Colonial Affair on the back and told him, “Let’s go make some history.” Before she made her move on the second turn, she kept peeking behind her to locate Prairie Bayou, the favorite.

Sadly, the Preakness winner had broken down shortly after the first turn and was euthanized within an hour. It was a tragic Triple Crown season. In the Preakness three weeks earlier, D. Wayne Lukas’ Union City had broken down and had to be destroyed.

And so, while Krone was given credit for her female first, and while she got a little airtime on the ABC telecast to let the world see and hear her, the landmark moment lost its celebratory heart to the death of a horse. Nor, in those days, was there the kind of frenzied media coverage we have today for every racial and gender milestone.

When Jim McKay eventually signed off the telecast, he did so almost sadly: “This is Jim McKay at Belmont, in the dark and the rain. So long.”

Krone crossed the finish line two lengths in front and eased the horse. In victory, there was no whip-waving or fist-pumping.

“I’ve never been much for that,” she says. “All I wanted to do was call my mom and get a pizza and a beer.”

She did both. Judi Krone, who died seven years ago of ovarian cancer, told her daughter she was “on the ceiling.” At Umberto’s in Elmont, N.Y., the pizza and beer never tasted better.

Seven years later, Julie Krone was inducted into the horse racing Hall of Fame. She stood on a milk crate so she could reach the microphone, and said, “I want this to be a lesson to kids everywhere. If the stable gate is closed, climb the fence.”

--

Bill Dwyre can be reached at [email protected]. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.

--

T.J. Simers is on vacation.