Krone rides off into the sunset

In these times when sport is exclusively about being the best rather than about attempting to be the best, you can still watch as sexism supports itself on creaky crutches. Women tennis players don't hit as hard as male tennis players so they don't earn as big. And when they hit as hard they are grotesque monsters who have stripped the game of its nuance. Women athletes don't run as quick as their male counterparts, and so on.

Nobody ever says Oscar de La Hoya wouldn't last kissing time in a ring with Mike Tyson, or that Red Rum would look like a carthorse in the Epsom Derby.

All this is apropos of nothing except that Julie Krone retired from horse racing in America a while ago and this column never got the time to mark her passing. After Mohammed Ali, and tied with Michael Jordan, Julie Krone would have been at the top of the list this column would have drawn up if the fairy godmother of journalism had granted us an interviewing wish list.

We never saw her race, and wouldn't have the knowledge to judge a rider's style anyway; but snippets and fragments of her astonishing story wafted our way over the years. Astonishing woman.

Krone did it all in the hardest game in the business. She rode horses, she rode thousands of winners, she fell under mounds of horseflesh and got herself put back together again and did it all over again. Nobody ever asked or even wondered if a man could do better. The evidence was all around Once Krone's mother told the local doctor that her daughter was going to be a jockey. The doctor told Krone's mother to go home and hit her daughter on the head.

Instead, her mother helped her fake her birth certificate so she could get a head start working at the stables. She was taken on as a 15-year-old - she looked younger but the cert. said she was older. The rest is the stuff of Hollywood.

Women in sport have it tough generally. Women at the race track had it especially hard. They had to go to court in the late 1960s even to win a jockey's licence for a rider called Kathy Kusner. Those who followed in Kusner's wake were either boycotted, catcalled or, in one case, literally stoned. And then Julie Krone came screeching across the racing world like a comet. More an icon than a role model.

She came out of Michigan as a teenager with a wild and wonderful childhood behind her, she knew horses before she knew walking or talking, she loved speed and danger more than she loved air and water. She worked at Churchill Downs as a rail-skinny 15-year-old, passing through briefly before flying further south to Tampa Bay to try her hand. They wouldn't let her onto the track when she arrived in Tampa, but she argued and made connections and, a year later, won her first race.

She hustled hard. Famously, she would shake the hands of owners and trainers with special vigour so they would get a sample of her strength before they could write her off.

She fought fistfights with grooms, chased down every stray horse from morning gallops and brought each one back bargaining hard to be allowed ride it. She lived in her car and never switched off. Arrived in places with her worldly goods in cardboard boxes tied up with string.

Great stories. For a while she rode with a white headband with a red sun emblazoned on the front of it. Kamikaze woman. Once, another rider accidentally struck her horse on the head with his flailing whip as they tore down the stretch. He was on the weighing scales a few minutes later when a shunt from Krone flattened him.

Another rider cut her ear with a whip as she went past him. She punched him. He wrestled her. She broke a lounge chair over him. Someone else introduced her, jokingly, to company once as a "jockette". She turned and kicked him.

She couldn't see the pecking order or ancient etiquette of her profession. She rode races to win, and if that meant boxing big names in or cutting a line diagonally across other riders she would do that. Etiquette was for people with civil service careers.

She did all the things which, when done by a man, would contribute to the definition of great competitor. In a woman the same things were evidence of pushiness and arrogance. "Go make babies," they would shout at her.

She lived the cliche of having to work twice as hard to be thought of as an equal. She turned up half-an-hour before everyone else, every morning. Worked three hours in the gym every evening no matter how hard her body cried for rest.

She rode through the bitterness of male colleagues and out the other side into the general acclaim and affection of the public. She brought new faces through the turnstiles at race tracks. She sat down and chatted with Johnny Carson and Dave Letterman. Eventually nobody thought of her as a female jockey anymore. Just a jockey and a great one.

Being the first woman to do X, Y or Z didn't even register as landmarks with her. Once, in the lonely world of the obsessive, she sat with a blade at her wrists. She drew back again because a corpse could never be recognised as the greatest rider ever.

She became such hot property that she had her choice of three or four horses per race. She had her setbacks. She was so wound up so much of the time as she drove from track to track that she took to smoking a little dope in the evenings to steady her head again. She got busted and took a 60-day suspension and a year's worth of urine tests for her troubles.

She broke virtually every bone in her body, most of them at least twice, many of them at the same time. Devastating falls took their toll on her body and, in the end, her appetite.

And, finally, there she went into the quiet twilight of retirement. The first woman to do virtually everything in horse racing in America. More than that, an elite jockey regardless of gender, one of a handful of jockeys to win five races in one day, over $40 million knocked down in purses, nearly 3,000 winners ridden. A genius.

Julie Krone could walk down any street in this country unnoticed. Which is a pity. We missed a great, great story.