06/21/2026
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On the afternoon of Saturday, the fifth of June, 1993, at Belmont Park in Elmont, New York, in the one hundred and twenty-fifth running of the Belmont Stakes — the one-and-a-half-mile thoroughbred race that constitutes the third and final leg of the American Triple Crown — a twenty-nine-year-old jockey from Michigan named Julieanne Louise Krone, who weighed approximately one hundred pounds and stood four feet, ten and a half inches tall, rode a three-year-old c**t named Colonial Affair, a thirteen-to-one long shot, across the finish line two and a quarter lengths ahead of the second-place horse. With that finish, Julie Krone became the first woman, in the recorded one-hundred-and-eighteen-year history of the American Triple Crown, to win a Triple Crown race.
She had been waiting for the moment for sixteen years.
Krone had been born on the twenty-fourth of July, 1963, in Benton Harbor, Michigan, to a horse-breeding mother named Judi and an art-teacher father named Don. She had begun riding horses at the age of two. She had won her first competitive horse show at the age of five, in an under-eighteen division for which she had been eligible on the basis of her demonstrated riding ability rather than on the basis of her age.
In the spring of 1978, watching the live broadcast of the Belmont Stakes from her family's living-room television set, the fourteen-year-old Julie Krone had watched an eighteen-year-old jockey named Steve Cauthen ride a three-year-old c**t named Affirmed across the Belmont finish line by a nose, completing what was then and remains the most recent Triple Crown sweep in American racing history.
She had decided that she wanted to be Cauthen.
She had spent the next sixteen years trying to make that happen.
Her mother, Judi, had driven her, at age fifteen, from Eau Claire, Michigan to Churchill Downs Racetrack in Louisville, Kentucky, where Julie was old enough by Kentucky rules to obtain a hot-walker's job but was, by the documented birth certificate she carried with her, two years too young to be admitted to the track facilities. Her mother had altered the birth certificate by writing a seven over the five in the year of birth, photocopying the result, and presenting the photocopy to track officials. Julie had walked out the back of a thoroughbred training shed for the first time on the morning of her fifteenth birthday.
She had moved to Tampa, Florida, at age sixteen, to live with her grandmother and apprentice as a jockey at Tampa Bay Downs Racetrack, where the trainer Bud Delp had given her her first professional mounts. She had made her debut on the seventeenth of January, 1981, aboard a horse called Tiny Star. She had won her first race, less than a month later, aboard a horse called Lord Farkle, also at Tampa Bay Downs.
She had moved, over the subsequent twelve years, through the New Jersey circuit, the New York circuit, and the Florida circuit. She had become, in 1987, the first woman to be a leading rider at a major American thoroughbred racetrack. She had accumulated, by the date of the 1993 Belmont Stakes, approximately two thousand career wins.
On the morning of the fifth of June, 1993, Steve Cauthen — by then retired from race-riding and working as a racing broadcast commentator — met her in the Belmont Park paddock before the race and wished her luck.
She crossed the finish line that afternoon two and a quarter lengths ahead.
Approximately two months later, in late August of 1993, at Saratoga Race Course in upstate New York, Krone's mount clipped heels with another horse during a race and went down. Krone was thrown from the saddle. Multiple following horses ran over her. She suffered, by the documented assessment of the trauma team that treated her, a shattered right ankle, a punctured left elbow, and a cardiac contusion — a severe bruising of the heart muscle resulting from blunt force trauma. Her ankle was reconstructed, over the following nine months, with bone grafts from her hip and a series of metal plates and screws. The orthopedic surgeons had initially recommended amputation.
She returned to riding in May of 1994.
She continued racing for the next ten years. She became, in 2000, the first woman in the recorded history of American thoroughbred racing inducted into the National Museum of Racing's Hall of Fame at Saratoga. She became, in October of 2003, the first woman to win a Breeders' Cup race, aboard a two-year-old filly named Halfbridled. She retired from race-riding in early 2004, at the age of forty, with three thousand seven hundred and four career victories from twenty-one thousand four hundred and twelve career mounts, and total career purse earnings of more than ninety million dollars.
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