She Who Laughs Last...

One day, on her return to the paddock after a race at Keystone, a jockey named Maryann Alligood threatened to punch her lights out the moment they got back to the jocks' room. A woman? Julie Krone dashed up the tunnel, ducked into the first-aid station and hid.

Mom—
New York is unbeliveable. Me, Debi, Larry and Chuck got chaufered to the city by Fox. We saw wierdos ate good food and I got drunk. Ha Ha. I'm having a good time and even working harder. Cordero tells me how to ride all the time. You would have to see what I was doing to belive it.
Good feeling
Julie Krone

They found the marijuana in her car at Bowie on Feb. 18, 1983. It could have been worse. They could have found cocaine. There was something about the way she lived—wringing everything out of herself and pouring it into a funnel—that made every hour away from the funnel seem empty, that made her look for ways to feel as alive when she went home at night as she had felt bringing a 30-1 shot home in the afternoon.

She began to learn the dreamer's hardest lesson, the one about consequences, the one about 4'10½" jockeys with chipmunk voices—yes, even them—having to give up being little girls and become women. She received a 60-day suspension and was ordered to attend a drug rehabilitation class and urinate into a jar once a week for a year. She stood and stared through the wire mesh at Pimlico, horseless for the first time since she was two—fenced out. It scared her so badly that it made her go clean. And it made her think about her brother, Donnie, who had given up his dream of racing cars to become an exercise rider in Maryland and who would be suspended from the track twice for drug use. And it made her sit still for a minute and write:

In the quiet of the evening
When the dark was falling fast
I sat in my room and thought of the things
I had done in the years gone past.
So agervated did my mind wander for I knew I had miss understood
The importance of that extra something
That separets evil from good.

Her first day back from the suspension, she had two races at Pimlico. She won both. She went on to win the Atlantic City riding title again in '83, but broke her back and missed four months of racing when she came off a horse during a workout at Laurel. Her career was like her driving—bursts of speed and sudden stops. "I never let anything bother me," she would tell people. Her stomach began to burn, the beginnings of an ulcer.

She found love at the racetrack, assistant trainer Steve Brown, the first man she had a real relationship with. But when he asked her to stop riding at two tracks a day so he could see her now and then, she couldn't bring herself to do it. Love—yes, she craved it—but emotional intimacy? Whoa, boy, wait a minute, who said anything about that? He walked away. She flirted with him again, became the little girl whispering cute little things in his ear, but she couldn't get him back. Consequences, consequences....

She was 21. Suddenly she realized how alone she was, how much she ached for a center of gravity in her adult life, just as she had in her childhood. She went to Brown's apartment when he was gone one day, sat on the floor, picked up an X-Acto knife and studied her wrists. That would teach him. That would teach them all.

Then it hit her. Death would put her out of the running for the best jock of all time. She put down the blade, went into an 0-for-80 slump, screamed "I quit! I quit!" coming down the backstretch one day. And yet, there was something so irrepressible, so unsinkable about her. She would go into her room after a grim day, replay everything she had done wrong in her entire life, but rather than cry she would pummel one of her teddy bears for half an hour, tell herself over and over, "This can't go on. I won't allow it to go on," then come out of the room, grab a kitchen knife and order her current agent, Larry (Snake) Cooper, to get her better horses—now.

"Julie, I'm trying, I'm trying," Cooper would plead.