She Who Laughs Last...

"Try harder!" she would growl, half-grinning, half-serious, swishing the knife closer and closer. "Sit, Snake!" she would cry. Snake sat. "Dance, Snake!" she would cry. Snake danced. Then she would toss aside the knife, tackle him and wrestle on the floor until he said uncle, get up, gloat, jump into her car, crank up the radio, stomp on the wooden block she needed to reach the gas pedal, and fly. Sixty...seventy...eighty....

That was the speed at which a cop in Maryland clocked her while she was riding in her Mustang convertible with the steering wheel between her knees, both her arms straight up in the air catching the rain, both her eyes lost on the rainbow above. The cop pulled her over. "Do you know I had the flashers on for five minutes?" he said.

"No," she said.

The cop let her go. The world let her go. Hell, you couldn't even issue a warning for exuberance like that.

You say you should have when I was a baby
drowned me in a lake
You've never baked me a cake
Then why do I love you like I do?
This I wondered as I grew
Your the one who bought my first horse
You taught me know to ride and be the best (of course)

And then one day in 1986, her mother called. A doctor had opened up Judi Krone, taken a look at the cancer inside her, given her two years to live with treatment, three months without it. The woman Julie felt so close to that they used to get stomachaches together. The woman she felt so far from that they could go a year and a half without talking. The woman who had infected her with that beautiful torture, the dream.

What could she do to help her mother through the pain and delirium of chemotherapy and radiation, through the slow, inevitable death?

Win, said Judi Krone. Win.

The daughter stopped needing to win just so she wouldn't hate herself. The daughter started needing to win to help her mother live. The timing was right. She was 23, reaching maturity as a rider. The wins started coming steadily, and then, like firecrackers, four some days, five, even six! "Call my mom and tell her," she would holler to anyone who had access to a telephone between races on a day like that. The long droughts stopped. She started mailing videotapes of her victories to her mother, who would pop them into a VCR at a lodge for cancer victims and grin as all the other patients gathered around her.

Trainers and owners started offering Julie Krone so many mounts that she could take her pick of two or three horses a race. She became the leading winner in 1987 at both Monmouth and the Meadowlands, repeated at both New Jersey tracks in 1988, then led in the jockey standings for much of the recent winter meet at Aqueduct before finishing second. She became the first woman to ride in the Breeders' Cup (finishing fourth in last year's Classic on Forty Niner), beat Bill Shoemaker in a match race at Arlington Park (leaned on his horse for an eighth of a mile, of course), started earning more than half a million dollars a year. She was invited to appear on Carson and Letterman and even at the White House right after George Bush's inauguration, and her spunk and her grin made everyone around her grin, too. She found a boyfriend who didn't make a living off horses, who would rather talk about Cairo, Nepal and Easter Island than the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont. She even put on nail polish. And her mother, a year past the time she was supposed to die, started training horses again, started feeling good enough to wonder if maybe it wasn't too late to start running after her own dream, the one about going on tour with an exquisitely trained stallion, the dream she had never quite chased down.