Last August Krone was rounding the bend, going 35 miles per hour, when an apprentice jockey edged in front of her, clipping heels with Krone’s Seattle Way. Her horse buckled, and Krone catapulted into a twisted somersault, landing on her right ankle. The 4-foot-10, 100-pound jockey was facing oncoming traffic – 1,200-pound thoroughbreds. A horse hoofed Krone’s left elbow and then sent her flying with a kick in the chest. Nine months, 14 screws and two titanium plates later, Krone is back.
Julieanne Louise Krone has a knack for speed. At night, before the 30-year-old jockey goes to bed, she prepares her clothes for the next day. She buttons up an oxford shirt, inches a belt around a pair of jeans and tucks the pant legs and some socks into her boots. That way, when she wakes – well before daybreak – she can hop out of bed and straight into her duds. ““Think about it,’’ Krone says in her high-pitched, breakneck chirp. ““If it takes you 10 minutes to get dressed, you can cut it down to five.''
Setting records comes naturally to Krone. She became the first woman to capture a leg of the Triple Crown when she won the Belmont Stakes in 1993. She is one of only three jockeys – including greats Angel Cordero and Ron Turcotte – to win five times in one day at Saratoga. With more than $50 million in purses, she’s been in the winner’s circle more than any other female jockey and many men. She even heals quickly. ““She has bone like stone,’’ says her orthopedic surgeon, Frank Ariosta. (Krone credits the goat’s milk she drank growing up on a farm in Michigan.)
Krone’s childlike enthusiasm for racing doesn’t seem jolted by her fall. ““Boy, was I meant to keep racing or what that I lived through that?’’ Krone asks. ““I guess I’m blessed.’’ She may be right. At least 100 jockeys have died from racing injuries since 1950, and more than 50 former jockeys are paralyzed, according to a 1992 study by the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. ““Horses don’t have power steering and they don’t have power brakes,’’ says John Giovanni, national manager of the Jockeys’ Guild. In 20 years of horse racing, Giovanni broke 19 bones. The guild battled with the nation’s racing commissions, and today an ambulance tails the riders – an ominous reminder that horse racers risk their lives (not to mention their mounts’) several times a day.
What saved Krone was a two-pound flak jacket made out of high-density foam, which became mandatory for all jockeys in January. Her bruised heart and punctured elbow looked like mere scratches compared with her ankle. It had shattered in a dozen places. Ariosta – who owns a thoroughbred-breeding farm in upstate New York – knew that Krone needed to keep her foot flexible. She had to work the joint if she was ever going to cram it into a racing stirrup and stand on it for seven furlongs again. So instead of putting her in a cast, Ariosta pieced her together with hardware. But that meant keeping her off her right foot.
Just try telling Julie Krone what to do. Two days after her three-week stint at Staten Island University Hospital ended in late September, she was riding again. ““Without stirrups,’’ she offers in her defense, flashing an impish grin. ““We never had one session where we did what I had planned. It was always on her terms,’’ says Robert Bazley, a physical therapist based near Krone’s 10-acre ranch in Colts Neck, N.J. ““I had to keep pulling the reins on her – no pun intended,’’ he says. If solemn warnings and grotesque X-rays didn’t keep her off her foot, hollering might. ““Once, she got up to walk across the room, and I yelled, “What are you doing?’ She walked the rest of the way on her hands,’’ Ariosta says, half amused, half annoyed. ““She’s got a lot of spunk.''
Around the stables, Krone is as tough as any old sinewy jockey. When she doesn’t have her bobbed blond hair matted under her helmet, it’s under a baseball cap. One favorite reads no cry babies. Off the track, Krone admits, ““The pain started to eat at me. You know that Dr. Death guy?’’ she says of Dr. Jack Kevorkian. ““Well, I can really see getting to a point like that.’’ About three months before coming back, she couldn’t poker-face the agony anymore. She sank into depression. She didn’t sleep for two weeks. She wouldn’t eat or work out. ““I went from the highest of the high to the lowest of the low,’’ she says. But the pain was nothing compared with the longing. ““I’m not good at just watching,’’ she says. She’s not watching anymore. Krone raced on Thursday and won. Not bad for a jockey who rides with a brace, walks with a limp and can still set off metal detectors with her ankle.
title: “Back In The Saddle Again” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-05” author: “Marie Bordelon”
Sales of exercise riders – sold under names such as HealthRider, CardioGlide and The LoneRider – have taken off in the last 18 months. The HealthRider alone is moving at 10,000 a week and is the hottest-selling item at The Sharper Image, a chain of 76 high-tech emporiums. Says Sydney Klevatt, the chain’s senior vice president of marketing, “It’s new, it isn’t motorized and doesn’t require a real high degree of physical fitness to begin.” All riders work similarly. You push and pull a handlebar that, in turn, lifts the seat. The rider’s own heft provides the weight and resistance; workouts can be tailored by adjusting parts of the machine. But the heavier (and probably less fit) you are, the more the machine requires you to work. That’s a problem, says Kam Miller, a clinical exercise physiologist at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington. As you lose weight, the value of the workout lessens. Miller adds that the riders’ rocking motions are especially stressful on the hip flexer muscles – ones usually well toned by, say, climbing stairs – that attach to the lower lumbar. Overworking them, experts say, usually results in backache and loss of flexibility. “I didn’t think it was a bio-mechancially sound device,” says Miller. But a spokesman for HealthRider says the machines are safe and effective if adjusted and used properly.
Though there’s no study yet on the effectiveness of riders, some critics say the companies that make them seem far better at marketing fitness than actually helping people obtain it. In short, they produce greater ads than abs. Ned LaBonne is so convinced that riders “don’t do what they’re supposed to” that he won’t stock them in his New York City bike and fitness store – even when his customers ask for them. For Laverne Cose, a working mother in San Diego, the rider was a disappointment. “I didn’t feel I was getting a workout. It took 20 very boring minutes to break a sweat – a little one.” On the 29th day of a 80-day trial, she returned her rider. There are, of course, people who think Cose and LaBonne are dead wrong. Ryan Pool, 28, a motorcycle racer from Salt Lake City, says his HealthRider helped him lose 20 pounds and improved his strength and stamina. (He was so pleased that he agreed to appear in an infomercial.) And ultimately, riders – good or bad – may wind up like treadmills and stationary bikes: gathering dust in the comer of American bedrooms.
