Pioneering Female Jockey Diane Crump Passes Away

[Wandering Eyes]

Diane Crump, the first female to ride a pari-mutuel race and also the first female to ride in the GI Kentucky Derby, passed away Thursday evening after battling an aggressive form of brain cancer. She was 77. The news was confirmed by Crump's family on social media Friday via her GoFundMe.

According to Equibase, Crump rode only 228 winners in a career that spanned 1969 through 1988. But her mark on the sport goes well beyond the number of races she won. Female jockeys were widely rejected in the late sixties. It got so bad that when she left the jockeys room at Hialeah to ride in her first ever race on Feb. 7, 1969, she had to have a police escort to make it to the paddock.

After she received clearance to ride a horse named Bridle 'n Bit in the race at Hialeah, six male jockeys took off their mounts. That a female was riding in a horse race was such an oddity that she was mobbed by reporters from newspapers and television stations and photographers. The horse finished 10th, but Crump received a positive review in the New York Times, which noted, “Even the most bitter opponents of girl riders had to admit she looked good on Bridle 'n Bit.”

She was determined to win the fight and gain acceptance, which eventually happened. She was not one to give up easily.

“I was just so excited that I was finally going to get to ride a race,” Crump told the Louisville Courier-Journal in 2020. “I read all the negative press, but I just never let that negative press deter me.”

In 1970, she recorded another milestone, becoming the first female jockey to ride in the GI Kentucky Derby. She finished 15th aboard a horse named Fathom.

“It wasn't that big of a deal in the Derby because he was a longshot,” Crump told writer Bob Ehalt in 2017. “There were some things written about it, but I had been riding for a year and people knew I was capable so there wasn't a big deal made of it. Yet to me it was a dream you always have if you're a jockey. Just to go through that experience gave me one of the greatest feelings you could ever imagine. Just the fact that I was there meant so much to me.”

She said that in time the threats and harassment started to disappear. It also helped that other female riders were following her path and taking out a jockey license.

“A lot of the harassment and most of the issues occurred before I ever got to ride,” Crump told the TDN in 2020. “The first two or three months were the worst. At the Derby, it was a little over a year since I started and by then, things had calmed down. I was fairly well received in Kentucky, more so than in other states. There was less dissension. After the first several months it died down so far as the male jockeys went. It wasn't perfect, but it definitely improved.”

Crump said that, eventually, getting mounts was not a problem. But getting the assignment on horses that had a chance was.

“I think I was a very good rider,” she told the TDN. “I won races I never should have won. I think I rode a good race and I had the potential to be a really good rider. I never got to show it because I was never put on a top horse. I won races on horses that paid $100, horses that were 99-1. I beat top riders coming down to the wire. You need to ride a certain amount of horses to get proficient at it. It took longer for me because of how few horses I got to ride. That my biggest disappointment.”

Crump retired in 1988, but her work had already been done. She was the one that led the way for a generation of talented female riders, including Hall of Famer Julie Krone, Rosie Napravnik and Donna Barton Brothers.

“Those pioneer women jockeys are my idols,” Jacqueline Davis, who has been a jockey since 2008, told Ehat. “They had to have a lot of courage. I don't know if I could have gone through what they did and made it as a jockey back then.”

In 2020, she released her autobiography “Diane Crump: A Horse Racing Pioneer's Life in the Saddle.' It was co-authored by Mark Shrager.

After her retirement, Crump settled in Virginia, where she operated Diane Crump: Equine Sales, Inc., an equine sales business.

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