Diane Crump, a trailblazing jockey who in 1970 became the first woman to ride in the Kentucky Derby, died on Thursday in Winchester, Va. She was 77.
Her death was announced by her daughter, Della Payne, who said that the cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, which Ms. Crump had been diagnosed with in October.
On Feb. 7, 1969, Ms. Crump became the first professional female jockey to compete at a track in the United States where betting was legal. A month later, she won the first of her 228 career victories, which brought earnings for her mounts of nearly $1.3 million, according to the database Equibase.
She won 24 races that year, even though her reception into the male-dominated world of horse racing remained mostly unenthusiastic. Despite such resistance, she became the first female jockey to ride in the Triple Crown’s most prestigious race, the Kentucky Derby, on May 2, 1970.
Mark Shrager noted in his 2020 biography “Diane Crump: A Horse-Racing Pioneer’s Life in the Saddle,” that in the first 95 runnings of the Derby, 1,055 thoroughbreds had competed, all ridden by male jockeys.
In 1939, Anna Lee Aldred of Colorado had become the first American woman to receive a jockey’s license, but for competing in Mexico. In the United States, female jockeys were eventually accepted only with “grudging reluctance,” Mr. Shrager wrote. Many male officials considered women to lack the strength and composure to control a thoroughbred as it galloped along at 40 miles an hour.
That argument was struck down in a Maryland court in 1968, as women began to gain official approval of their riding skills beyond bush tracks, county fairs, exhibitions and equestrian jumping events in the Olympics.
When Ms. Crump arrived at the 1970 Kentucky Derby, days short of her 22nd birthday, she answered assuredly when reporters asked whether she was concerned about the large field and the elite jockeys against whom she would be competing. “I never worry when I ride,” was her response.
Still, Mr. Shrager recounted in his biography, she faced paternalistic inquiries and observations from turf writers, one of whom wrote that she gave “the appearance of a freshly scrubbed farm girl, ready to pitch hay or get dressed up for a dance.”
Another wrote that she looked “as if she should be in high school instead of hanging around race tracks.” By then, she had been married for five months to Don Divine, who had trained the 3-year-old colt she would ride in the Derby. But she did not consider it anyone’s business and told reporters: “My romance is with the horses.”
As it turned out, her Derby mount, Fathom, was overmatched and finished 15th among the 17 horses that completed the race. But she did ride the winner of the first race at Churchill Downs on the day of the Derby, and told The New York Times in 2020 that she found her participation in the run for the roses to be “awesome.”
“I was a part of it,” she said. “It was a big field. Fathom wasn’t bred to go that far. He was bred to go a mile, not a mile and a quarter. He gave it a shot. So did I.”
Diane Crump was born on May 18, 1948, in Milford, Conn. Her father, Walter Crump, a builder, worked for Sikorsky helicopters. Her mother, Jean (Boreiko) Crump, wrote religious poetry and was an artist who painted murals of horses on the walls of her daughter’s bedroom.
At age 4, Diane rode her first pony at a carnival; every time the horse stopped, she refused to dismount, she told The Times, and her father kept having to pay for another ride. At 7, she received riding lessons as a birthday present. When she was 12, the family moved to Oldsmar, Fla., where, with money that she had saved from delivering papers, mowing lawns and babysitting, she bought her first horse, a buckskin named Buckshot.
At 16, she moved 275 miles away from her parents to rent a room in Hallandale Beach, Fla., so she could work with horses at Gulfstream Park, a race track..
A year earlier, Kathryn Kusner had become the first American woman to be granted a jockey’s license to race at a major track in the United States. After being turned down by the Maryland Racing Commission — twice — Ms. Kusner prevailed in a circuit court on Sept. 26, 1968, on the grounds that she had been denied a license solely because she was a woman.
She argued that the commission’s refusal was a violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that forbids employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex or national origin.
By 1968, Ms. Kusner was a two-time Olympic equestrian. But, because of an injury, she did not become the first female jockey to compete in an official race at a pari-mutuel track in the United States. Penny Ann Early received a license in November 1968 to ride in Kentucky, but the threat of boycotts made by male jockeys at Churchill Downs in Louisville thwarted her attempts to make the groundbreaking ride.
Instead, Ms. Crump, then 20, delivered the pioneering moment aboard a 48-to-1 long shot named Bridle ‘n Bit on Feb. 7, 1969, in the seventh race at Hialeah Park in Florida. The horse’s trainer, Tom Calumet, told her that his wife, Catherine, the horse’s owner, had said insistently, “Put that girl on or I’ll get another trainer.”
It was an era where aspiring female jockeys were often dismissed as “jockettes.” Six male jockeys withdrew from her first race and were replaced.
“I didn’t care how the jockeys felt,” Ms. Crump told her biographer, Mr. Shrager. “I figured they had to get over it.”
Security escorted her through reporters, photographers and onlookers to the saddling area in the paddock. Some spectators shouted encouragement, Mr. Shrager wrote, while one told her to stay in the kitchen.
Lacking a racing saddle, Ms. Crump borrowed one from a sympathetic male jockey. Before a crowd of 15,791 that bet $200,431 on the race, she finished a distant 10th among the 12 entries, but won the appreciation of racing writers. The Times said that amid the pressure she was “possessed of remarkable composure and self-confidence.”
After her seminal ride in the 1970 Kentucky Derby, Ms. Crump continued to race professionally, with a brief retirement, until around 1998 — through injuries and tepid acceptance — winning and nearly winning at rates “comparable to those of racing’s most esteemed male jockeys,” Mr. Shrager wrote.
Yet, he added, the racing world responded to Ms. Crump’s career with “what might charitably be labeled ambivalence” that persists toward women jockeys, only five of whom have ridden in the Kentucky Derby since her race in 1970.
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Crump is survived by a sister, Linda Suave; a brother, Bert Crump; and three grandchildren. Her marriage to Mr. Divine ended in divorce in the 1980s. He died in 2013.
Despite a somewhat frustrating professional career, the resilient Ms. Crump, who later operated a sales service for potential horse buyers and provided her dachshunds as therapy dogs for the ill and the needy, described herself “as a hard-headed little nobody with a dream that I wouldn’t let die.”
“Galloping a great racehorse gives you a powerful feeling,” she told The Times. “I gave all the horses I rode my heart, and they gave me theirs.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
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