Diane Crump, First Woman to Ride in Kentucky Derby, Dies at 77

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 Crump had been diagnosed with in October.

On Feb. 7, 1969, 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 her mounts earnings of nearly $1.3 million.

She won 24 races that year, even though her reception in the male-dominated world of horse racing remained mostly unenthusiastic. She went on to become 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 became the first American woman to receive a jockey’s license, although for competing in Mexico. In the United States, female jockeys were eventually accepted only with “grudging reluctance,” 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 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 elite jockeys she would be competing against. “I never worry when I ride,” she responded.

Still, as Shrager recounted in his biography, she faced paternalistic inquiries and observations by horse-racing 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 her marriage anyone’s business, telling 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 had found her participation in the run for the roses to be “awesome.”

“I was a part of it,” Crump 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, worked for Sikorsky, the helicopter manufacturing company in nearby Stratford. Her mother, Jean (Boreiko) Crump, wrote religious poetry and was an artist who painted murals of horses on the walls of her daughter, Della’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 newspapers, mowing lawns and babysitting, she bought her first horse, a buckskin named Buckshot.

At 16, Diane moved 275 miles away from her parents to rent a room in Hallandale Beach, Fla., so that 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, Kusner prevailed in a circuit court in 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, which forbids employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex or national origin.

By 1968, 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 that groundbreaking ride.

Instead, 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 in which 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,” Crump told her biographer, Shrager. “I figured they had to get over it.”

Security officials escorted her through reporters, photographers and onlookers to the saddling area in the paddock. Some spectators shouted encouragement, Shrager wrote, while one told her to stay in the kitchen.

Lacking a racing saddle, Crump borrowed one from a sympathetic male jockey. Before a crowd of 15,791, which had 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, Crump was “possessed of remarkable composure and self-confidence.”

After her seminal ride in the 1970 Kentucky Derby, Crump continued to race professionally, with a brief retirement, until about 1998, winning or nearly winning at rates “comparable to those of racing’s most esteemed male jockeys,” Shrager wrote.

Yet, he added, the racing world responded to Crump’s career with “what might charitably be labeled ambivalence.” That attitude persists; only five female jockeys have ridden in the Kentucky Derby since Crump’s race in 1970.

In addition to her daughter, she is survived by a sister, Linda Suave; a brother, Bert Crump; and three grandchildren. Her marriage to Divine ended in divorce in the 1980s. He died in 2013.

Despite a somewhat frustrating professional career, the resilient Crump, who later operated a sales service for horse buyers and provided her dachshunds as therapy dogs for the ill and the needy, described herself “as a hardheaded 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.”

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