The Women Who Have Ridden in the Kentucky Derby

Six women have ridden in the Kentucky Derby since Diane Crump first did it in 1970, across nine trips to the starting gate between them, and none has won. The most recent of the six, Rosie Napravnik, retired in 2014; no woman has ridden in the Derby since.

The biggest milestone for a woman at the Derby in years came from a different job. In 2026, Cherie DeVaux became the first woman to train a Kentucky Derby winner, sending out Golden Tempo, a 23-1 shot who broke from the 16th stall after three scratches inside him, to win under jockey Jose Ortiz. A trainer conditions the horse and chooses who rides it; the jockey is the one in the saddle on the day. DeVaux's record is real and it is a first, but it is a different record from the jockeys' one below, and the two get blurred together more often than they should.

Through the 1960s, no US racing commission would license a woman as a jockey. Kathy Kusner, an Olympic equestrian, applied to the Maryland Racing Commission in 1967 and was turned down four times, the commission citing her strength and her "emotional stability." She sued under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and on September 27, 1968, a Maryland circuit court judge ordered the commission to issue the license. Kusner became the first licensed female jockey in the United States that October, and other states followed within the year.

A license to ride is not a mount in the Derby, which a trainer and owner have to give a jockey. The first woman rode in the race a year after Kusner's case, and the ninth and most recent trip came 44 years later.

Napravnik's fifth on Mylute in 2013 is still the best Derby finish by a woman. She did better elsewhere: she became the first woman to win the Kentucky Oaks, the Derby's companion race for three-year-old fillies, in 2012 on Believe You Can and again in 2014 on Untapable, and ranked among North America's top 10 jockeys by wins or earnings in three straight seasons before retiring in 2014.

The only woman to win a Triple Crown race at all is Julie Krone, who rode the 13-1 shot Colonial Affair to victory in the 1993 Belmont Stakes. No woman has started in a Preakness or Belmont since Patricia Cooksey's 1985 Preakness ride, and none has started in a Breeders' Cup race that this blog has been able to source.

There is no running official count of how many licensed jockeys are women. The closest thing is a figure the Jockeys' Guild, the riders' union, gave reporters in 2018: about 8 percent of its members were female. That is the most recent figure this blog could source, not a current one, and the Guild has not published an update since.

A mount in the Derby is not decided by a license or a win percentage; it is decided by a trainer and an owner picking who rides their horse, race by race, for years before the first Saturday in May. Nothing here says why that choice has gone the way it has, only that it has: nine mounts for women against 20-horse fields, year after year, since 1970.

Cherie DeVaux's Derby win with Golden Tempo is the first by a female trainer, and it opens a door that was shut for exactly as long as the jockey's was: nobody had done it before her. It says nothing about who rides in the next Derby. Training and riding are separate jobs with separate paths in, and a horse's trainer has never once been the thing standing between a female jockey and a Derby mount. The jockey's record above is still six names long, and the ninth line in the table is still 2014.