Duncan strode across the paddock to the bronze statue by the winners circle, the one he had walked past every morning on his rounds, a lifesize horse with a tiny rider crouched low over its neck. He ran his finger across the plate at the base. His voice scratched as he read it. “Rosalind Mayhew. First woman to win the Kentucky Oaks. Nineteen seventy four. Four feet eleven inches tall.” He looked from the statue to me, and then back to the statue. I am Rosalind Mayhew, seventy seven years old, and I stood by the paddock fence in my green raincoat with the little silver horseshoe on my lapel, and he was a full foot taller than I.
In 1974, at twenty five, I was the first woman jockey ever licensed to ride at Churchill Downs. I rode a filly named Blue Lantern in the Kentucky Oaks, and we won by a length and a half in the rain. I rode for eleven years and I won three hundred and eight races. The city commissioned the statue in 1990, cast to my own measure, which is why the plate gives my height. The silver horseshoe was a gift from my first trainer, Old Mack, on the day I won, and I have worn it every day since, through two broken collarbones, one divorce from the sport, and a great many cold mornings at the rail.
An old man in a battered cap, leaning on the paddock rail with a cigar stub between his fingers, straightened up. “Rosie,” he said, and the voice cracked. “Little Rosie Mayhew.” It was Mack Dillard, my old trainer, ninety four years old and still coming to the track every morning. The grooms along the rail had stopped working. A young exercise rider took off her helmet. A woman selling programs set down her stack, and a child on the shoulders of his father pointed at the statue and then at me, and tugged at the ear of his father.
A silver horseshoe on a green raincoat gave one retired jockey a wet morning to bring a young guard back to the winners circle in Louisville.
I gave my terms with a laugh, because it is very hard to be solemn when you are four feet eleven. “Mr. Duncan, no harm is done. I have been told to leave a good many places in my life, and usually by a taller man. I would ask only that you walk me into the winners circle, under that statue, and that you let me stand there for five minutes. And that you tell me your first name, because I do not want to carry around a stranger.” He said it was Cal.
Cal Duncan removed his cap. His face was wet. “Mrs. Mayhew, my grandmother cleaned the stands here for thirty years,” he said. “She told me about the little woman who beat the men. I thought you were seven feet tall, in her stories.” He wiped his cheeks. “I said that jockeys needed a licence on their person. I said a horseshoe pin was not a badge. I saw a short gray haired lady in a raincoat and I never saw a champion.” He swallowed. “I am the one who should be thrown off the property.”
But in his embarrassment he did a foolish thing. Cal reached out, slipped the silver horseshoe from my lapel, and turned toward the guard office at a fast walk, saying it would have to be verified against the old licensing records. He took ten strides. Old Mack, ninety four, stepped into the path with his cigar stub, the young exercise rider swung across the other side with her helmet under her arm, and the woman selling programs planted herself there, her whole stack of programs held out like a barrier.
Cal stopped on the wet gravel with the horseshoe tight in his fist and four people ringed around him. He looked as though he wished the earth would open. Old Mack spoke up first, in a voice rough as a feed sack. “Son,” he said, “I put that on her the day she won. I have never seen her without it. You hand it back.” Cal crossed the gravel to me, knelt on one knee in the mud, and held it up. I let him pin it on, and I patted his cheek.
The consequences were what any racetrack would love. Mack and I stood in the winners circle, beneath the statue, for the full five minutes, and the grooms and riders gathered around us, and Mack told the story of the Oaks to a crowd of two hundred. The track added a new plaque beside the statue with the names of the women riders who followed me. Cal became the first guard to volunteer as an usher for the girls riding program, and he walked me to my car under an umbrella.
In the name of my husband Dale, who passed in 2017, I started the Dale Mayhew Fund. It pays for riding lessons, tack and apprenticeship fees for young jockeys, and for retirement care for old racehorses, in Jefferson, Oldham and Shelby counties. In the first year we sent thirty one apprentices to the jockey school and retired nineteen horses to good pasture. One was a fifteen year old girl from Shelbyville, barely ninety pounds, who rode her first winner on a muddy afternoon and cried into the mane.
On Oaks Day, in the bright cold spring, I stood in my green raincoat at the winners circle with Old Mack in his wheelchair beside me, and Cal Duncan holding the umbrella. The new riders came out of the jockeys room in their silks and their tiny boots, the girls among them, and walked toward the starting gate. One of them, a girl no taller than I, looked back at the statue. Then she looked at me. I tapped my silver horseshoe, and she grinned, tugged her goggles into place, and rode out onto the track with her chin high.