28/12/2025
Hollywood... Make this movie!
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She was 17 years old when she became the first Black female jockey in America. She finished dead last in her first race. And then she won 750 more.
June 15, 1971.
Thistledown Racetrack, Cleveland, Ohio.
Cheryl White sat astride Ace Reward, a horse trained by her father. She was 5-foot-3, 107 pounds, and 17 years old.
The crowd roared. National newspapers had sent reporters. This was history—the first probationary ride for America's first Black female jockey.
"I just wanted those gates to open," Cheryl would later say.
The gates opened.
Ace Reward broke first. For three-eighths of a mile, Cheryl led the pack. For three-eighths of a mile, it looked like she would make history by winning her first race.
And then Ace Reward faded.
Cheryl White finished 11th out of 11 horses.
Dead last.
Reporters asked if she planned to celebrate her historic ride.
She didn't. She went home. She had another race scheduled.
And 2.5 months later, on September 2, 1971, Cheryl White won her first race riding Jetolara at Waterford Park in West Virginia.
It was the first of 750.
Cheryl White was born into racing. Her father, Raymond White Sr., was a Black horse trainer in an era when Black jockeys and trainers were being systematically pushed out of the sport that they had built. Her mother, Doris, was a Polish American horse owner.
The family owned 400 acres of land in Rome, Ohio. Horses weren't just their business—they were their life.
Raymond Sr. had trained horses that ran in the Kentucky Derby in 1932 and 1944. But here's the thing: He couldn't sit in the grandstand to watch them run. The grandstand was segregated.
He could train the horses. He could get them ready. He could send them to Churchill Downs.
But he couldn't sit with white people to watch.
That was the world Cheryl White was born into in 1953.
When Cheryl told her father at age 4 that she wanted to be a jockey, he didn't believe her. He was old-school, born in 1903, and he didn't think women should be jockeys.
But Raymond White Sr. was also a great man who didn't let his bias stand in the way of his daughter's dream.
So he gave her a pony when she was 5. He taught her to ride. And when she was 17 and insisted she was ready, he helped her become the first female to apply for a jockey license at Thistledown Racetrack.
It wasn't easy. Women had only won the legal right to ride in pari-mutuel races in 1968, when a group of female riders sued. Before that, there weren't even women's locker rooms at recognized tracks.
Cheryl was breaking barriers just by showing up.
And she was a triple threat: Black, female, and young.
That first race—the one she lost—made her famous anyway. By July 29, 1971, just six weeks after that first ride, Cheryl was on the cover of Jet Magazine.
She was 17 years old.
And then she started winning.
In September 1971, she became the first Black woman to win a Thoroughbred race. Later that same month, she became the first woman to win two races in one day in two different states—one at Thistledown in Ohio in the afternoon, another at Waterford Park in West Virginia that evening.
Her mother's horses had been on a long losing streak. Cheryl won five races for her mother in the span of one month, breaking the dry spell.
In August 1972, she was invited to the prestigious all-ladies "Boots and Bows Handicap" race in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Fourteen riders entered.
Cheryl won.
She wasn't just making history. She was winning.
But the racism and sexism were relentless. Cheryl faced missed mounts because of her race. She faced male jockeys who didn't want to compete against her. She faced crowds who came to watch her fail.
When people asked her about the discrimination, she answered calmly, matter-of-factly. She didn't brag. She didn't complain.
"She just did her thing," her younger brother Raymond Jr. would later say. "She didn't understand what she had accomplished. I don't know that she understood her significance, or place in history."
By 1974, Cheryl had moved to California, entering the riding scene at state and county fairs. And that's where she truly dominated.
In 1977, she became the first woman to win the Appaloosa Horse Club's Jockey of the Year award. She won it again in 1983, 1984, and 1985—five consecutive years as the leading Appaloosa rider in the United States.
And on October 19, 1983, at the Fresno Fair in Central California, Cheryl White made history again.
She won five races in one day.
Five races. One day. First female jockey ever to do it at a major track.
She didn't just break barriers. She shattered them. She obliterated them. She made them irrelevant.
Over her 21-year career as a jockey, Cheryl won more than 750 races. In Thoroughbred racing alone, she had 226 wins and earned $762,624. But she also rode Quarter Horses, Arabians, Paints, and Appaloosas—winning hundreds more races across multiple disciplines.
In 1990, she received an Award of Merit from the African American Sports Hall of Fame.
In 1991, she passed the California Horse Racing Board's Steward Examination—becoming the first woman to serve as a California horse racing steward.
On July 25, 1992, Cheryl rode her last race at Los Alamitos.
She won.
Of course she did.
But Cheryl's story doesn't end there. Because life isn't always a victory lap.
In 1997, her steward's license was suspended for betting while working as an official. In 1998, she paid a veterinary bill for a horse that didn't belong to her and had her license revoked.
The woman who had broken every barrier, who had won 750 races, who had changed the face of American horse racing—had made mistakes.
She attended Gamblers Anonymous. She exercised horses to support herself during her suspension. She worked her way back.
Eventually, she was fully reinstated. She worked as a placing judge, a supervisor for jockey weigh-ins, and a rules infractions official.
From 2010 to 2014, she returned to the saddle for Lady Legends for the Cure charity events at Pimlico Race Course, riding alongside other pioneering female jockeys.
Her final ride was in 2014 at Pimlico, aboard a horse named Macho Spaces.
She was 60 years old.
And then Cheryl White went back to work as a racing official, doing what she'd always done: showing up, doing her job, staying quiet about her accomplishments.
"I was just a race track brat," she once said. "I'm probably going to die on the track."
On September 20, 2019, Cheryl White died in Youngstown, Ohio. She was 65 years old.
And most of America had no idea who she was.
Her brother Raymond Jr. was stunned by how forgotten she'd become. "Whenever I hear about icons and she's never mentioned, I don't know why," he said. "It makes you hesitate to think it's rooted in racism. It almost feels like it's the cheap answer—but it's the answer."
Black jockeys once dominated American horse racing. Thirteen of the fifteen jockeys in the first Kentucky Derby were Black. Fifteen of the first twenty-eight winners of the Derby were Black.
And then, in the early 1900s, during the Jim Crow era, Black jockeys and trainers were systematically pushed out of the sport.
Cheryl's father was one of the few who survived that purge. And Cheryl herself broke back through—not just as a Black jockey, but as a Black female jockey in an era when both identities made her a target.
She did it quietly. She did it without self-promotion. She did it by just being better than everyone else.
Today, Cheryl's brother has co-authored a children's book about her life with New York Times reporter Sarah Maslin Nir: The Jockey & Her Horse. Breyer has created a doll of Cheryl and her winning mount Jetolara—the first real Black doll in the company's history.
In 2024, Cheryl was posthumously inducted into the Cleveland Sports Hall of Fame—the first posthumous induction in the organization's history.
Another first.
Lexington, Kentucky is constructing a park to honor African Americans in racing. Cheryl will be included.
But here's what haunts me about Cheryl White's story: She changed American horse racing forever, and most people have never heard her name.
She won 750 races. She broke every barrier. She became a steward, a judge, an official—proving her excellence at every level of the sport.
And she did it all while being told, explicitly and implicitly, that she didn't belong.
On June 15, 1971, a 17-year-old girl rode Ace Reward out of the starting gate at Thistledown.
She led for three-eighths of a mile.
And then she finished last.
Reporters asked if she was disappointed.
She wasn't. She was relieved to have her first race behind her.
She was ready for the next one.
Cheryl White, 1953-2019.
America's first Black female jockey.
750 career wins.
She deserves to be remembered.
