The Girl Who Finished Last and Won 750 Times: The Legacy of Cheryl White

On June 15, 1971, at Thistledown Racetrack, the starting gates swung open to reveal a seventeen-year-old girl who weighed barely 107 pounds. As Cheryl White gripped the reins of her horse, Ace Reward, she wasn’t just competing in a race; she was gallop-stepping into the history books as the first Black female jockey in American racing.

The debut, however, did not follow a Hollywood script. After leading for the first three-eighths of a mile, White watched her momentum bleed away. She crossed the finish line eleventh out of eleven horses—stone dead last. When reporters swarmed her, asking if she would celebrate the historic milestone regardless of the result, White simply shook her head. She had another race to prepare for. She went home.

This quiet determination was a trait inherited from her father, Raymond White Sr. A veteran of the track, Raymond had worked with Kentucky Derby contenders in the 1930s and 40s. Yet, due to the cruelty of segregation, he was barred from the grandstands. He could saddle the champions and send them to the post, but he could not sit among the white spectators to watch them run.

Initially, Raymond was skeptical of his daughter’s dreams, believing in the era’s prejudice that women did not belong on racehorses. But his love for Cheryl outweighed his traditionalism. He bought her a pony at age five, taught her to ride, and at seventeen, helped her apply for the license that would change the sport forever.

White did not just break barriers; she demolished them with a twenty-one-year career defined by sheer dominance. Two months after her last-place debut, she secured her first win at Waterford Park. It was the first of 750 career victories. Her resume became a list of “firsts”: the first Black woman to win a Thoroughbred race; the first woman to win two races in a single day across two different states; and a historic five-win day at the Fresno Fair in 1983.

Despite being a five-time Appaloosa Jockey of the Year and California’s first female horse racing steward, White remained largely anonymous to the American public when she passed away in 2019 at age 65. Her brother, Raymond Jr., attributes this silence to the lingering shadows of racism that his sister spent her life outrunning. Cheryl White began her career at the back of the pack, but she finished as a titan. She deserves more than a footnote; she deserves to be remembered as a pioneer who turned a last-place start into a legendary finish.