Sport: Horse Racing
Born: February 9, 1988
Town: Mendham, New Jersey
nna Rose Napravnik was born February 9, 1988 in Mendham, NJ. She was the second of three children born to Charles and Cindy Napravnik, who were in the horse business. Her mom trained thoroughbreds and ran a boarding facility and her father was a farrier, seeing to the needs of horses’ hooves. Rosie was riding ponies soon after she could walk. She broke her arm at age 4 after taking a spill but was undaunted. By age 7, she was racing—and had already set her sights on riding in the Kentucky Derby.
During her teen years, Rosie worked for several top stables. At 16, she went to work for Dickie Small in Maryland, and he developed her as a jockey training his horses. At 17, she became a professional and rode for a time as A.R. Napravnik to disguise her gender. Rosie won her first race, at Pimlico, on Ringofdiamonds in the spring of 2005. She was the leading jockey at Laurel Park that year until she fell and fractured her collarbone in November.
Rosie won 300 races in 2006, captured her first stakes race, and finished second in the Apprentice Jockey of the Year voting. Injuries curtailed her 2007 performance but, in 2008, she bounced back at age 20 to win 176 times, including 101 victories in Maryland—the most in the state—until a broken leg knocked her out for three months. Near the end of that season, she began racing at Aqueduct Racetrack in New York.
In 2009, Rosie won 184 races. In 2010, she won 155 races—including the grade 3 Cicada Stakes at Aqueduct—and produced nearly $10 million in prize money. In 2011, Rosie continued to make headlines when she became the first woman to win the Louisiana Stakes, aboard Pants on Fire, and captured the track title at the Fair Grounds Race Course in New Orleans for the first of four straight years. During that 2011 season, Rosie’s childhood dream came true when she rode Pants on Fire in the Kentucky Derby. She finished 9th. Also in 2011, Rosie married trainer Joe Sharp, whom she’d met two seasons earlier when she rode for him at Penn National outside Harrisburg, PA.
In 2012, Rosie became the first female rider to win the Kentucky Oaks, a grade 1 stakes race held the Friday before the Kentucky Derby. Later that season, she won the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile. At year’s end she ranked among the nation’s Top 10 jockeys, with more than $12 million in winnings.
In 2013, Rosie finished 5th in the Kentucky Derby and third in the Preakness aboard Mylute—finishing behind legends Gary Stevens (on Oxbow) and John Velazquez. She also rode in the Belmont, becoming the first woman to ride in all three Triple Crown races in the same year.
In 2014, she repeated this feat and also won the Kentucky Oaks again. For a time, Rosie was the second-ranked jockey in the country, but an injury kept her off the track for a month. She bounced back and picked up where she left off by the end of summer, winning the Breeders’ Cup Distaff aboard Untapable—and then announced she was seven weeks pregnant. The Oaks and Distaff are considered major thoroughbred races. Rosie finished the year on the Top 10 earnings list for the third year in a row.
The 2014 season marked Rosie’s final year as a jockey. She and Joe had two sons over the next two years. She stayed in racing as part of a husband-and-wife training team and occasional exercise rider. In 2017, their horse Girvin won the Louisiana Stakes and the Haskell, and was the top point-earner in the Road to the Kentucky Derby series.