She's a Riding Giant

"I like her," said Gaudet, who struggles to get Napravnik on his horses, just like everyone else. "She's got good balance, good patience, and she cuts the corners well. If she's tucked in behind horses when they get to the turn, they drift out and she shoots right through -- whoosh!"

Faltynski, 52, talks about Napravnik with an almost evangelical zeal.

"It took me 32 years to find a neat jockey like Rosie, who loves the game as much as I do," Faltynski said. "When you work as a sports agent in basketball or football, you have ups and downs working side by side seven days a week. I don't seem to have that with Rosie, and everything she rides seems to win."

Early Surroundings

The seeds of Napravnik's success and work ethic were planted at a very young age. She was born on Feb. 9, 1988, in Morristown, N.J., to parents who were farmers and horsemen. Her father, Charles, works an organic farm in Asbury, N.J., with Belgian horses while her mother, Cindy, now living in Vermont, ran a boarding facility.

By age 6, Napravnik was already rubbing ankles in stalls and applying bandages.

"She wasn't overprotected from what was around," said Charles Napravnik. "We never hid anything from her. She just saw the life as what it really was. As far as the work ethic, my ex-wife rode horses, was very dedicated and the kids grew up with that."

Napravnik and her older sister Jasmine, 23, who everyone calls Jazz, tumbled into the horse world, riding pony races on the steeplechase circuit.

"When I was 12 years old, in addition to washing the dishes and clearing the tables, I was at the farm on the weekends at 6 o'clock in the morning mucking out at least eight stalls," said Jazz Napravnik, who works for Pimlico-based trainer Holly Robinson and trains four steeplechase horses on her own. "Before you think my mother was some sort of slave driver, I had one pony I was eventing, so I was paying my way."

The Napravnik household, during that time, never had a television set. "There's so much junk on it," Charles Napravnik said. "But now I've got a dish so I can watch Rosie."

The sisters began working for top steeplechase trainers Lilith Boucher, Bruce Miller and Jack Fisher. Rosie loved riding; Jazz training.

When Rosie was 13, she worked for a year with Hall of Fame trainer Jonathan Sheppard, but at 15, she took a year off from horses.

"I decided to take the year off and had a lot of fun just being a teenager. I knew I was going to work with horses for the rest of my life," Napravnik said.