The Olympics and the Good Will Games have always inspired me. I was not especially athletic as a child, in fact I detested physical education in school, but I have always greatly admired the commitment to excellence made by anyone who qualifies as an Olympic level athlete. I can scarcely fathom the kind of drive it takes to spend all day every day working out and perfecting your performance in activities the rest of the world considers worthy of only leisure time. Of course, you can’t unless you are brilliant enough to earn sponsorship. The rest of us don’t make that grade. Our part is to watch and cheer them on. The closest I ever came to an Olympic commitment was in owning horses and becoming an equestrian.
My particular interest in the Olympics is, naturally, the equestrian events: Three Day Eventing, Dressage, and Stadium (or Show) Jumping. The equestrian events are notable for the facts that they are the only ones in which men and women compete on equal footing, and the only events involving an animal partner. All three sports are based on skills once necessary in wartime, when fought from the backs of horses. The Olympics and Good Will Games also include an event called the Modern Pentathlon (to distinguish it from the ancient discipline with which it shares no events), based on the skills a cavalry officer needed during the Napoleonic Wars if caught behind enemy lines. It includes epee fencing, pistol shooting, running a 3K, swimming a 200 m freestyle, and jumping a stadium round on a horse you’ve never seen or ridden before. It is limited to a total of 72 competitors (no more than two per nation), takes place in only one day, and men and women compete separately. In the 1990 Good Will Games held in Seattle, the jumping phase was held at Cedar Downs, an equestrian stable where I took weekly riding lessons. It was the equestrian element that determined the winner—and the riders who received the highest and lowest scores got them on the same horse! The equestrian phase makes competitors the most nervous, because it is the one event that they have the least control over. Being successful requires you to be a skillful horseman, because you can't just manhandle a horse around the jumps. Furthermore, the owners of horses donated for the event don't appreciate their horses being "yanked around" the course, either.
One special treat this year was being able to watch the equestrian competitions on my computer, regardless of the time of day. How far we have come since Barcelona when NBC decided to broadcast 12 minutes of video showing horses falling! Back then I ponied up the money for Pay per View of the Three Day Event and recorded all of it on video tape. Since I was too poor to pay for Dressage and Show Jumping, I didn’t get to see those, but I didn’t really care. It was the Three Day that mattered. This year I loved being able to watch the entire cross country competition live, go back and watch highlights, and after that the US team. The riders and horses make it look easy, but believe me, an Olympic caliber course is anything but. Those fences are huge, and they don’t fall down like the airy jump standards in the Stadium Jumping. Looking across a big, black ditch lying right behind a tall jump across to the second element that the horse must also clear will put fear into you if anything will. I used to walk the course at Mountain Meadows (when the Equestrians’ Institute Three Day Event was held there—the highest level of competition was Intermediate), look at some of those jumps, and know I could never do that, no matter how much I wished I could. Training Level was possible, but anything beyond that was not for me.
Eventing as a sport has always been my love, even though I train and ride dressage on my Arabian mare Hadarah. I took jumping lessons for a while on my instructor Karin Bishop’s thoroughbred school horse California, but I fell off a lot. Even though I usually managed to fall “gracefully” (according to Karin), I decided to hang it up after falling off my own horse during a lesson and getting knocked out. My dream of someday fox hunting in Ireland would not be happening, but I learned to love being able to execute demanding dressage movements successfully. Even though I have never competed my horse, I never felt pressed to do so, since Karin was a qualified dressage and horse trials judge and always gave me excellent advice. Who knows, perhaps I will compete one day, but right now I can certainly enjoy watching others excel; I can offer bits of advice and wisdom from my accumulated years of horse-keeping, training, and riding; I can continue to train my own horse and take occasional lessons; and I can enjoy riding on the trail with (or without) my friends. I can offer heartfelt congratulations to those who do earn medals, and I will say that riding my horse is my little piece of the Olympic dream that I pay for myself and enjoy in my own leisure time.
My particular interest in the Olympics is, naturally, the equestrian events: Three Day Eventing, Dressage, and Stadium (or Show) Jumping. The equestrian events are notable for the facts that they are the only ones in which men and women compete on equal footing, and the only events involving an animal partner. All three sports are based on skills once necessary in wartime, when fought from the backs of horses. The Olympics and Good Will Games also include an event called the Modern Pentathlon (to distinguish it from the ancient discipline with which it shares no events), based on the skills a cavalry officer needed during the Napoleonic Wars if caught behind enemy lines. It includes epee fencing, pistol shooting, running a 3K, swimming a 200 m freestyle, and jumping a stadium round on a horse you’ve never seen or ridden before. It is limited to a total of 72 competitors (no more than two per nation), takes place in only one day, and men and women compete separately. In the 1990 Good Will Games held in Seattle, the jumping phase was held at Cedar Downs, an equestrian stable where I took weekly riding lessons. It was the equestrian element that determined the winner—and the riders who received the highest and lowest scores got them on the same horse! The equestrian phase makes competitors the most nervous, because it is the one event that they have the least control over. Being successful requires you to be a skillful horseman, because you can't just manhandle a horse around the jumps. Furthermore, the owners of horses donated for the event don't appreciate their horses being "yanked around" the course, either.
One special treat this year was being able to watch the equestrian competitions on my computer, regardless of the time of day. How far we have come since Barcelona when NBC decided to broadcast 12 minutes of video showing horses falling! Back then I ponied up the money for Pay per View of the Three Day Event and recorded all of it on video tape. Since I was too poor to pay for Dressage and Show Jumping, I didn’t get to see those, but I didn’t really care. It was the Three Day that mattered. This year I loved being able to watch the entire cross country competition live, go back and watch highlights, and after that the US team. The riders and horses make it look easy, but believe me, an Olympic caliber course is anything but. Those fences are huge, and they don’t fall down like the airy jump standards in the Stadium Jumping. Looking across a big, black ditch lying right behind a tall jump across to the second element that the horse must also clear will put fear into you if anything will. I used to walk the course at Mountain Meadows (when the Equestrians’ Institute Three Day Event was held there—the highest level of competition was Intermediate), look at some of those jumps, and know I could never do that, no matter how much I wished I could. Training Level was possible, but anything beyond that was not for me.
Eventing as a sport has always been my love, even though I train and ride dressage on my Arabian mare Hadarah. I took jumping lessons for a while on my instructor Karin Bishop’s thoroughbred school horse California, but I fell off a lot. Even though I usually managed to fall “gracefully” (according to Karin), I decided to hang it up after falling off my own horse during a lesson and getting knocked out. My dream of someday fox hunting in Ireland would not be happening, but I learned to love being able to execute demanding dressage movements successfully. Even though I have never competed my horse, I never felt pressed to do so, since Karin was a qualified dressage and horse trials judge and always gave me excellent advice. Who knows, perhaps I will compete one day, but right now I can certainly enjoy watching others excel; I can offer bits of advice and wisdom from my accumulated years of horse-keeping, training, and riding; I can continue to train my own horse and take occasional lessons; and I can enjoy riding on the trail with (or without) my friends. I can offer heartfelt congratulations to those who do earn medals, and I will say that riding my horse is my little piece of the Olympic dream that I pay for myself and enjoy in my own leisure time.
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