Gold Medal Horse (12 page)

After Patrona won at the advanced level, Jil decided not to sell her. She began to dream, just a little, about the Olympics.

“At that first advanced horse trials, she just dealt with everything that came her way,” Jil said of Patrona. “So I started thinking,
Maybe she can go that far.
But I was thinking about the Atlanta Olympics, and the 1994 World Championships, not about Barcelona.” Jil thought the Barcelona Olympics were coming up too soon. She did not think Patrona could be ready.

After competing in two advanced horse trials in early spring, Jil entered Patrona in the 1992 Kentucky Rolex Three-Day Event, the hardest event in North America. Jil also competed a horse named Fax; she and Fax had won a medal at the 1991 Pan American Games. “I thought Fax was going to be the champion,” Jil said. “Patrona was so green that I thought,
I’ll just jump the first twelve fences and see how it goes.
” If Patrona had started out badly or seemed frightened, Jil would have quit, but Patrona did so well that Jil kept going. In the end they
finished third—and they were invited to try out for the Olympic team.

Jil Walton never thought Patrona would make it to the Olympics, but the gallant horse surprised her and everyone else. Here’s Jil astride another horse, Tytan. (Shannon Sollinger photo courtesy of
The Chronicle of the Horse.
)

Jil found the Olympic team selection process thrilling. Along with eleven other top-ranked Americans, she took her horse to England for two months of intensive training. Jil loved getting the chance to learn in the company of famous riders she’d admired for her entire life. She also loved showing them what she and Patrona could do.

“On the first day in England, they had us jog the horses up,” Jil said. “And the coach said, ‘This mare’s seven years old?’ and I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘And you plan on riding her around an
Olympic
course?’ and I said, ‘Yeah!’

“It was like a dare—you put me and that mare in that situation, and we had to prove ourselves.” Patrona and Jil made the Olympic team on Jil’s twenty-sixth birthday.

Jil says Patrona’s attitude, more than anything else, made her an Olympian. “A lot of horses that succeed in eventing are kind of nutty, but Patrona’s not. She’s incredibly laid-back—very aware, but not in a nervous way. She always has the whole situation sized up in one glance. She’s always in control.

“She’s like a little schoolteacher who sits there quietly, noticing everything, and then goes off into a phone booth and turns into Wonder Woman.

“And she’s incredibly hardheaded. She keeps running
even when she’s tired. During the Olympics, she threw a shoe on the steeplechase. We nailed it back on before cross-country, and she just did great. I think she knows that this is her job, and she does it.”

Their seventeenth-place finish in the Olympic Games in Barcelona was the highest American placing, but Jil knows they probably could have done better. The cross-country course was incredibly long. Riders could choose to take lower jumps that took longer to get to, or higher jumps on more direct routes. Jil was the second American to go. Since her teammate Mike Plumb had already encountered trouble on the course, Jil’s coach told her to take Patrona through the slow routes.

“I had to have a clean round,” she explained. For the team to receive a score, three of the four American pairs riding in the cross-country event had to complete the course. (In fact, one of the American pairs was eliminated. The other two American pairs finished forty-eighth and fifty-second, and the United States team ended up tenth overall.) Jil had planned to take many of the slow routes anyway, but after talking to her coach, she switched to taking all of them. Patrona jumped flawlessly, but because they went so slowly they finished with forty-four time penalties.

Here’s how Jil described their Olympic cross-country round: “I was really nervous because of Patrona losing
that shoe. When you start worrying about things, your horse will pick up on it, so I tried to keep myself calm.

“You couldn’t go very fast, because it was so hot. Over the fifth fence, a big ditch-brush, she gave me a huge leap. It was a huge fence, and she was like, ‘All
right!
’ and she flew over it. I accidentally dropped my whip when she landed. I had to get her through three big water complexes with no whip, but she did just fine. We were very well prepared for what we were supposed to do.”

Jil was very pleased with Patrona’s performance that day, but she wishes they could ride the course again now that they are more experienced. “I would love to ride Patrona over it today and try all the hard, fast options,” she said.

Although they won’t return to Barcelona, Jil and Patrona hope to return to the Olympics. Patrona is still young. “She doesn’t have a mark on her,” Jil said proudly. “She’s a very bold, brassy horse”—a true Olympian.

For The Moment

Patrona was one of the youngest horses to ride in the Olympic Games. With her in Barcelona was one of the oldest horses ever to make an Olympic team: the show jumper For The Moment, owned and ridden by American Lisa Jacquin.

Like Jil Walton, Lisa didn’t realize at first that her horse might become a superstar. When she bought him he was a six-year-old ex-racehorse. Lisa planned to teach him to jump and then resell him. She named him For The Moment because that was how long she planned to keep him.

“We knew he had the athletic ability to be a great horse,” Lisa said. “His biggest problem was that he was difficult in his mind. He didn’t want to be disciplined enough to be ridable.”

Within two or three years, however, For The Moment was listening to Lisa well enough that she could steer him through the tricky, tight turns on a show-jumping course. At that point she began to realize just how good he was.

“There are a lot of good horses,” Lisa said, “but not a lot that want to be great. Like people, some horses don’t push themselves hard enough to do their best. Great horses have to have a little bit more fire.” For The Moment has plenty of fire.

The big bay Thoroughbred first made the Olympic team in 1988 and helped the United States win the team silver medal in Seoul. In Barcelona the United States placed fifth in show jumping.

At age nineteen, in the 1992 games, For The Moment was considered extremely old for an Olympic horse. What
about when he’s twenty-three? For The Moment is still healthy and still competing at the highest levels. “He’s as good as ever,” Lisa said. These days she saves him for big events and plans his schedule carefully so that he doesn’t get tired. But if he’s ready to try out for the 1996 games in Atlanta, Lisa will let him. For The Moment just might become the only three-time American Olympic horse.

Snowbound

Two other American show jumpers besides For The Moment have competed in two Olympic Games. The first, a brilliant horse named Snowbound, was also the first horse from the United States to win an individual gold medal.

Like For The Moment, Snowbound was an ex-racehorse. While at the racetrack he injured the tendons in his legs, and during his whole show-jumping career these injuries affected him. He did not compete often, but when he did he usually won. His rider, William Steinkraus, said he had “the heart of a lion and the agility of a cat.” Snowbound won his gold in 1968. In 1972 he again made the Olympic team but did poorly because his legs were hurting him again. After that Olympics he was retired to a farm in Ireland.

Touch of Class and Abdullah

Touch of Class and Abdullah made history in the individual show-jumping competition in the 1984 Olympics. Touch of Class, a tiny bay Thoroughbred mare, was ridden by an American named Joe Fargis. Abdullah, a big gray German-bred Trakehner stallion, was ridden by Joe Fargis’s friend and business partner, Conrad Homfeld.

Olympic show-jumping competition takes place over several days, and the horses jump several rounds. Abdullah was outstanding, but Touch of Class was a bit better. The mare knocked down only one fence in four days of competition. She won the individual gold medal, and Abdullah, close on her heels, won the silver. The United States won the team gold medal as well.

Halla

Halla was a fairy-tale mare who made Hans Gunter-Winkler’s dream come true. Hans Gunter-Winkler was a famous German show jumper who rode on six Olympic teams and won seven medals, five of them gold. Halla was a difficult, sensitive mare. Many German riders tried her and thought she was too hard to ride, but Hans liked her. He rode her in his first Olympics in 1956.

As always, the top three scores from the four riders on a
team counted toward the team score. The Germans were doing very well, but one of their horses became ill and had to be removed from the competition. This meant that the other three had to finish the course.

Halla was jumping brilliantly. With one round to go, she was in first place, and so was the German team. But as she landed after the final fence, she tripped and nearly fell. Hans Gunter-Winkler managed to stay on (if he’d fallen, they would have been eliminated), but he injured his stomach muscles severely. He had to ride the final round only a few hours later.

Hans’s teammates had to lift him into his saddle. He could barely hold on. Halla was so hard to ride that no one thought she would jump a single fence. Hans couldn’t tell her what to do—and surely she would never do it on her own.

But she did. Halla jumped a perfect round with Hans clinging to her back, and together they won the individual gold medal and the team gold medal for Germany.

Charisma

Charisma was another late-blooming horse, but he went on to become one of the greatest three-day event champions of all time. New Zealand rider Mark Todd
found Charisma at a small stable in New Zealand. At the time Charisma was named Podge. He was small and plain. He had never done anything spectacular, and no one expected that he ever would. When Mark first saw him, he thought Podge looked like “a fat, hairy pony.” Mark gave Podge a try only because he had driven a long way to see him. Once in the saddle, however, Mark liked the horse’s movement and attitude. He bought him and renamed him Charisma.

At age thirteen Charisma won the individual three-day event gold medal at the Olympics in Los Angeles. Mark was a dairy farmer, and he had sold most of his herd to pay for his trip to the Olympics. Charisma’s gold made it all worthwhile.

In 1988 Charisma, now seventeen, qualified for the Olympics in Seoul. Eventing is such a difficult sport that most horses don’t compete at the top for very long—seventeen-year-old Charisma was like a fifty-year-old basketball star! At each phase of the event Mark promised his little horse, “This is your last dressage test.… This is your last trip cross-country.”

Charisma won the individual gold again. When the three medal winners rode up to the platform, little Charisma was by far the shortest horse. Then the riders dismounted—and Mark Todd was by far the tallest rider! They looked mismatched, but everyone knew by then
that they were a perfect pair. True to his promise, Mark retired Charisma immediately after the games.

Stroller

Stroller was not a great horse. He was a great pony. When British rider Marion Coakes was a young girl, she competed him in pony jumper classes. Stroller was a truly brilliant jumper. When Marion turned eighteen and had to move on to adult classes, her parents wanted her to get a full-sized horse. Stroller was only fifty-eight inches tall at the shoulder—most jumpers are sixty-six inches tall or taller, and the jumps themselves are often five feet tall. No pony had ever done well in open—adult—jumping. But Marion believed Stroller would, and she wanted to keep him.

She turned out to be right: Tiny Stroller flew over fences that were higher than his head. Not only did he make the Olympic show-jumping team in 1968, he won the individual silver medal! Stroller was dynamite—a pony, but, like the others, a true gold medal horse.