The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [45]
A show jumper is an equine athlete. He performs feats that are based on a horse’s natural abilities, but like those of a ballet dancer, those abilities have been honed to a level of control, skill, and grace that does not exist without hours of disciplined training. Not every horse is born to be a world-class athlete—but some are. Some horses embody that desire to excel seen in every great athlete. Those are the horses that eventually star in the sport horse pantheon.
What makes the sport of riding so unpredictable and endlessly alluring is that it requires a partnership. Just as the most brilliant rider is nothing without a great horse, so the greatest horse cannot excel without an equally talented rider. As Vladimir Littauer explained in his classic 1931 instructional manual Jumping the Horse, success over a jump depends largely on the rider himself. A “bad rider will disturb [the horse], a good one will not interfere with him; a very good one will help him over.” In the 1950s, two main riding styles dominated in jumper competitions in the United States. One was the chiefly self-taught style of the professionals, mostly men, many of them Irish, who passed along horsemastership from father to son. The other was the American military style, influenced by the classical traditions of European riding.
The equestrian arts have a written history dating back to the Greeks. Styles of riding have evolved over the years; the very upright posture and long stirrups popular in the Middle Ages to accommodate knights in armor gave way to a more forward posture, where a rider keeps his weight balanced. In the past, people riding jumpers did not understand the physics of the jumping horse, and the rider allowed his weight to fall back over the fence—this is the position seen in old hunting prints. Federico Caprilli, the chief riding instructor of the Italian cavalry in the late nineteenth century, discovered that if a rider kept his weight forward over a fence, staying with the horse’s center of gravity, the rider would be more secure and the horse could jump better. This forward position soon swept across Europe and the United States. With the change in the rider’s seat, horses could consistently clear high fences, paving the way for the development of the sport of show jumping.
By the mid-twentieth century, even self-taught professional riders had adopted some version of the forward seat. But unlike the classically trained U.S. cavalry riders, whose refined style reflected the influence of the European riding schools, the style of self-taught professionals was often unorthodox. A classically trained rider will keep his lower leg mostly perpendicular over a fence, his back straight, and his eyes looking forward. His hands will release forward, giving the horse room to stretch out his neck. A self-taught rider may achieve the same effect but without the same style, hurling his weight forward over the big jumps, his back rounded, or he may duck down over the horse’s neck, letting his lower legs slide out behind him.
Harry’s riding style was a hybrid of these two. He did not have the military training that had influenced many of the top American riders, but his style was less eccentric than those of some of the other self-taught riders. His balance over the fences was impeccable, allowing him to stay with the horse’s motion even over big obstacles.
Harry reset the poles and circled back again, approaching the cavaletti at a brisk trot. Again Snowman stumbled, scattering the poles. But Harry soldiered on, determined to find the key to unlock this horse’s ability.
Again through the cavaletti, and again the poles scattered. Harry looked up at the darkening sky, circled around,