The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [62]
Meanwhile, back at the Garden, crews worked furiously, putting the last touches on the basement stables, layering ten to twelve inches of dirt over the steel platform floor, and hanging bunting and flags of all the represented nations from the balustrade. The National Horse Show social rituals, once interrupted by World War II and feared gone forever, were now back in full swing. The boxes in the “golden circle” around the show ring were known by their numbers—certain box numbers had been held by families for years, some as far back as the first show, in 1883. The names listed in the New York Social Register, the ultimate chronicle of snootiness, were originally taken from a list of box holders at the National Horse Show.
As society girl Tracy Lord said in The Philadelphia Story, “The prettiest sight in this fine pretty world is the privileged class enjoying its privileges.” When people came out to watch horse shows, the spectacle of the rich in their finery was as much of a draw as the horses. A New York social columnist in 1900 complained that it had become “a great trial for members of the working class to save their money for weeks to see society in its good clothes” at the National Horse Show; not much had changed by the mid-1950s, when one young reporter, “a girl in black stockings, scribbling furiously in a notebook,” wondered which cost more—the horses or the clothes. The expensive, tradition-bound, closed-off equestrian world was one of the last bastions of the upper-class elite.
During the eight-day course of the show at Madison Square Garden, the event featured in the New York Times no fewer than thirty-eight times. The annual spectacle was “the culmination of the social, sporting, and event calendars of the year,” the paper noted. The opening ceremony was broadcast live on television. There were classes for roadsters and pleasure horses, saddle horses and walkers, but the thrills and spills of the open jumper classes stirred the most passion from the crowd. Whichever horse won the open jumper division was acknowledged to be the top jumper in the show—and the top horse in the nation.
This year, Riviera Wonder was the hands-down favorite for that title, expected to repeat his performances of ’55 and ’56. Eleonora Sears’s gelding Diamant, a veteran of several Olympic outings, was considered a close second, after finishing reserve to Riviera Wonder two years in a row. Dave Kelley’s mare Andante, the champion in ’53 and ’54, was also a strong contender.
For Harry de Leyer, the show offered a chance to try out Sinjon against the best. Any horse could enter the class—but few had the skills to try. The courses were challenging, and the fences were high—a horse jumping over a five- or six-foot fence catapults a rider more than ten feet into the air. Riders wore no protective gear, and spectacular crashes happened frequently in this high-risk, high-stakes game. Like jockeys in thoroughbred races, the ranks of open jumper riders were filled with paid professionals—often born into the life as the sons of livery stable owners or other professional horsemen. There were always a few intrepid amateurs and the occasional female rider was starting to sift through, but this was no sport for sissies, and no sport for green horses, either. One wrong move over fences this size could cause a catastrophic crash; sometimes a rider or a horse fell so hard that he or she would never walk away.
The qualifying classes were scheduled for the weekday mornings, when the crowds were sparse. The top twelve from all those rounds would ride in front of capacity crowds during the evening performances,