The Horsewoman(98)

Now I was the one being asked to deliver. Me and my horse. You never knew until you were out there. You always had to wait to find out. And what I found out, quickly, was that Sky had saved her best for today.

These weren’t 1.6 m jumps; today felt half that high, as if we were covering speed bumps. By the time we got to the water jump, she was in the zone and so was I.

We cleared the water, breezed through the triple. I didn’t have to ask for anything. She just nailed it like a champ.

Two fences left. The hardest jumps behind us, the hardest turns. Made the last soft turn. Cleared the oxer.

One to go. To go clean and keep going to the real main event.

“Let’s go!” I heard myself yelling.

Yelling at myself by then.

But three strides before the fence I felt her stumble slightly.

It was almost as if she’d stepped in a hole. Her first wrong step all day. As she made it, she started to turn her head to the right. The rest of her started to follow.

Shit.

I gave her a kick and it got her head squared up. She still took off late, managing to get her forelegs up and over the bright green rail.

But one of her hind legs hit it hard.

Not just hit it, but rattled the living shit out of it.

I felt all the air come out of me at once. Knew it had to be going down. I’d heard it and felt it. Waited to hear it from the crowd, one way or another. Up or down.

And then the crowd cheered.

Only then was I able to exhale, get Sky and me turned around, and allow myself a look at the scoreboard. Knowing I didn’t need to be first. But still wanting to be first, wanting to beat them all, all day long.

76.8.

I’d gone faster than Mom, faster than the Irish guys, faster than everybody, at least for now. It wouldn’t help me in the jump-off. But Mom and I would be the last two riders out there in the jump-off.

I thought: Maybe this is the way the story is supposed to end.





ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOUR



THEY DIDN’T WASTE any time starting the jump-off. The cloud cover had broken into rain and the day was getting very dark, very fast. I’d been too busy to notice that they’d put the lights on at the top of Etoile Royale.

Matthew Killeen went clean. Eric Glynn didn’t. Then Simon LaRouche beat Matthew’s time and he was in first place and the home crowd pretty much lost its shit.

In the steady downpour, I hadn’t noticed Simon having any problem with the footing, didn’t see the rain affecting his horse.

Mom and I were in the gate.

Gus said to Mom, “You’ll be fine. You’re gonna beat the rain. But even if you don’t, the drainage for this ring is fantastic.”

“You know this how?” Mom said.

“Because it’s the Olympics, that’s why,” he said.

Mom was off the moment the buzzer sounded, trying to beat not only Simon’s time, but the rain. Sometimes she liked to take one more look around. Not today.

I knew Simon’s time was beatable, one hundred percent. Matthew had come in with 40.1. Simon was at 39.8. When we’d walked the jump-off course, I thought the winning time might be two seconds better than that. Simon had a really nice horse. He was a very good rider, especially in Europe. But he wasn’t the rider Mom was. And didn’t have the horse she had.

She had good pace from the start. In the early part of the course, nothing was slowing Mom and her horse. I hadn’t paid any attention to Simon’s splits, but my gut told me that neither he nor Matthew had attacked the course the way Mom was attacking it.

By now Coronado soared over the top rail, then cleared the water.

I closed my eyes as she came up on the second rollback. To me, this was her last real challenge, even more than the triple. If Coronado had a weakness, it was the way his size impacted sharp turns.

This time he lost just enough traction as he made his left turn, and she had no choice but to go outside instead of inside. Maybe cost her half a second. It wasn’t because she was afraid. She just couldn’t take a chance. And she knew that Simon still had a beatable time.

The triple now. I thought she had him too close to the second jump. But Coronado got over it. And the next one. And the next. If the rollback hadn’t been the last trouble for her on this course, the triple should have been. Wasn’t.

Just about everybody saw Mom’s time before she got Coronado turned around, still being careful with him as she slowed him to a walk.

39 flat. Nearly a second faster than Simon LaRouche. Going outside hadn’t cost her. As she was coming out of the ring, I was going in. I could see how happy she was. She smiled at me. I smiled back, and nodded, and then was past her.

The skies opened then.





ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIVE



IT HAPPENED THAT FAST. Within a half minute the rain was blowing sideways, and I could barely see the fences. An end-of-the-world storm in Etoile Royale.

Maybe if this were a Grand Prix in Wellington, in the middle of April, they would have stopped things right here and waited it out, waited for the storm to pass, even this late in the round. But it was the Olympics. The judges were one rider away—me—from awarding gold.

I needed to get around this course. It didn’t matter that the other riders, including Mom, had gone in better conditions. A storm like this would blow in and it didn’t matter that some of the riders had already gotten around a dry course and others were now going to ride in mud. It was part of the deal in our sport.