This weekend will mark a month since Port Authority, fondly known as Ollie, arrived back in Virginia from England, where he contested Badminton with his rider, Steph Rhodes-Bosch. After a fantastic campaign last year – 5th at Rolex, and a silver medal and 9th individually at the WEG, and a solid spring prep this season culminating in a second place at The Fork CIC 3*, no one could have blamed the Canadian camp for having high expectations of this pair. A lacklustre dressage on Friday however, was followed up by a cross country that ended just shy of the official finish, after a rider fall at fence 27 out of 30, the quarry, having had just the one stop coming out of the Hunstman’s Close at fence 24.
Four weeks later Steph has had time to reflect on her experience, and talked to me about it.
Since his return, Ollie has spent most of his days out in the paddock,
“Ollie had an uneventful trip back, while mine was a bit of an adventure! I left Heathrow on Tuesday afternoon at 2pm London time, and got back to my apartment in Virginia at 6pm EST on Thursday. He goes out for a varying number of hours each day; I’ll feed him his breakfast in the morning and then turn him out, and whenever it gets too buggy for him, he comes in. It’s been pretty good though, he’s been managing to stay outside for at least three or four hours every day. He jogged up really well when he got off the truck coming back, and he’s happy. I think I’ll start hacking him next week, and then I’ll have Dr. Ober come and make sure everything’s good before I put him back into flat work, but he looks good to me!”
All things considered, with the way the competition panned out, and then her nightmare journey back home, I told Steph, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she wanted to completely forget Badminton 2011, but she said that wasn’t the case at all,
“I absolutely don’t look back on it as a failure in any sense other than I didn’t cross the finish flags. He did a lot of the course, he did ten of the eleven minutes, he only had four obstacles left to go; we had our challenges through the course but every time you go out on cross country you have your challenges on course. Even though the result was what it was, I have a hard time thinking of it as a horrible experience or a fiasco or anything like that, I feel like it was such a positive experience, and a lot of those jumping efforts – you don’t really appreciate the opportunity to walk the course, ride the course, and then watch the best in the world do exactly the same thing. I’ve been watching videos of Badminton since I was a child, but it’s completely different to go and walk it, and it’s completely different again to go and ride it, to feel what it feels like, and then watch other people do it on different types of horses. It was an invaluable experience and I don’t think you can really appreciate it until you’ve done it and realised what you’ve got from it.”
“I think the objective of going to England was definitely to have a dry run for next summer, and see how the horses, and riders, were going to react. For myself, the logistics of getting everything organised, and what it all entails – I don’t think you can really understand that until you’ve done it. I think the team takes care of a lot more of the logistics when it’s an Olympics type situation, so the fact that I had to do a lot of my own organising for the Badminton trip, means that if I get to go to London next summer, it’s going to be the second time around and I’m going to have more assistance, so a) it won’t be a brand new thing and b) I don’t think it will be quite as taxing because there’s a little more involvement from the national team, as far as traveling in a herd and everyone being on the same plan.”
“I knew that the reason we were being asked to go was because it was going to be unlike anything we’d ever seen before so that was definitely something I’d anticipated, but it was one hundred percent a completely different experience to anything I’ve ever had before at an event. I’m so glad that I got to see our sport, the sport that we all think
we’re really familiar with, to see it run that way, with that many really great horses and riders, the impeccable way the organising committee put it all on. To see the pinnacle of our sport they way it’s supposed to be, to witness that was a pretty eye-opening experience; even if you do expect it going in, you just can’t know what the actual reality of it is until you’ve been in the middle of it.”
Badminton also happened to be the first event that Steph was ever held on course, about two-thirds of the way round, just after the Lake, and I asked her how she thought this affected Ollie, and her, both mentally and physically,
“Well, I don’t know what would have happened if we hadn’t have been held, but I’ve never been held before, ever, and neither has my horse, obviously. I definitely felt as though he got distracted, and wound down a bit; you know how when they go cross country they get in that rhythm and then their adrenalin’s going and they are in that mode, we definitely lost that, but it’s hard to know what he would have felt like if he hadn’t been held. It’s hard to guess what would have happened in different circumstances, but I definitely noticed that he was not himself, not as focused afterwards.”
“That’s something I learned from having a horse that was unfocused and tired, I probably could use a different bit of some sort in the future, just to prevent the steering issues and fatigue that resulted from that. He goes in a two ring elevator type bit, and I think that when he was distracted and tired he then became a little bit unsteerable, there were just half a dozen things that led to my fall, but the hold was definitely something you want to have a game plan for, and I didn’t. Also I’ve watched the video of Mark Todd in the quarry over and over again and tried to figure out ways I could have got my horse’s face up like that. I felt like if I could have only helped my horse out the way he helped his horse out. I didn’t really have enough respect for quite how tired my horse was at that point, and I think if I had ridden around Badminton twenty-something times like Mark Todd, then maybe I would have had that recognition of what a really tired horse feels like, and needs.”
Despite the intensity of the competition, I wondered, are there moments when she could just marvel at the fact that she was riding at Badminton, and actually enjoy it?
“Oh my Gosh, YES, absolutely! Once I got there and had a chance to look around, I felt that ‘Oh my gosh, I’m at Badminton’ thing pretty constantly throughout the week. That was one of the things I was sorry I didn’t get to experience at Rolex last year, because I was so concentrated on staying focused that I didn’t ever get to feel super-excited. I don’t think my focus suffered as a result of my enjoying the moment a bit more this time around, our issues were more a result of circumstance. I did have that thought to myself after Badminton, that that was the most relaxed during the day I’ve ever been at a competition, I let myself be positively affected by the atmosphere where I was, which I definitely did not do at Rolex, I shut that whole part off because I was worried that if I got excited then that would translate into getting nervous…but I don’t think the results at Badminton really had anything to do with my willingness to get a little more excited about it, which is good because next time I won’t be reluctant to let myself feel that way, and it’s so much fun. I don’t want to take all the enjoyment out of it just because I’m trying to be competitive.”
I asked Steph what she’ll remember most about her first Badminton,
“Just the sheer scope of all of it. The depth of the personnel that they have: the fact that when you walk into the office everyone asks how they can help you, it’s absolutely 100% customer service. Apart from that…everything! Everything about that week and that event is an example of what every other event in the world should strive to be. Great riders, great quality of horses, obviously there’s a time and a place for extremely difficult cross country courses and that’s one of them, the course design, the course preparation, everything was exactly how I hoped it would have been. I can honestly say that it was the best overall experience of a horse show I’ve ever had, even though it wasn’t the best overall competitive experience I’ve ever had. ”
After talking to Canadian Team Coach David O’Connor, Steph has mapped out a tentative schedule for Ollie this autumn,
“We have plans – obviously plans are subject to change (!) but we have a Plan A which is working towards the FairHill 3* in the Fall. In order to get from here to there, we need to do a preliminary at the second Maryland Horse Trials in mid-July, and then intermediate at probably Waredaca, with tons of dressage lessons in between, and then I’ll probably just run Plantation and Morven Park advanced horse trials. Right now that’s the tentative plan; we’re not trying to run too many cross country courses between now and then. I think the preliminary and intermediate will be really good for him to get out and get back to how much he really enjoys it, because he really does love to go cross country. I think it will be nice for him to go out and have it be incredibly easy a couple of times. Then just focusing on trying to deal with the new mentality I’ve got from him these days; his attitude as he’s been going advanced for longer and longer has changed, he’s becoming less of the casual, laid back kind of guy that he has been, and is becoming a little bit more intense in character so we’ve just got to try and take care of that on the flat a bit better so it doesn’t come across as tension.”
Although Steph and Ollie’s rise to the top has been far from easy,( she’s one of the hardest working event riders on the circuit, and all event riders work hard !) until this point it had all gone pretty well. It must have been hard to have Badminton be the one event when things started to unravel,
“I grew up with Rebecca Howard, and if there’s anybody who’s an example of what can go wrong, like Murphy’s Law, then she’s it but also of grace and resilience and character. She’s had so many hard breaks and I’ve known her forever, and I know that with horses nothing is guaranteed, and I’ve had that drummed into me since I was a young kid. Rebecca’s mother and my mother are very close, and one thing her mother has always said to my mum and I, is that with horses you can work really hard, but it’s about how the stars line up on that day, sometimes there’s just nothing you can do about it. I’ve always been so lucky in the past with this horse, so yes, it was really hard to be on the wrong end of it; to be in a situation where I really felt like we were prepared and all that good stuff, and for one reason or another, things just didn’t quite work out, it’s hard, but I don’t necessarily feel like I was unprepared for it, I’ve had it made very clear to me the majority of my life that at some point things don’t go the way you want them to, and you just have to deal with it.”
“Honest to goodness, even the very moment I fell off, I looked at his legs, and was just relieved. The first real emotion I felt was not, ‘oh crap,I just fell off at Badminton’, I looked at him, realised he was okay, and my first clear thought was to thank God that he was alright. Then obviously I was pissed, nobody wants to fall off at the tenth minute marker, almost home. If I’d have got over that fence we would have made it home and I would have had a chance to show-jump and it all would have been fine, that’s obviously extremely frustrating and I went through the whole gamut of emotions that day, but at the end of it I 100% feel like, of all the things to happen at Badminton to a tired horse, I got one of the most minor outcomes ever, and I have to be incredibly grateful. Maybe that’s my good luck, that I had a little shake-up but maybe my form of good luck is we’ll go again.”
Canada sent three combinations to Badminton this year, and although none of them perhaps performed as well as they’d hoped, the fact that that they all started speaks to Canada’s increased depth and strength of it’s event squad, and they will be even more of a force to be reckoned with next year,
“We were all really excited to send three riders that have horses that are really, truly world-class horses. All three of us had our moment when it was less than ideal circumstances so I wouldn’t say that we all had the weekend we were hoping to have, but given a little extra in the luck department we could have been right up there with everybody else. I think the team spirit was a little discouraged because of the end result but we were all so excited to have the opportunity to go abroad.”
Steph talked to Team Coach David O’Connor following the event,
“Our emotions have evolved since Badminton; quite honestly none of us were very proud of ourselves at the end of the weekend. The four of us, David included, none of us was even remotely satisfied. David is so competitive, and he takes all of his work very personally, which is what makes him so good at what he does, because he’s so involved. All three of us had the opportunity to go and be really good, and our best is a whole hell of a lot better than what we did, so no, none of us were pleased at all, but I think we’ve all had a chance to cool down, analyse it, realise and recognise what we should take away from it, and be able to just move forward with that. None of us are dwelling on it anymore, but definitely next year we’ve got this whole list of things that we are now familiar with, that we can take and use. I don’t think any of us need to continue to be really upset about what happened because I don’t think what happened is going to mark us for what we are and go into the future with us, I just think it’s something that happened. I really hope that the other girls feel that way too. It’s horses…it’s not because we weren’t ready, we didn’t make gigantic mistakes that we can’t fix, it’s not that we don’t have the skills, or the coaching or the horses, it was just that on that day in that moment those were the things that happened. Now we have the experience to make sure that we don’t allow those same situations to happen again.”
Steph still has the ride on her nice little sale horse Kojo, who moves up to training level at Rubicon, as well as some other rides this summer, but look out for her and Port Authority at the big events this autumn, and indeed the entire Canadian squad next year. I’d like to thank Steph wholeheartedly for talking so frankly about a subject that can’t be easy, and thank you for reading. Go Steph and Ollie, and go Eventing!
