With it being an (unusual) Olympic year, it feels prudent on this International Women’s Day to spotlight a woman who made Olympic Eventing history by being the first female rider to win an individual silver medal: Karen Stives. That Games, the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, was actually the first Olympics in which a woman won any individual eventing medal, and both Karen Stives and Great Britain’s Virginia Holgate, who won the bronze that year, can both lay claim to the title of being the first women individual medalists in our sport. The U.S.’s Torrance Watkins (neé Fleischmann) also finished in fourth place that year.
The video above begins part of the way through Karen’s fabulous double clear cross country round aboard Ben Arthur, which left her in the lead heading into the final phase the next day. Unfortunately, Ben tipped a rail at the second element of a triple combination, three jumping efforts from home, which lost Karen the individual gold. More importantly to Karen, however, was that just the single rail still meant that USA would take home the team gold medal. (You can also watch Karen’s show jumping round here, though the audio and video quality is not the best.)
“When I went into the show jumping arena, I knew both the team and individual gold medals were within our reach. But I couldn’t let myself think about that,” Karen said in an interview with Horse Illustrated in 2008.
“Show jumping was always Ben’s weakest phase, so I was incredibly relieved to have just one rail down, even though that meant losing the individual gold medal. It was the team medal that mattered most. The Brits, Australians and Germans fielded incredibly strong teams that year, so we really had our work cut out for us to win any medal, much less the gold.”
As we know, equestrian disciplines are the only Olympic sport where men and women compete directly against each other, which superficially makes equality in this sport seem like a moot point. But given that fact, and given that there are so many women competing in eventing, it seems impossible to have never had a female individual gold medalist in the sport, yet that’s the reality. Several women, Karen, being the first and Gina Miles in Beijing 2008 being the most recent, have won individual silver medals — but we still have yet to break that gold ceiling, so to speak.
Karen Stives was also the most recent woman to be named USEA Rider of the Year in 1981, 39 years prior to Liz Halliday-Sharp earning the title in 2020. Despite the number of fierce female competitors in the sport, it appears that we still have a ways to go in order for success as a female rider in this industry to be truly on a level playing field — and I, personally, don’t believe that’s due to a lack of tough, driven female competitors out there.
After the conclusion of Karen’s round in the above video, there’s an interview with her and Mike Plumb, with whom Karen was working and training with at the time. Mike Plumb is an extremely accomplished horseperson in his own right, having won individual silver himself two Games prior at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, and was a member of 1984 gold medal winning team alongside Karen, finishing 10th individually himself. It would be neglectful of me, especially on International Women’s Day, not to point out Karen’s great poise throughout this interview.
