“Let him finish,” Mom said. She smiled now. “And by the way? Veteran just means old.”
Mike Tirico turned to Bitsy Morrissey now.
“Any prediction on who’s next?” he said.
“It has to be Rich Grayson and Becky McCabe,” she said. “It’s just the question of who’s the alternate.”
“Out with it!” Grandmother yelled.
I hid my face behind a pillow, knees up to my chest, the way I would when I was watching a scary movie in this room when I was a kid.
One more pause from Mike Tirico.
Then he smiled and said, “The third rider on the team is…Becky McCabe.” He smiled. “The young woman Bitsy called the outlier is in. And she’s going to compete alongside her mother!”
More cheering in the room, even louder than before. We never heard Mike Tirico announce that Rich was the alternate.
Now I got off the couch and went over and hugged my mother.
“Damn,” I said, “we did it.”
“Didn’t we, though?” she said.
Paris
ONE HUNDRED SIXTEEN
MOM AND I scored a two-bedroom apartment at the Olympic Village, which had been built in the Seine-Saint-Denis area outside of Paris. Mom had said that at her age, she was too old for dorm life. But the place was new, clean, spacious, even quiet, despite the fact that there were fifteen thousand athletes from all over the world living in the Village. And when we weren’t riding, we were hanging out at the Hotel Pont Royal downtown, where Grandmother had booked rooms for her and Gus.
We’d been in Paris a full week before marching with the United States team in the Opening Ceremonies. Me and Mom, along with the NBA players and tennis players and America’s best golfers, swimmers, and track and field stars filed into the Stade de France, which became the selfie capital of the world.
When we weren’t riding, we’d all eaten well and seen as many of the obligatory tourist sights as we could. Mom had occasionally gotten Gus to go along with her and Grandmother and me, even though he kept saying that the only tourist attraction he cared about was the inside of the ring where our competition would be held, about twelve miles outside of central Paris, at the Chateau de Versailles. That’s where they’d built the horse park for equestrian events. The ring, the far end of the property near the Grand Canal, had officially been named Etoile Royale. Gus just called it “The Royal.”
As much as he liked to be a professional grump, though, he was clearly enjoying himself. He was even working well with an old competitor of his, Charlie Benedict, the official show-jumping boss for the US team. His title was “Chef d’Equipe.” Gus said that made him sound like he should be cooking at one of the fancy restaurants where we’d been eating. Charlie and Gus were the same age and had come up through the ranks together. Everybody had figured Charlie as an alternate on the team that went to Beijing in 2008. That was before Gus got hurt. But now they’d made it to Paris together, with our team, enduring the wait for the first day of competition.
Which had now blessedly arrived. There were still two hours before the competition would begin. But we were all out walking the course. You got out there a lot earlier at the Olympics.
“Long way from Wellington, right?” Charlie said to me.
“I keep looking around for Marie Antoinette’s horse,” I said.
Mom said, “Here’s hoping things work out better for us in the end than they did for her.”
Seventy-five riders today, from all over the world, in the qualifying round. By the end of the afternoon, that number would be cut down to the thirty who’d compete for the individual gold medal two days from now, on Friday night. After that there would be a two-round competition for the team gold medal, beginning Sunday. It meant that after everything that had happened over the past few months, it all came down to these six days and nights. Yeah. Charlie Benedict was right, I thought. We are one hell of a long way from Wellington.
If there was any kind of favorite here, it was the Irish team, just because both Matthew Killeen and Eric Glynn had had such tremendous years, not just in the States but all over the world. But the draw for the qualifying was random. I was going forty-eighth in the order. Mom was going tenth.
We had moved over to the schooling ring, waiting for Seamus to arrive with Coronado. Gus was with Mom and me.
“Listen,” he said, “I’m not going to tell you that this is just another ring. You’re not idiots and neither am I. But once you get out there, then this does become every qualifier you’ve ever ridden in. You’ve got one job: Get to the next round. Today that means getting into the top thirty and living to fight another day.”