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.
The idea of the first rollback, that first sharp turn, was scaring me to death. Not Sky. She got over the jump, breezing.
By now the water was pouring into my eyes off my helmet. The course was getting muddier with every jump. Puddles were already forming. The rain was coming that hard.
I kept tight reins on Sky through the double. Then we were clearing the pool. No splash there, before we started splashing our way toward the next fence. I knew I couldn’t get reckless or go full throttle. But if I slowed down too much, I had no chance to win. And hadn’t come this far to lose.
I put my head down.
Rode my ride.
We got over the jump on the last rollback. She slid a little, but I got her squared up. She got over. No time to celebrate. I slowed her down, just slightly, coming into the triple.
But she went clean there.
We made our last turn and didn’t slide and got over the second-to-last jump and now it was just a sprint to the end of the course.
Or so I thought.
Sky’s hind legs slipped and came out from under her then.
She didn’t stop. But it was the same as her rearing up, even while still going forward between jumps. Just like that, the back of her was lower than her front and she started to go down.
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SIX
I HAD SEEN IT HAPPEN to riders before, their horse going backward and going down when their legs came out from under them that way, sometimes with the rider still in the saddle, sometimes with disastrous results.
It was happening to Sky now.
At least she was still going forward. If she could keep doing that, if she could stay up, we still had a chance. But whatever I was going to do to help her, I had to do right now.