In June 2020, An Eventful Life celebrated 10 years since the launch of the book that started everything for us
The book, An Eventful Life, published in 2010, provides a written and pictorial insight into the lives of five elite Australian Olympic eventing riders; Megan Jones, Sonja Johnson, Shane Rose, Wendy Schaeffer and Stuart Tinney and a young professional rider just starting out, Emma Scott
To celebrate the anniversary, we are sharing some excerpts from the book; this excerpt from the chapter on Olympic gold medallist Wendy Schaeffer covers the 'two tales within the amazing story' of winning Olympic gold after breaking her leg and the sad loss of her horse Sunburst ...
Wendy has no hesitation in saying that the highlight of her career so far is winning a gold medal at the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996. There are, however, two tales within this amazing story.
The first is the fairy tale of the young woman who rides her pony club horse at the Olympics and wins a gold medal. The second is the tale of Wendy breaking her leg nine weeks out from the Olympic Games. Thanks to grit, determination, and a metal plate and several screws keeping her leg together she still rode at the Olympic Games and won the gold medal. Put the two tales together and you have a story worthy of an Oscar.
“So many things went wrong in our preparation for Atlanta, which made the result even better than it would have been if the preparation had been perfect. Sunburst was simply amazing and tried so hard for me. I could never have wished to sit on a better horse.”
Having followed her mum’s eventing career and having been involved in team situations herself prior to the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Wendy already had an insight into the Australian selection process and she knew the selectors and how the whole system worked. She had also learnt that sometimes you just had to do what you believed was the right thing for you so, with that in mind, she chose to compete at Badminton in the spring of 1996. This was not a choice that went down well with some of the selectors, who pointed out to Wendy that Badminton was a big event and asked her whether she was really sure she wanted to do it. But Wendy had suffered other occasions where things had gone wrong following a safe path and this time she was going to stick with what she wanted.
“I wanted to do Badminton because if – for whatever reason – I didn’t get selected for the Games, at least I could say, ‘I’ve done Badminton’. Mind you, I felt quite confident about making the team for Atlanta, certainly more so than I had done in the past and probably more so than I have since.”
Her Badminton debut almost didn’t come off as Sunburst was suffering with a foot injury in the run-up to the great event and had to have four weeks off, during which Wendy could only walk and swim him to keep him fit. Wendy describes Badminton as “awesome” and it was only a few time penalties from cross country and show jumping, together with an uncharacteristic rail down while show jumping, that kept the pair a little way off the leaders.
Nevertheless, it was still a huge success, as they finished in eleventh place and won an award for the best-placed first timers. It certainly looked as if Wendy and Sunburst were in with more than a good chance of being on the Atlanta squad.
So, with Sunburst happily boarded with dressage trainer Maggie Doel, Wendy returned to Australia to compete her home-based horses at the final Gawler Three Day Event. The plan was to head back to the UK, collect Sunburst and join the team for training in Aitken, South Carolina. It was an ambitious plan, but this is a girl who tries to fit into a day what most of us would fit into a week. Back in South Australia, she took a truckload of horses to Naracoorte as a lead-up to Gawler.
With her Badminton success still vividly in her mind, Wendy set out on the one-star cross-country course on her relatively inexperienced horse, Whimsical Sun, with great confidence. Halfway around the course, however, Whimsical Sun – who wasn’t feeling as confident as her rider – had a problem at a bank complex which resulted in Wendy being thrown against the bank, crushing her leg. A trip to hospital confirmed her worst fears: she had broken two bones in the lower part of her leg. Her dream of representing her country in nine weeks’ time at the Olympics seemed to be over.
Looking back, Wendy admits she was probably a little naive about the whole situation and now sees that it was asking too much, not just of herself but everybody else, to come home in the middle of the season and compete horses she hadn’t ridden for more than two months. It was a hard lesson to learn. She sat, with her broken leg and crutches, receiving lots of sympathy from riders and supporters alike who had come to commiserate the fact that she would now miss out on the Olympic Games. But Wendy didn’t want their sympathy. She had made up her mind that she was going to Atlanta, and the small matter of a broken leg wasn’t going to stop her.
“I think it was a bit of dogmatic ignorance and I just held onto the belief that I could get better and make the team. I’m sure there were times when I thought I was a bit crazy and self-doubt crept in, but I don’t remember much of that. I just remember keeping focused on the goal. I just had to get there and I did get there and I will always be eternally grateful to the people both in Australia and in England who helped me get there.”
As Wendy worked on her road to recovery, Sunburst – who was totally oblivious to the drama going on halfway around the world – was being kept fit by a girl called Zoe, who worked at Maggie Doel’s yard, while Maggie continued his training on the flat. Wendy acknowledges that without their enormous help the Atlanta result could have been very different. The whole situation was bizarre, but it turned into an amazing journey as Wendy struggled back to fitness, undergoing physiotherapy sessions several times a day and pushing her body to do what her mind was convinced it could.
“I was lucky to find a surgeon called Tony Pohl who was prepared to operate and give me any chance at all of recovering as quickly as I needed to. He understood my dream of getting to Atlanta as he had competed in sport himself in South Africa and that, together with his great skill, made him by far the best person for the job. I truly believe that if I had had normal, conservative treatment I would never have made it to the Games. Tony is still a very special person in my life today because of what he did and I still catch up with him from time to time … I saw him recently when I broke my other leg, but that’s another story!”
“The tibia in my leg had a wedge in it that was shattered so they put screws in it to hold it together and they let the crack on the fibula heal itself. I was really lucky that the injury didn’t quite involve the ankle joint because that would have been much worse. While I was in hospital for six days I had some special splints made and a cast that could be zipped on and off for protection. It was awkward, slow and uncomfortable to get around, but not painful, and the casts allowed the calf to keep working and I could exercise the joint.
Two-and-a- half weeks after my operation I was back on a horse, albeit without stirrups, and less than two weeks later, after being given the all-clear from my doctors, I was back overseas riding Tommy. I had a hinge- brace made, which I was only allowed to use six weeks after my operation. Three weeks later I tried out the brace and I could walk quite well, but by week six I had lost a lot of calf muscle power and wasn’t pushing off very well. When Mum saw me in America she was pretty shocked and disappointed that I wasn’t walking better.”
After the usual stressful team training, Wendy was finally told that she had made it onto the Atlanta team – together with Andrew Hoy, Matt Ryan and Phillip Dutton (the first reserve and Wendy’s friend, Gill Rolton, was moved onto the team after the first day of dressage when Matt’s horse was withdrawn at the last minute). She felt a huge sense of relief – for Wendy, the selection process is always much tougher than the actual event you are hoping to be selected for.
By the time they arrived in Atlanta she was looking forward to the event itself, which she describes as the “easy” part of being at the Olympics. However, the opening ceremony proved to be quite a challenge for her as the athletes had to walk up a steep ramp to make their way into the Olympic stadium – not easy for someone who couldn’t walk very well.
“I was determined to march, but at the same time I was thinking it would be stupid to have an accident or be bumped or pushed, but it all went well and the whole experience was amazing. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
As Wendy walked the cross-country course, she was naively expecting it to be a little easier than the Badminton course she had done earlier in the year, but she was wrong. It was a tough course that would prove to cause quite a few problems. Her dressage test went well and she set off on the cross country feeling confident that she was sitting on a horse that was as good as any other at the Games.
“At that stage I still had that slight ignorance of youth, believing that everything would work out fine. Nothing really bad had ever happened to me at that stage … sure, breaking the leg wasn’t in the plan, but it had still worked out okay and here I was in Atlanta. There was a little more pressure, but I wasn’t as nervous as I might have been had I been a little older and a bit more worldly wise.”
The event went well for Wendy. She strapped up her leg and put together a good dressage test, blitzed around the cross country and finished by jumping a clear show-jumping round. She achieved the best result of the whole team and brought home a team gold medal to prove it. Had the rules for eventing been the same as they had been at previous Olympic Games, Wendy would have also taken home the individual gold medal.
She describes the medal ceremony as surreal, although at the time she didn’t really have an appreciation of just how special the whole experience was. It was something she had been working towards since she was a little girl, taking each step at a time, and to be standing on the podium was simply the reward for her hard work.
“I just loved the whole Atlanta experience. The strength of the relationship I had with Sunburst was really tested because of the unorthodox preparation we had. But I trusted him and he trusted me and we just got on with the job and enjoyed every moment.”
With the equestrian part of the Games over in the first week, the team had plenty of time to soak up the atmosphere during the rest of their stay and it was an ideal way to wrap up what had been an amazing journey. The Australian tabloids trumpeted the story of the twenty-one-year-old Australian girl who was the youngest ever rider to win an equestrian gold medal and Wendy came home to a barrage of media interviews. It was a time that she describes as a complete whirlwind, but good fun.
Great new sponsorship deals appeared from the South Australian TAB and the National Australia Bank, which bought Wendy some new horses and at that time it looked like nothing could stop the talented girl from pursuing her next goal of being selected for the 1998 World Equestrian Games.
As the post-Olympic frenzy settled down, it was back to work for Wendy and the reality of horses to work and lessons to teach. The fact that she had won a gold medal didn’t really make a lot of difference to her business, but at that time she didn’t see her business as a “proper” business anyway – it was just what she did. Looking back now she realises that her success at Atlanta should have been used in a much more pro-active way, but admits that, at twenty-two, running a business successfully wasn’t at the top of her priorities – she just wanted to win more medals.
No-one could have foreseen that Wendy’s Olympic story would have a tragic and dramatic end. The year after Atlanta, when Wendy was just twenty-two and still on a high from her Olympic glory, Sunburst died. It was a time that made her grow up fast.
She speaks a lot about her early days with reference to the innocence of youth, just going with the flow and a belief that anything was possible. Sunburst’s death is when she feels she lost that innocence. Up until that point the worst thing that had really happened to her was an occasional horse going lame or an injury to herself, but suddenly she had to deal with the reality that bad things can happen, and Sunburst’s death shook her to the core.
“I had to try hard to get a perspective on his death. If someone had said to me, ‘Okay, this is the deal – you will have this horse and he will take you to the Olympics and you will win a gold medal, but the following year the horse will break his leg’, I would have said ‘yes’.
I wouldn’t have missed that time with Sunburst for anything. His death in 1997, when he broke a leg in the paddock, was as freaky as his whole story had been. We never in our wildest dreams would have thought he could take me to the Olympics and equally we could never have imagined he could die that way.”
© An Eventful Life - Life Stories of Eventing Champions
Read the excerpt from the chapter on Megan Jones here
Read the excerpt from the chapter on Shane Rose here
Wendy presents the Sunburst Trophy each year at the Australian International 3 Day Event in Adelaide
