It was the achievement he had been working towards since childhood, years of graft and practice distilled into less than a minute in a Tokyo arena. So what does Ben Maher recall about the foot-perfect round that earned him the individual jumping gold at the Olympics in August?
“I don’t really remember anything,” he says, which seems a shame, as his 37.85sec aboard Explosion W was flawless from start to finish. But perhaps it had to be that way. The kid whose enthusiasm for show jumping was fired by a visit to the London International Horse Show decades earlier was still in there somewhere, but his 38-year-old brain flipped to short-term memory only, keeping him in the zone as the fractions ticked away.
“Everything happened really fast,” he says, “much faster than I was expecting. I won the individual qualifier on the first day so I should have been last in the [six-person] jump-off, which I guess would be like pole position.
“It wasn’t possible to see what was happening in the arena from the final warmup ring so I didn’t even know how fast everybody went or who had jumped clear. I just had to take every risk and every chance and that’s what I did. Sometimes it’s a good thing when you don’t watch the others.”
Maher shaved less than 0.2sec off the leader’s time and then watched as two rivals failed to better him.
“London [where he won team gold] was an incredible atmosphere, we’ll never get anything like that again,” he says, “while in Tokyo, there was nobody there and we weren’t allowed out, but as a personal moment Tokyo will be hard to top.”
He will be back at the event where it all started for him this week, though not at the famous venue that has staged the London International Horse Show since 1972. While Olympia is being redeveloped, it is moving to ExCeL London in Newham, with the first of its five days on Thursday.
“It’s just a great atmosphere,” he says. “If you love horses, if you don’t love horses … that’s what so unique about that horse show, you get all different people from all walks of life and that’s what our sport should be about.
“There’s a lot of kids and younger, aspiring riders and that’s the only show I go to where you have to pull your hat down and run for it if you want to get somewhere quickly.
“But it’s a nice feeling, I can remember being one of those kids once when we got tickets one night to watch a jumping class, so I try to give as much time to give something back, say hi to people and give autographs. And I try to take the whole team, even the ones behind the scenes who don’t normally travel.”
Maher’s team is based at Elsenham Stud, a couple of miles from Stansted Airport on the border of Hertfordshire and Essex. It is the hub of an operation that sends horses thousands of miles to compete. As he spoke at a recent media day, one horsebox the size of an locomotive has just returned from Prague and another heading out of the gates for Scandinavia.
It is a year-round business that ensured he had little time to dwell on his Olympic success or take a week or two to wind down in the spectacular surroundings of the former thoroughbred stud Maher has been developing and improving for about 15 years.
“Occasionally you get a week at home, but it’s rare,” he says. “I fly back on a Sunday evening and typically fly again on a Wednesday. I’ve driven the truck in the past and I still can, but if do all those things now, I just don’t get anywhere.
“Mentally, [the Olympic success] has changed me maybe. I’m a little more at ease and it was quite a long wait and buildup over the last couple of years. But physically, day-to-day, it doesn’t change anything. We still come home and have the puppies to look after and a house to clean.”
The climax of the jumping in Tokyo, as six riders took on a demanding circuit against the clock, was a memorable end to the competition. The jumping in the modern pentathlon was memorable too, but for very different reasons, after a German coach was seen punching a horse after it refused a jump. As a result, it seems showjumping may be replaced by cycling in Paris in 2024, but Maher does not expect the wider discipline to suffer in the fallout.
“I didn’t see it, but I heard about it,” he says. “Unfortunately, there are always some individuals that ruin it for everyone else. It’s a shame when traditional things in sport have to change like that, but we’re in a different era now and when they bring in horses [for the modern pentathlon], the riders have never seen the horse and a lot of the horses have never seen an environment like that.
“With horses, there’s a relationship you have that you build over time. Our horses are trained and produced for the right time, they’ve been under lights and they’ve seen huge arenas. A lot of those horses are not and it’s not a great balance when you add all those elements in.”
In the Horse Show’s glory years in the late 1970s and 80s, millions of BBC viewers would tune in after the Nine O’Clock News and Harvey Smith and David Broome were household names. “It’s tough nowadays,” Maher says.
“A lot of sports are maybe pushed harder than the one we’re in. But it’s about accessibility. People called me this year and said they’d never watched showjumping before and couldn’t believe how fast the horses are over such big jumps. That’s what we need to put across.”
The London International Horse Show, ExCeL, 16-20 December. Some tickets still available at /https://londonhorseshow.com