Israeli Horseman Saddles Up for Summer Olympics
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Reprinted from
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When Oded Shimoni competes at the Athens Olympics this summer,
he could do more than win a medal. He could make history.
Shimoni is the first Israeli to qualify for an Olympic equestrian
event. He will compete in dressage, in which riders lead their horses
through a series of prescribed movements; scores are based on the
horse’s accuracy and response to commands.
In modern times, Germany has dominated dressage at the Olympics,
consistently taking home the medals in recent games: “It’s
a very old sport, and a very German sport,” Shimoni told the
Forward. Although Shimoni spends his winters riding his gelding
on a sunny farm in rural Florida, he — like many of his peers
— spends much of the year on Germany’s preeminent dressage
training grounds.
Shimoni is proud that he has established a reputation for Israel
as a contender in dressage. “It took me a few years to be
accepted,” he explained. “There are not many judges
in the world who don’t know me. There are not many people
in the international circuit who don’t know me.”
Shimoni, 41, qualified for the Olympics two weeks ago in Florida,
when he edged out a female rider from Belarus. He will be part of
a four-person European equestrian team. (At the Olympics, Israel
is considered part of European League Group C.) Although there are
other Israeli equestrians, none will compete for Olympic representation
this year, because they lack suitable horses, due to a combination
of circumstance and limited resources. “In this sport, you
are totally dependent on what you are sitting on,” he said.
If a horse has an injury or doesn’t fit well with a rider,
it can compromise one’s score.
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| Shimoni atop Glenstern. |
Shimoni’s horse Glenstern was not sound enough to compete
for Olympic qualification. So a German former student of his lent
her 17-year-old horse Falco to Shimoni for the Olympics qualifying
competition. Shimoni has yet to decide which horse he will ride
in Athens.
Shimoni has not always groomed himself for Olympic competition.
He discovered horse riding at age 13 through a government-sponsored
program in his hometown of Ramat Gan. He took to it immediately,
and though the sport is expensive, he worked in stables in exchange
for training lessons and riding time. After he finished his army
service in the mid-1980s, Shimoni left Israel to pursue his equestrian
interests. He spent two years working with Israeli trainer and competitor
David Pincus in England and also trained in Switzerland with George
Wahl, a world-renowned dressage trainer.
Shimoni represented Israel for the first time in 1998 at the World
Equestrian Games in Rome. The Israeli government, however, does
not offer financial assistance to sportsmen like Shimoni. “In
Israel we have some great athletes, but unfortunately, the number
one priority of money-spending in Israel is in security,”
Shimoni lamented.
Even prize-winning equestrians earn virtually no money in competitions,
so Shimoni supports himself through Kingsclere Inc., a private dressage
training business in Palm Beach, Fla. and New York that he has been
running with fellow equestrian and partner Nancy Later for 17 years.
His Olympic bid will require more money, however: Shimoni estimates
his costs for competing in Athens to be $100,000. Most of that he
hopes to raise through donations via Maccabi USA/Sports for Israel.
The group has collected money for him in the past, and continues
to funnel him funds that donors have earmarked for dressage, in
which Shimoni is the only recipient. Shimoni has already garnered
product sponsorship from the Der-Dau boot company, a famous riding-boot
manufacturer. He also hopes to raise money through speaking engagements
and events in the Jewish community.
Kenneth Braddick — Shimoni’s friend of 16 years and
the founder, editor and publisher of Horse Deals US, a magazine
focusing on equestrian sports — has a plan to help Shimoni
raise more funds by creating a book about the Israeli’s “road
to the Acropolis.”
Braddick believes Shimoni has a strong shot at a medal in Athens.
“Familiarity counts,” he noted. “Now all the judges
know him. Now instead of looking at him as someone new, they look
at him as someone who’s paid his dues. So I suspect he’ll
do very well.”
The son of Holocaust survivors from Hungary, Shimoni will compete
in Athens against an American team that includes his friend Robert
Dover, a five-time Olympian who is also a fellow Jew — “which
is unusual,” Braddick mused. “It tends to be a somewhat
WASPy sport. It’s changing obviously, but I think a lot of
it is traditional, the landed gentry.”
When asked about competing against another Jewish equestrian, Shimoni
replied, “For me they are all Americans. I am competing against
the performance.”
The roots of dressage are usually traced back to ancient Greece,
where chariot fighting involved similar skills. But some archaeologists
suggest that the sport may have its roots even further back, in
ancient Israel, which puts Shimoni’s achievements in a different
historical perspective.
Deborah Cantrell, a doctoral student at Vanderbilt University who
is writing her dissertation on the horsemen of Israel, said her
academic research — involving extensive archaeological digs
in Tel Megiddo National Park in Israel (the legendary battleground
prophesied as the setting for the ultimate clash of Armageddon)
— has shown that ancient Israelites were prominent horsemen
as long ago as the eighth century BCE, long before the classical
period in Greece. “At Megiddo was likely the largest horse-training
center in the Iron Age period,” she said, noting that the
Bible and ancient historical texts claim Israelite King Ahab had
the largest chariot fleet in the Middle East at the time.
Cantrell, a horse-breeder who has been friends with Shimoni for
eight years and gave him his primary horse, Glenstern, said that
Shimoni’s Olympic quest is even more significant because of
the history it echoes. “Getting Israel in the Olympics for
the first time ever to me is exciting,” she said. “It’s
really something that should happen, because in antiquity, the best
horsemen in the world were from Israel.”
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Sara Liss is the co-founder
of Petakim and a freelance writer living in Miami.
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