Unbreakable
Page 4
The Aintree influence is easy to discern. The Velká Pardubická is just a furlong or so shorter than the Grand National – and the jumps are tough enough for merely finishing to be a commendable achievement. Other aspects of the challenge are unique to Pardubice. The route starts and finishes on the racecourse but was not, in those early days, confined to it. The founders insisted that half of the race be run across ploughed fields, and so the route digressed significantly into the local farmland. The stamina-sapping effects greatly increased the difficulty of the jumps; which was unfortunate, because the man overseeing the design of the jumps was Oktavian.
It took several years for the course and its obstacles to settle down into anything resembling their current form. There were only twenty-four when the race was first run, but most of the notorious jumps were there from the beginning and are still there today: the Big English Fence (a thick hedge with a wooden fence on the far side), the Snake Ditch (a wide, water-filled ditch with a drop of about two feet from take-off to landing), the Irish Bank (six foot high and six foot thick, with a small ditch on either side – to be scrambled over rather than jumped), the French Jump (a double hedge with a small ditch in the middle), the Garden fences (two big railed hedges, just eight metres apart). We shall be hearing more of these – just as we shall be hearing a great deal more about the obstacle originally known as the Big Ditch. In the meantime, think of it as a tough cross-country jumping course, transposed to a distinctly unmanicured racecourse, with a couple of miles of ploughed fields tagged on; the crucial difference being that, instead of jumping the vast obstacles one by one as eventers do, the competitors all start at the same time and place, jumping in one monstrous tangle – and whoever finishes first gets the prize.
It sounds like a recipe for mayhem, and it is.
On a cold Thursday, 5 November 1874, fourteen runners and riders lined up at the start of the first Velká Pardubická. Two had already fallen, the organisers having insisted on a pre-race test jump to check that all involved were fit and competent. The pair who failed were allowed to start anyway. Thereafter, even token pretences of common sense vanished. After six jumps, only eleven horses remained. Four fell at the Wall, the first and biggest (four foot high) of several stone walls. Hansi Fries, riding Kinský’s horse, remounted. Like all those riding on this occasion, Fries was a professional: he wouldn’t have wanted his employer to think he had done less than his utmost. But Walter Earl and Peter Appleton – two of eleven Englishmen riding – were too badly injured to continue. Earl’s distinguished riding career never really recovered from the fall.
The rest of the field charged on chaotically. For much of the race, they were out of sight of spectators, who were not very numerous anyway. But you barely needed to see the action to get the gist of it: more falls, more remounting; more danger and injury; increasing exhaustion. The hurdle at the Big Ditch was trampled flat; some horses preferred to wade through rather than jump over the deep trench beyond it. The Irish Bank claimed a victim; so did the Bullfinch. Only six horses finished. Two had pulled up from exhaustion. Another, Strizzel, was dead, after breaking its neck at the relatively innocuous penultimate fence.
The grim toll provoked justifiable criticism. ‘It is inconceivable that such small weight be placed on the safety of horses and riders,’ complained one journalist. But it was not enough to prevent the race – which was won by the Germany-based Englishman George Sayers on the German-owned Fantome – from being judged an overall success. It was repeated the following year, although the youngest of its founders, Count Ugarte, did not live to see it. The twenty-four-year-old died in a fall that winter, while racing in Italy. Some might see this as a kind of justice, others as a reminder that life is indeed short – lending all the more urgency to the pursuit of life- transcending excitement in each bright remaining moment.
The Velká Pardubická became a regular feature of the sporting and social calendar, usually on the second Sunday of October. Professional expatriate riders dominated in the early years: twenty-two of the first thirty winners had British riders. But the crowds that came in increasing numbers to watch were drawn from all over the Habsburg empire, and beyond.
The race’s reputation grew with that of its most spectacular and challenging feature. The Big Ditch, as it was initially known, attracted more controversy with each new victim it claimed. It wasn’t unjumpable, but the depth of the ditch, which was often flooded, meant that mistakes could be catastrophic. The slanting hurdle at the approach was at some point in the mid-1880s or early 1890s replaced with a large hedge, improving drainage but otherwise making the obstacle more fearsome still. At around the same time, there were serious discussions about the possibility of removing the jump altogether. Instead, the assembled aristocrats were swayed by the intervention of Prince Egon Thurn und Taxis, who said words to this effect: ‘Gentlemen, none of us will be jumping it. Therefore I see no reason why we should omit it or make it easier for anybody else.’ Perhaps such solipsistic logic makes more sense if you are a prince. It proved persuasive, at any rate; and the jump was officially named after the prince following his death in 1892.
When Lata was growing up, and for most of her adult life, Taxis consisted of a huge ditch, two metres deep and five across, concealed on the approach by a stiff hedge, 1.4 metres high and 1.2 metres thick. A horse jumping it straight would need to soar a minimum of about eight metres to land safely on the far side; a crooked jump would increase the distance still further. The ditch’s sides were steep and, as a result, unforgiving to those that fell short. And then there was the biggest hazard of all: all those other horses.
Remarkably, no jockey has yet died jumping Taxis. Some have had their ashes scattered there, but the nearby gravestones are the legacy of a brief period in the Communist era when the course doubled up as a speedway track. Yet the message of the stones is appropriate: this is a life-threatening obstacle. Countless jockeys have suffered disastrous injuries there in the past 145 years. In addition, twenty-nine horses have died. This imbalance is largely explained by the fact that badly injured horses are usually put down, whereas jockeys are not. It still seems obscene. Yet that is how things used to be done. Times have changed since most of those deaths occurred, and the Velká Pardubická is now more merciful – too much so, say hardcore traditionalists. The rules have been tightened and the course has been repeatedly toned down; Taxis, in particular, is not the jump it was. On a dry day you can see the line in the soil where the far slope of the ditch has been made significantly nearer and shallower.
The challenge is still grotesquely hard. Not only must the horse perform a gargantuan leap to land safely on the far side: it must do so without any idea why. Just ‘giving full liberty to the horse’ – the supposed secret of Count Sándor’s prodigious jumping – is not enough. The vast ditch is invisible until well after take-off. None the less, it can be done and usually is. The secret is generally held to be a combination of equine psychology (‘Horses will try things as a herd that no individual horse would do of its own accord,’ explains Jan Pospíšil) and blind commitment (‘When you come to the jump, you have to throw your heart over it,’ says Gabriela Křístková, who teaches riding and jumping in the same Řitka paddocks where Lata learned to ride). The best contenders try to be first to the obstacle, so as not to be impeded by the also-rans; the rest charge along in the leaders’ wake, hoping to be drawn over by herd momentum.
It sounds a bit vague to inspire total confidence, but it’s the best there is. As a result, few approach Taxis without dread in their stomachs. The English amateur rider Chris Collins, who raced here in 1973 – the first Englishman to do so for nearly sixty years – admitted: ‘When I saw the Taxis for the first time, I thought those who said it was jumpable were joking.’ But they weren’t; and, indeed, Collins jumped it successfully that year, although not the next. The British jockey Marcus Armytage, who survived it in 1990 and 1991 but fell badly in 1992, calls it ‘the love child of Becher’s Brook and The Chair, o
n steroids’. Charlie Mann, who got over safely both times he raced there in the mid-1990s, thinks, ‘It looks bigger than it jumps’ , while according to the Czech jockey Pavel Liebich (who won the race three times in a row from 1981 to 1983), ‘Many people are haunted by the name.’ In Liebich’s opinion, ‘Horses will often do a jump of that size in training, even at a smaller obstacle.’ Then, of course, they are not among a crowd of other horses. But the fact remains: if horses more often than not get over it, it is because they are both able and willing to do so. Jan Kratochvíl, who won the 2017 race on No Time To Lose, said afterwards that getting over Taxis was ‘largely a question of letting the horse go’.
But Taxis is only one obstacle among many; and, as we shall see, it is by no means the only one that is potentially lethal. The long stretches of ploughed field turn the whole race into a form of Bohemian roulette, especially when the weather has been wet – as it usually has been. The race has been run 128 times (there have been interruptions for war), and there has never yet been a year in which every competitor finished. In 1909, none finished at all.
It is possible that Lata had visited Pardubice by then. Perhaps she had even watched the race. We do not know. What we do know is that she and her family were well aware of the Velká Pardubická, and of Oktavian’s role in its creation. It was impossible to be interested in horses and not know: it had transformed the sporting culture, and perhaps even the economy, of central Bohemia. But there was also another reason: Oktavian was Lata’s great-uncle.
There was a huge gap in wealth and status between the mighty Kinský family and the struggling Brandis family. The Brandis’s overcrowded home in Řitka would have fitted unnoticed into the stables of Karlova Koruna. Yet the fact remained: Oktavian’s sister Barbara had married Heinrich Brandis, in 1849. Leopold was their son, and all his children were Oktavian’s great-nieces and great-nephews. There may not have been much contact between the two parts of the family in Oktavian’s lifetime, especially after his scandalous late marriage to a former servant girl forty-seven years his junior. But their paths may have crossed in Vienna, where Leopold’s parents lived and Oktavian spent his winters, and there was at least one visit by the Brandis family to Chlumec, during which the eight-year-old Leopold was allowed to ride some of Oktavian’s horses. And although Lata never met Oktavian, who died in 1896, shortly before her first birthday, she knew his sister (Lata’s grandmother joined her son in Řitka for the final years of her life), and she would certainly have known about her rich, eccentric greatuncle’s pranks, feats and place in steeplechasing history. If his more recent descendants are anything to go by, she will rarely have heard him mentioned without a note of amused admiration, bordering on awe, in the speaker’s voice: ‘Uncle Taffy? Oh yes, he was crazy! Did you hear about the time . . .’
When thinking about what she did and didn’t want to do with her future, Lata would have considered Oktavian’s example – as well as the example of the equally dashing (but slightly saner) Karel Kinský, a more distant relation. True, the steeplechases with which both men’s names were associated were not events in which a woman could hope to compete, no matter how great her talents. Yet it would have been hard not to question the reasoning behind that prohibition, and perhaps even its permanence. It was acceptable for a well-bred woman to follow an English-style hunt: the Emperor’s late wife – the beautiful, discontented Sisi – had made endless visits to Britain in her younger years, dazzling English society with her jumping skills as she followed the Pytchley hunt. And if a woman could prove herself men’s equal in the most demanding of hunting fields – as the Empress was reckoned to have done – then why should it not be possible one day for a woman to race in one of the great death-defying steeplechases, just as all those dashing cavalry officers did?
It was a far-fetched question, but it was worth dreaming about.
5.
Broken in
Horses are born wild. Even the most pampered thoroughbred is wilful and impetuous until it is broken in. And even then we may assume that the bit sometimes chafes.
It was much the same for children of the ruling classes of the great European empires of the nineteenth century. You started off running wild – often in vast palaces and idyllic country estates. Then, sooner or later, you too had to be taught submission and initiated, patiently but implacably, into the rules and rituals of your caste. For boys, being broken in usually meant being sent to military academy, where habits of unquestioning obedience and dogmatic adherence to military codes were drilled in until they became second nature. For girls, it meant being laced into metaphorical corsets of submissive, lady–like conformity.
It wasn’t exactly cruel; nor was it compulsory. It was simply the price of privilege. Yet the sense of unnatural restraint could be maddening. And, just as a horse harnessed to a carriage will occasionally ‘kick over the traces’ – so that the straps constraining it become instruments of mayhem – so the carefully schooled children of the nobility would sometimes seek escape in mad, destructive abandon.
The gratuitous perils of the Velká Pardubická can be largely explained in terms of such impulses: the race was designed by and for people who abhorred restraint. Much the same could be said of some of the other extravagant excesses through which aristocratic boys in Prague or Vienna liked to let off steam (think Bullingdon Club with uniforms, swords and guns); and, for that matter, of the surprising enthusiasm with which many young officers embraced their rare opportunities to take part in actual battles. The risks were the whole point. It wasn’t that anyone wanted to die. It was just that sometimes they felt the need to remind themselves that they were alive.
But what about the girls?
Shortly after Lata’s eleventh birthday, a racecourse opened at Velká Chuchle, a few miles south-west of Prague and a mere twelve-mile carriage ride from Řitka. Leopold became a regular visitor to the track, and the girls, particularly Lata, liked to go with him. The races they watched were mostly flat races. The standard may not have been particularly high. None the less, for a father and daughter who liked being around horses, and who enjoyed one another’s company, these were happy excursions.
Two years later, in 1908, Leopold bought his own thoroughbred, a Hungarian mare, through a fellow officer. Lata was allowed to ride it at Řitka – and got her first experience of what a highly strung horse can be like. At one point the mare lay down, with Lata still in the saddle, and refused to get up. The experience did not cool her enthusiasm: on the contrary, she is said to have expressed a wish to compete as a jockey herself. If she did, Leopold did not approve: to have participated in such a rough, rude, public sport would have been scandalous. It was also impossible: there was no such thing as an officially sanctioned race for women, and thus no such thing as a female jockey.
This begged the question of what Lata was to do instead. ‘All my young imagination was filled with horse experiences,’ she said later. As a result, according to one observer, ‘Lata spent more time with horses than trying to find a husband.’ This must have worried her parents, although Lata couldn’t see what the problem was. Horses were her ‘darlings’; a horse, to her, was ‘my dearest and most faithful friend’. What was wrong with that? But convention dictated that young noblewomen must marry within the nobility; or grow up to live lonely lives as spinsters, on the margins of high society; or, worse still, marry outside the nobility and lose their privileged status altogether. Finding the Brandis daughters aristocratic life-partners would have been the overwhelming priority of their teenage years, irrespective of what they themselves felt about this.
Both parents moved in the highest social circles. Johanna was a regular on Prague’s charitable fund-raising circuit, while Leopold kept up friendly relations with members of the imperial court and family – and was part of the delegation that greeted the Emperor Franz Joseph when he visited Prague in 1906. They were on visiting terms with wealthy neighbours, too: the Kasalickýs, for example, who would soon begin to rebuild the already g
rand house in the nearby village of Všenory; or, later, the Kasts, who acquired the grand chateau in Mníšek in 1909 and similarly lavished vast sums on making it more splendid still (it would eventually include one of the world’s first private cinemas). But being well connected did not alleviate the Brandis family’s relative poverty – if anything, the strain of keeping up appearances must have added to it. As a result, the biggest social prize of all – finding titled bridegrooms for their daughters – eluded them.
Their daughters may not have been particularly bothered. Indeed, it is said that none of them showed much enthusiasm for marriage. Why should they? They were happy as they were. Their parents loved them; they enjoyed their village and their vast rural playground; they loved the surrounding countryside; and they had horses and dogs and endless opportunities for outdoor fun. It was, in Lata’s words, ‘a happy youth, growing with nature and with animals’. Who would want to forgo all that, to become the property of a strange aristocrat, far from home?