by Unbreakable- The Woman Who Defied the Nazis in the World's Most Dangerous Horse Race (retail) (epub)
You would be happy to have such men fighting alongside you. You would trust them more than most to do what they considered the right thing; but ‘the right thing’ did not, in their view, extend to treating women as equals – and especially not when it came to physical discomfort and danger. Ra’s proposal was not just scandalous, in their view: it was immoral.
Perhaps we should try to put ourselves in their boots. They were soldiers. They lived mostly in the all-male world of Pardubice’s cavalry barracks and military riding school, and their values were military ones. Their worldviews were coloured, in many cases, by memories of war; perhaps also by the anticipation of war. The virtues they aspired to were courage, honour, steadfastness, hardiness, patriotism, loyalty to comrades. They were not anti-women, but they saw them as precious creatures, not as equals. Their own kind were men. Women were always the ‘other’ .
As for progress: it’s one thing embracing change if you’re a fashionable intellectual in Prague. If you choose to become a soldier, you usually think in terms of defending your country’s social traditions, not blithely turning them on their head. Officers such as Popler or Charous would have laid down their lives if their code demanded it. Perhaps it is understandable that they saw that code as immutable.
The Pardubice officers’ shared experiences of riding in the Velká Pardubická added an extra layer of insulation against the inclusive attitudes of Masaryk’s young nation. Like any contest that takes participants too close to death for comfort, the race created a grim camaraderie among those who rode in it – from which everyone else was by definition excluded. As their horses fidgeted under them at the start, they were united by the knowledge that there was no guarantee that they would all come back in one piece. It wasn’t quite like preparing to ‘go over the top’ in war, but it wasn’t all that different. It was, in other words, the kind of time when you remind yourself that you are a soldier: a fighting man, whose code of honour forbids him to shrink from danger.
The idea of a woman muscling in on this territory was as ridiculous as it was offensive.
The fact that the organisers of the Velká Pardubická meeting raised no objection to Lata’s participation signified little: Ra and Kasalický were both members of the three-man management committee. But that didn’t make it all right. The officers protested to the Jockey Club in Prague. Lata must have felt tempted to back out when she learned of this; Count Zdenko Kinský, Ra’s father, was among those who encouraged her to stand firm. (Lata’s father, by contrast, was among those who disapproved of her plan.)
Lata had one obvious advantage in the dispute: the president of the Jockey Club was her cousin. But Ra had an equally obvious difficulty. To use his position to advance his own agenda would be dangerously undiplomatic. If the sport’s governing body was perceived to be biased on this matter, the protest could turn ugly.
With artful diplomacy, he referred the matter up to an even higher authority: the English Jockey Club. He wrote to them explaining the problem and asking, specifically, if there was any reason why a woman should not be allowed to compete in a race such as this. The gentlemen of Portman Square, perhaps feeling that it didn’t really matter what happened in a faraway country like Czechoslovakia, were remarkably relaxed about it. They wrote back saying that the question didn‘t really arise in England, as women were happy to ride in separate races and no woman would dare to enter the Grand National; but that ultimately there was nothing in the rules to prohibit such a thing. They insisted, however, that if a woman did ride against men in the Velká Pardubická, she must be provided with a separate changing room.
That seemed to resolve the explicit argument: if Lata wanted to ride in the race, she could. But it would be some time before the ill feeling subsided. The brotherhood of officers remained a brotherhood, and Lata was not a member.
Meanwhile, there were complaints from other quarters. The hazards, according to Ra, were ‘reiterated to us from all sides’ . The reiterators had a point. Even if you discounted the respectable body of medical opinion that held that (to quote a paper on ‘Women’s Participation in Athletics’ presented to the International Olympic Committee in 1925): ‘Sports which tax the muscular frame and put a strain on it . . . are, of course, wholly unsuitable for the feminine organism’ , it was hard to deny that the Velká Pardubická also posed other, less gender-specific risks. Was it really ethical – in terms of traditional values – to expose a lady to such dangers?
Neither Lata nor Ra was swayed. Having taken the matter this far, they could hardly turn back now. The officers had their code, and the Kinskýs had theirs – in which the main items appear to have been reckless disdain for all forms of compromise and caution. In any case, retreat could have intolerable consequences. If Lata didn’t exercise her right to compete now, having been given explicit clearance to do so, she could give up all hope of ever competing on equal terms in future.
As the race approached, Lata’s father was eventually won round, which would have been an important boost. (He seems to have been the kind of father who could never be unsupportive of his daughter for long.) Lata, meanwhile, spent as much of the autumn as she could at Obora, practising on Ra’s private course at Kolesa. The great thing about practising at Kolesa was that the jumps there replicated those at Pardubice. There was even a life-size version of Taxis. Even though Lata could spend only limited amounts of time away from Řitka, the experience was priceless. Nothing could replicate the crowded, terrifying reality of the Velká Pardubická, but by early October both Lata and Nevěsta had a good sense of the jumping challenges they would encounter. At the same time, however, Lata found that the enormity of the challenge was beginning to get to her: ‘Just recalling it to mind upset me. I had stage fright during training.’ Despite this, ‘although I jumped often, I never fell.’ But jumping alone is one thing. Doing so in the midst of a charging crowd is altogether more hazardous.
Discussions continued about the possibility of Lata riding a different horse in the big race. Ra still had three entered – Nevěsta, Golubčík and Horymír – and although he planned to ride one of these himself, he was happy for Lata to choose first. But Lata felt comfortable with Nevěsta and, indeed, had developed a ‘special liking’ for her. Each time they practised, the trust between horse and rider grew stronger.
For the final week before the race, Ra arranged for him and Lata to take accommodation with their horses in Popkovice, a village-cum-suburb right by the Pardubice racecourse. According to Ra, they ‘felt very comfortable’ there. Part of the attraction was the seclusion. Word of Lata’s participation had spread by now, and interest in her preparations threatened to become oppressive. People were still trying to dissuade Ra from allowing Lata to race, but the wider public were fascinated. The organisers and the city council must have been delighted by the excitement. They were concerned about a slight fall-off in the number of super-rich foreigners coming to the race, and they had already increased the prize money on offer to the winner from 15,000 to 50,000 crowns in the hope of boosting interest from abroad. Wild rumours about the involvement of a crazy countess would at least get the event talked about. For Lata, however, the attention can only have added to the pressure she was under. The less time she spent in the public eye, the happier she was.
None the less, she did exercise Nevěsta on the Pardubice racecourse itself. The atmosphere may have been tense, since some of her rivals were practising there at the same time. But Golubčík – the only other horse of Ra’s that would actually run in that year’s Velká Pardubická – was also there, and Jakub Častora, a professional jockey whom Lata would have known from Velká Chuchle, was probably there with him. So she may not have felt entirely isolated. Meanwhile, the watching journalists had eyes only for Lata – who, they reported, suffered a fall on the course on the Thursday before the race. It looked like a bad one, claimed NárodnÍ listy, although Countess Brandisová was not seriously hurt. What the press missed was that Nevěsta was left with a sore foot, which was
still slightly inflamed when Lata brought her back to the course three days later.
By then it was Sunday 9 October 1927: time for the most important ride of Lata’s life so far.
14.
Fight to the finish
She was afraid. Around her neck she wore a medallion with an image of the Virgin Mary; another, depicting St Anthony, was attached to the inside of her helmet. She hoped these would keep her safe. But what she really feared was humiliation. After all that trouble, all that hostility, all that mockery – and now, with all these people watching – what if she made a fool of herself ?
Others had had the same thought. Many had come to see for themselves. Pardubice’s hotels had been full since Friday, while on Sunday the trains were overflowing. Unofficial estimates put the number of spectators at 20,000. There was no official figure. The weather was pleasant, after two days of rain, and both ticket offices had run out of admission tickets long before the crowds stopped streaming in. Somehow, space was found for everyone, although many missed the earlier races. There were 650 cars packed into the car park behind the main stand – in an age when private motor travel was a novelty.
In the paddock there had been friendly faces. Ra, for example; and Karel Šmejda, who was listed as trainer for both Nevěsta and Golubčík. (Some said that this was just a formality: Ra liked to train his own horses, helped by his own private staff. But Šmejda was too significant a trainer to be engaged as a mere charade.) A pre-race photograph of Lata shows her smiling, the light gleaming from Nevěsta’s glossy flanks beneath her. She is thirty-two, but the smile is girlish, suggesting a selfconscious teenager enjoying her day in the sunshine. A well-dressed couple – possibly Ra and Lori Kinský – smile back from the paddock’s edge.
The start was a different matter. Lata was alone among her enemies – who, she later claimed, had made a further protest to the Jockey Club that afternoon. There is no record of what form this took, but I presume that it was made at the Hotel Veselka, where the club made a temporary base during the Pardubice meeting. Josef Charous was certainly seen at the Veselka that day. The public excitement surrounding Lata’s participation can only have intensified the cavalry officers’ resentment, and all the usual pre-race nerves must have been tightened by unspoken hostility. If it’s not hard for us to imagine the officers’ grumblings, it wouldn’t have been hard for Lata to imagine them either. But she brushed her doubts aside. She had to. As she herself once said: ‘If you sit on a horse, you must have your nerves properly together.’
She did have one advantage: as a first-timer she had only the vaguest sense of what lay ahead. The old hands knew. Specifically, they felt the shadow of Taxis – the fourth obstacle – which casts a chill over most Velká Pardubická starts. It’s not the obstacle itself (which Lata had at least encountered in replica). It’s the way that it rushes up on you within moments of the starter’s shout. Get it wrong, or get your approach to it wrong, and your race can be over before you’ve settled into it. Ferocious concentration is crucial; usually preceded, before the off, by ferocious fretting. Lata, by contrast, was a mere irritant. Few expected her to last the course, although Národní listy had suggested that morning that Nevěsta might run well, ‘even with a woman in the saddle’ . The bookies had Landgraf II – winner in 1923 and 1925 and the previous year’s runner-up – as 4:1 favourite, with František Gimpl (a professional) riding. All Right II, Captain Popler’s winning mount from last year, was on 6:1, along with Editore, ridden by Lieutenant Mikeš. Nevěsta and Golubčík were the joint outsiders, on 33:1.
There was a pause in the crowd’s murmurings. The starter shouted. All thirteen runners broke into a gallop, back towards the stands from the racecourse’s northeastern corner. Lata – wearing the Kinský colours of red and white vertical stripes with a red and white quartered cap – settled Nevěsta near, but not at, the back of the field, keeping out of trouble while more experienced contenders manoeuvred for position. The first two jumps, little more than hurdles, caused no problems, and Lata felt her confidence growing. It felt, she said later, much like ‘my daily morning training’ .
In the third furlong they turned for the Small Water Jump, before galloping westwards, across the middle of the racecourse area but in full view of the stands. This was most spectators’ first proper view of the action, and the sight of Lata apparently still in contention added to the excitement. Everyone crossed the water safely – and then came Taxis.
Ferdinand Mikeš led the charge on Editore (whose owner, Josef Charous, was riding Forum) and cleared it first with a ‘magnificent’ jump. Then came the rest. Lata set Nevěsta as well as she could, but there was no time to think. They leapt, with horses on all sides. The next thing Lata knew, she was flat on the turf, breathless and semi-stunned.
There was such chaos at the obstacle that it is impossible to say with any confidence what happened – except that it was carnage. Landgraf II and All Right II, who probably jumped ahead of Nevěsta, also fell. If they didn’t obstruct Nevěsta, they may well have put her off. Golubčík was also a faller: one photograph suggests that Ra’s two horses may have impeded one another. Doyen (ridden by Sergěj Bezuglij) fell so horribly that he never got up.
Lata staggered to her feet. Was her race over already? A slight give in the ground may have taken some of the sting out of her fall. It was not enough for the earth to open and swallow her. But there was hope. Popler, Gimpl and Častora were all remounting. She would do the same.
According to John Oaksey, ‘There are fools, bloody fools and those who remount in steeplechases.’ Oaksey was twice British champion amateur jump jockey before becoming a journalist, so he knew what he was talking about. Yet even he eventually conceded that the culture of the Velká Pardubická is different. This, he wrote later, is a race in which ‘the time to give up is when you are in the ambulance and not before’ .
Oaksey exaggerated only slightly. Most jockeys would also have some thought for their horse’s wellbeing. But the soldiers, at least, took pride in giving little thought to their own, and in those days they were expected to remount if they could. So would Lata. Her plan, as she later described it, was simple: ‘to finish the race as long as my horse and I were able to fight.’ Her allies – Ra and Kasalický – had risked ridicule to get her into the race. She could not let them down. She would not give up yet.
But Nevěsta, although unharmed, had bolted. The leaders had reached the next obstacle before she was brought back. By the time Lata had remounted and Nevěsta was back on the move, there were few other horses in sight.
Sadly, the next few runners they encountered were no longer in the race. The 1927 Velká Pardubická turned out to be one of the cruellest in the event’s troubled and troubling history. It’s not clear why. The going was not noticeably heavier than usual, even over the two miles of ploughed fields. The number of runners was manageable, and most of the horses were hardened steeplechasers, as were their riders. None the less, things kept going wrong.
At the next obstacle, the Irish Bank, Pinguin (ridden by Karel Holoubek) pulled up. Editore, the early leader, fell at the eighth – a relatively straightforward railed fence between two large trees – and his rider, Lieutenant Mikeš, did not remount. Markomann, ridden by the visiting French officer, Count de la Forest, refused at the same obstacle. All this took place out of sight of the stands, behind the woods at the Popkovice end of the course. When the remaining runners re-emerged from the long turn, there were three widely separated groups. Forum, Esáž and Brutus led. Then came All Right II, Landgraf II, Dunka and Eba. And then, far behind, came Nevěsta and Golubčík.
The middle group had the worst of it. Eba fell so badly at the twelfth – a relatively innocuous ditch just before the course winds past Taxis again – that she had to be put down. Popler’s All Right II was running strongly when she suffered a freak accident, putting her foot in a pothole and breaking her pastern. Landgraf II pulled up soon afterwards, exhausted and badly lame. Both horses were later shot,
in the absence of any other way of putting them out of their misery.
General horror at these ghastly misfortunes meant that much less attention was paid to Lata and Nevěsta than would otherwise have been the case. People were watching the tragedies and other dramas at the front of the field, and that was the focus of subsequent eyewitness accounts.
Thus history records that, shortly after emerging from the Popkovice turn, Golubčík pulled up; and that, for much of the remainder of the race, Esáž and Brutus led. Esáž (ridden by Captain Pimpl) was supposed to be Brutus’s pacemaker, but was so exhausted that Brutus (ridden by Jiří Drahoš) kept slowing down to stay with her. We know that Esáž fell at the twenty-second (a simple fence with a punishingly wide ditch) and was out of contention by the time Pimpl had remounted. And we know that Brutus then took up the running, only to have his own disaster, with the finish in sight. But Lata and Nevěsta? All we know is that of the sixteen obstacles that remained after the Popkovice turn, they negotiated only twelve without mishap.
That’s all: four more falls. The details are lost, although Lata later dismissed all four as ‘harmless’ . We can assume that one of the four was the twenty-first, the Big Water Jump, since one photograph seems to show them up to Nevěsta’s chest in it. But the others? The trickiest remaining obstacles would have been the eleventh (the Big English Jump), the nineteenth (the Snake Ditch) and the twenty-third (the ‘in and out’ double jump), but that doesn’t mean that those were necessarily the ones that brought Nevěsta down. All we know is that, by the latter stages, the mare’s sore foot was troubling her, which may have caused problems with jumping; and that each time they fell, Lata remounted, shrugged off any pain and embarrassment, and patiently coaxed her dispirited but ‘loyal’ mount into continuing what they had started.
