by Unbreakable- The Woman Who Defied the Nazis in the World's Most Dangerous Horse Race (retail) (epub)
It had only been a matter of time before Lata tried again. This year was as good a year as any to do so. She was thirty-five – already getting on a bit for such a reckless stunt. There wouldn‘t be many more chances. And what a chance it was! The prestige of the Velká Pardubická hadn’t been so high for years, while interest in female sporting achievements – at least in Czechoslovakia – had never been higher. The third Women’s World Games had been held in Prague just a few weeks earlier, in the stadium at Letná: the event attracted 15,000 spectators over three days. The public’s enthusiasm must have stirred the embers of Lata’s yearning for sporting glory.
Most important of all, Ra had a horse for her. Norbert, the bay colt Vojtěch Szabó had ridden to eighth place two years earlier, was now a fast, confidently jumping sixyear- old. Lata had had the chance to strike up a relationship with him while staying at Obora, and both she and Ra felt that he had Velká Pardubická potential.
No one (publicly, at least) objected to Lata’s entry. Her battle this time would be the race itself, not getting to the start. She had already proved that she could stay the course. More recently, she had also shown that she had become a much more confident jumper. Riding a horse of her own, an old bay gelding called Boy, she had won a resounding victory with a flawless round in a showjumping contest at Velká Chuchle.
A week before the Velká Pardubická, by way of a warm-up, she rode Norbert in Pardubice, in a two-mile steeplechase for amateur riders. They came third behind Rudolf Popler, on Gyi Lovam!, and Eberhard Mauve on Gabarit. Norbert was well beaten, yet the result was not unsatisfactory. Gyi Lovam!, an eight-year-old Hungarian gelding with a curiously long neck and an extravagant jumping style, had won seven previous races that season and was already being described as a wonderhorse. Lata would have been happy to have kept him within sight, and to have completed the race without mishap.
The following Saturday, still in Pardubice, Lata was unplaced in a ‘Drag-Hunt Steeplechase’ for amateurs, riding Boy, who showed no great aptitude for racing. Ra and František Schwarzenberg also took part; as did Rudolf Popler who, as was his habit, won.
Then came Sunday. For the second time in her life, Lata prepared to submit herself to Pardubice’s trial by ordeal. She was spared the frenzied public interest that had accompanied her previous attempt: the large crowd, more international than it had been in 1927, was primarily interested in the four-legged sensation of the moment, Gyi Lovam!; as were the commentators who, for the first time, were reporting live on the proceedings to radio listeners all over Czechoslovakia. That didn’t make the pre-start wait less lonely or intimidating. Lata was, of course, an outsider: not in the tipsters’ sense (Norbert was a mere 12:1) but in the sense that she was not part of the Velká Pardubická gang. Popler and his friends were resigned to her presence and were probably polite to her. But she knew that there was jealousy and resentment (she later said as much), and she can hardly have felt welcome. Unlike her, the officers shared the culture of Pardubice’s military riding school. Several had experienced war. Some had Olympic hopes or memories. (The riding school’s Captain František Ventura had won gold in the 1928 showjumping.) All this was out of bounds to Lata, because of her gender. Meanwhile, her temperament excluded her from many of the officers’ habitual pastimes. Even if she had been welcome, for example, she would not have enjoyed the Hotel Sochor’s casino, where many of the officers liked to unwind. Nor was she the type to join in the more riotous celebrations at the Sochor, where one rider was rumoured to have ridden his Velká Pardubická horse all the way to the top of the narrow staircase. Even if no one was deliberately giving her the cold shoulder, it was hard to feel much sense of belonging – at least until the race got underway.
When it did, it went more smoothly for Lata than last time. Gabarit – eventually ridden in Čechoslavia’s colours by Josef Kohoutek – came to grief at Taxis, bringing down Issa in the process. Soon Hollandweibchen and Chán were on the ground as well. But Lata and Norbert cleared the big jump comfortably, and found themselves in a leading group with Gestor, Talán and Gyi Lovam!. Behind them, the casualties continued. Hollandweibchen, whose jockey, Alexander Alba, had remounted, fell spectacularly at the Irish Bank, performing a complete somersault as Alba flew earthwards alongside. Amazingly, neither was hurt, and they resumed the race, but Alba threw in the towel a few jumps later. By the halfway stage there were only those four early leaders left in the race. Talán went to the front for a while. Then, with only eleven jumps to go, Lata and Norbert took up the lead. They jumped the treacherous Snake Ditch impeccably, and Lata may have toyed with the thought that, notwithstanding Gyi Lovam!, the race was hers for the winning. If so, the thought was short-lived. Two jumps later came the Big Water Jump – in those days, like the Snake Ditch, an unmarked ditch, in which turf was replaced without warning by deep water. Horses are sometimes spooked by such hard-to-see obstacles; and Norbert, despite having taken the Snake Ditch in his stride, refused point-blank at the Big Water.
Lata refused to give up. Eventually, she and Norbert waded through the water. But it was too late to catch up. Worse, Norbert’s composure had gone. At the next jump, the Little Taxis (which is exactly what it sounds like), they fell. Lata remounted (naturally) and set off in pursuit at a less ambitious pace. She knew that Norbert was tired; she suspected that he was not as fit as he could have been. Just staying the course would be achievement enough for that day.
The rest of the race was as uneventful as an arduous, dangerous steeplechase can be. The four survivors continued in the same order over the remaining seven obstacles, with Gyi Lovam! far in front and gaining. Gestor and Talán (ridden by Popler’s fellow officers, Lieutenant Hynek Býček and Captain Josef Seyfried) claimed second and third. Norbert, breathing heavily, was last home. Fourth place, and just one proper fall, was an improvement on last time, but there was much for Lata to be disappointed about. There was no thunderous ovation: the public had already lavished its enthusiasm on Gyi Lovam! and on the seemingly invincible Captain Popler.
Man and horse deserved the accolades. The Velká Pardubická had rarely seen such an emphatic winner: the time, twelve minutes, was a record. As for Popler, his social traditionalism did not diminish his inspiring talent and boldness in the saddle. Lata described him later as ‘maybe our best rider ever’ . The rancour between them was healing.
They had much in common. Both were heroic spirits. Both put love and empathy at the heart of their dealings with horses. And both believed in pushing back the boundaries of the possible. Popler’s thirst for adventure verged on the crazed. Scarred by war, passionate in his work, unbending in the demands he made of himself, he was always seeking greater challenges against which to test himself. His toughness was matched by unfailing courtesy; gallantry, where women were concerned. The great love affair of his life had ended badly. Some sensed that his broken heart was a factor in his greatness, causing him to scorn lesser pains. Or perhaps he was just naturally restless. A few weeks after his Pardubice triumph, he wrote to Weatherbys in England to enquire about the possibility of entering Gyi Lovam! for the Grand National. It proved a complicated business, but the English were won over by the Czechoslovak officer’s good manners and obvious integrity. The boldness of the dream caught the imagination of his compatriots, too. The army gave him special leave to spend nearly three months preparing in England, and he was able to fund the substantial cost of the trip by public subscription. Sadly, although Gyi Lovam! did indeed start the Grand National in March 1931 and coped well with the jumps, the pace proved too fast. Gyi Lovam! fell at Becher’s on the second circuit. Popler remounted, but a second fall at the Canal Turn persuaded him that his horse had had enough.
Even the most indomitable warrior must sometimes admit defeat, and Popler cared enough about Gyi Lovam! to do so. He left with a host of English admirers, but perhaps also with a sense that, for an outsider, a crowded steeplechase can be a lonely place.
16.
Mortality
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sp; Reports of Popler’s adventure fuelled a growing enthusiasm for horse racing among Czechoslovak patriots. In May 1931, President Tomáš Masaryk himself was persuaded to visit Velká Chuchle, where he watched Jiří Esch ride Oskar to victory in the Czechoslovak Derby. It was a big coup for a little course. They had long ago created a race – the President of the Republic’s Trophy – in Masaryk’s honour. He, in turn, had made a conscious effort to associate himself with his countrymen’s equestrian traditions since becoming president, and was often photographed on horseback. But he had never yet been to the race. His presence was a boost both for the course and for the notion that horse racing was in some sense the young republic’s defining sport. Lata, who was at the meeting, may well have been introduced to him.
Later that month, Masaryk was in Pardubice to open a four-month-long exposition, nationwide but centred on the town, that celebrated physical education and sport. It was the biggest such event in Czechoslovakia’s history, with 320 exhibitors and 190 events, including one celebrating the Velká Pardubická. Lata is thought to have been among the 1.25 million visitors who attended.
Both town and race revelled in the attention. The scale of the proceedings showed just how far Pardubice had come. The new Grand Hotel opened on the same day as the exposition, with Masaryk as its first guest. Europe’s glittering classes followed, and many liked what they saw. Pardubice had so much to offer. The hotels were palatial: the Grand, the Veselka, the Sochor. The main avenues were wide and stately. The public architecture was magnificent. There were banquets, balls, concerts, gourmet restaurants, a magnificent theatre, a busy casino and some very upmarket shops. And – in contrast to Prague, or Vienna, or Baden-Baden, or the French Riviera – there was the mad annual rite of the Devil’s Race to justify the pleasure-seeking. Elsewhere, recession and rancour had begun to gnaw at society’s fabric. The fact that the Velká Pardubická was so extreme – the fact that only the bravest would expose themselves to its dangers – somehow made it feel like an appropriate form of escapism. None of life’s certainties was guaranteed any more. Why not risk everything for a few brief moments of thrills and glory on the turf – or, if that was beyond you, at least come along and join the death-defying party?
By October 1931, it seemed as though half of Czechoslovakia wanted to come along. It was the fiftieth running of the race, and what had once been a cult pursuit for a privileged few was now widely seen as a national sporting ritual. Everyone who could afford to took steps to taste the magic. A new four-storey grandstand, concrete and roofless, had been built alongside the old wooden one to accommodate extra spectators. It was just as well. On race day the road to the racecourse was choked with cars. Streams of pedestrians overtook them on both sides: many had reached the town on a special fast train from Prague.
Gyi Lovam! was not running. Popler was still resting him after his English exertions. But Popler himself was there, riding another of his own horses, Gibraltar II. Ra had two runners: Norbert, ridden again by Lata; and Pohanka, a dark five-year-old mare (by Nedbal out of Piacensa), ridden by the French cavalry officer Lieutenant François Durand. With nine other runners, including two others with Velká Pardubická experience, the race was both open and competitive. Lata’s presence no longer seemed exceptional: at least, no one seems to have deemed it worthy of special comment. Perhaps they would have done, had they known what would follow.
The weather was fine, but the autumn had been wet and the course was waterlogged. The race was not so much a struggle between horse and horse as one between horse and nature. The mayhem began before they had even reached Taxis: at the third obstacle, the Little Water Jump. Tuss, ridden by Antonín Albrecht, was first to arrive but jumped sideways at the last minute, bringing down five other horses. Lata and Norbert, who had started at a slower pace, were among the seven who avoided the pile-up. Taxis was relatively trouble-free: Talán refused, but the rest cleared it safely. Renonce – or at least her jockey – came to grief at the Irish Bank, and although there were multiple remountings (and refallings) by the earlier fallers, by the time the runners came back from behind the woods to head past the stands and towards the big ploughed field section, there were just five of them left: Gabarit, Norbert, Gibraltar II, Pohanka and Széles II. Just over half of the race remained. Lata must have felt, once again, that she was in with a chance. Then they reached the fields.
It was like Passchendaele. It was madness to race on such mud. That didn’t stop them trying. Sometimes they sank in so deep that even a trot was a struggle; in places they slowed to a walk. By the time they got back to the racecourse proper, it was a challenge to keep going at any pace. No one attempted to jump the Snake Ditch: they waded through instead. Even this presented problems. Gibraltar II got water in his nostrils, and there were fears that he might drown. At the Big Water Jump, the exhausted Norbert struggled to get out of the water. The only horse to complete the course without mishap was Pohanka – who, as a result, won by an enormous distance. The other four contenders trailed in eventually, bedraggled mud-figures, shivering with fatigue. As one commentator observed: ‘Everyone was glad that the race was over.’
Once again, it is hard not to question the humanity, let alone the sanity, of racing in such conditions. We can only remind ourselves that, by the standards of the time, this was considered the right thing to do. Decent riders would not push their horses indefinitely. At Aintree, for example, Popler had conceded that Gyi Lovam! had had enough, even though he himself would have loved to continue. But ideas of what constituted ‘enough’ in 1930s Pardubice were different from ours. In the riders’ defence, they spared themselves no more than they spared their horses.
The results read like a battlefield dispatch: J. Rojík, on Gabarit: fell and remounted; R. Popler, on Gibraltar II: fell and remounted three times; F. Albrecht, on Széles II: fell and remounted twice; J. Linhart, on Hollandweibchen: fell, rider unseated, then fell again; Count K. Rómmel (from Poland), riding Caraibe: avoided jump three times, then refused; A. Csató, on Campana: fell, avoided jump four times, then refused. Yet again, the runners who didn’t finish outnumbered those who did. Lata took her share of punishment but coped better than most. Norbert fell twice, refused once and unseated his rider once. The heavy ground must have softened the impact for both of them. Lata remounted each time. Yet again, she finished. Not only that: she finished third. A post-race photograph shows her talking to two fashionably dressed ladies, each wearing a fur stole. Bedraggled or not, she is smiling so widely her face seems about to burst. The battering she has just taken appears to have slipped her mind.
Her glory was eclipsed by the triumph of Ra’s other horse, Pohanka. For some, it was also overshadowed by the grimness of the race as a whole. Yet the grimness underlined Lata’s achievement: she had proved that a woman – or at least this woman – could be tough enough and skilled enough to complete the course, time after time, when highly trained military men could not. Not only that: she was getting better. Fifth, fourth, third: place by place, year by year, she was getting closer to the great prize.
After this, it was rare to hear anyone question the propriety of her participation. She had grasped early on that to win the respect of the male riders who resented her, she had to pay her dues. ‘Like any novice, I had to prove myself.’ Now she had done so. Even the most traditionalist cavalry officers had to accept that she was no more out of her depth than they were. Popler positively admired Lata by now. He is said to have been impressed by her resilience and grace, and to have envied her ability to bounce up from falls, seemingly unhurt, ‘like a cat’ . By one account, his feelings extended to the kind of admiration that a romantic soldier traditionally feels for a beautiful, unattainable woman of ‘extraordinary grace’: not love, nor lust, but a kind of courtly devotion. That may have been wishful thinking on his biographer’s part. It is clear, however, that Popler and Lata were now on friendly terms. It is also clear that honourconscious officers no longer felt compromised by the company of what the German pre
ss were soon calling a ‘courageous Amazon’ . She was not yet a national hero, but she was becoming the next best thing: a national treasure – a strange quirk of Czechoslovak life that her compatriots, notwithstanding her German-speaking background, were happy to claim as their own.
Reports of the horrors of the 1931 Velká Pardubická did nothing to diminish public interest in the race. The crowds the following year were bigger still. A record sixteen runners took part, including four from Austria, three from Germany and, in Czechoslovak colours, two former winners, Gyi Lovam! and Ben Hur. A scarcely less impressive line-up of VIPs was observed in the stands, including the French ambassador, the Italian military attaché and several government ministers.
Czechoslovakia had missed out on that summer’s Olympics. With the nation in the grip of the Great Depression, sending a team to Los Angeles was deemed an inappropriate extravagance. So the Velká Pardubická was the big setpiece of the 1932 sporting year. Brilliant October sunshine held out the promise of a fast, safe race – although some probably hoped that it wouldn’t be too safe. Just one attraction was missing: Lata.
She was there; but she was watching from the stands, not riding. She would probably have been happy to take her chances again, had a suitable horse been available. But Norbert presumably had no desire to return to the scene of the previous year’s ordeal, while Ra’s only other Velká Pardubická prospect, Golubčík, already had a rider, a Frenchman, J. Noiret.
It is possible that Lata felt comfortable among the spectators. She was thirty-seven, after all, and arguably a bit grown up for the follies of extreme steeplechasing. She was respected for what she had already achieved. Journalists sought her opinions. (She tipped Golubčík.) Why risk injury or humiliation with another attempt? She had, in any case, been largely preoccupied that year with trying to develop her own string of horses. After a decade of riding other people’s race horses, in practice and in competition, she seems to have registered her own colours in 1931: black, with a white crossed sash, and a black cap. Her three-year-old colt, Dante, had run as a complete no-hoper in the 1931 Derby – possibly as a ruse to allow Kasalický to introduce her to Masaryk. Now she had three horses in training with Karel Šmejda: Dante, Dorian and Savoy. The latter was a two-year-old gelding bought from Šmejda himself. Dorian was a three-yearold colt, sired, like Dante, by the fashionable stallion Ossian. (Kasalický and Mauve also had Ossian colts in training with Šmejda.) It’s not clear where Lata got the money from. War and revolution have left so many gaps in the paper trail that we can only speculate. It’s possible that one or more of the horses was a gift; it is probable that she was able to keep them cheaply. It is also possible that she borrowed at least some of the money: by the mid- 1930s, Řitka was quite heavily mortgaged. If so, she was foolhardy. None of the horses won anything. Yet being an owner did allow her to ride out at Velká Chuchle whenever she liked – and to race, too, if she chose. And it meant that, standing among the owners and grandees as the contenders for the 1932 Velká Pardubická headed for the start, she could feel – or at least pretend – that she was one of them: a mover and shaker of the racing world.
