The West Out There

Coloradan Leads U.S. to Reining Gold

By Emily Esterson , 9-01-06

While U.S sports fans are gearing up for football and the World Series, the Europeans have their attention squarely focused on the town of Aachen, Germany, which is where I am this week. No, there's no soccer here. It's the World Equestrian Games--an Olympic-level competition of horse sports that takes place every two years. And today, the Europeans got a little bit country with the reining team competition.

If you think this is some little horse show in some little backwater, think again. Aachen has pulled out all the stops for the festival, which is (by my rough calculations) attracting some 40,000 spectators every day for two weeks from dozens of countries. The press corp numbers 400. Every store window in the marketplace of Aachen is decorated with a horse theme (I even saw a chocolate shop that have made horse-shoe shaped confections). There are artistically painted plastic horses on balconies, in office windows, on street corners, even lurking behind a McDonalds sign.

And here at the end of week 2 are the reiners, all in chaps and boots and hats whether from Phoenix or France. In the team final, the Americans won the gold, lead by the young and surprised Aaron Ralston from Silt, who said he wasn't even trying to qualify for the World Championships, and now here is, top of the leader board and the highest scoring American. Ralston says his American Quarter Horse had been a working ranch horse- he's also one of the oldest in the competition, at 12.

The Europeans are still flummoxed, but in love with, Western riding. A German reporter in the press conference asked if any of the Canadians (silver) or Americans are real ranchers (Ralston keeps cows). I think they imagine that the reiners simply pulled their horses out of the cow pasture, tossed them in the cargo hold of a Lufthansa 747, brushed them a bit and won the gold medal. Nonetheless, the European fascination with the West remains. When Nancy Jaffer of Equisearch.com asked bronze medal winners Italy what they liked about reining (which is wildly popular there) their chef d'equipe explained, in not so many words, that everyone wants to be a cowboy.

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