Bonfire saves his best for last
From Simon Barnes in Sydney
SIMON BARNES
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It was, perhaps, the single greatest duel of the Olympic Games, and it took place between two trim blonde ladies who have in common a taste for pearl ear-rings and victory. The weapon of choice was music and the duel took place on dancing horses.
It was the individual dressage final: the top 15 competitors dancing it out in the freestyle dressage-to-music. It was Isabell Werth against Anky von Grunsven, it was Germany against the Netherlands and above all, it was Gigolo against Bonfire. Again. These two majestic powerhouses of horses have dominated world dressage for years, and the gold was always going to be a personal matter between the two of them. The horses have seen and done everything; both are now 17, at the absolute peak of their powers, and both will be retired now the Games are over.
And through all the years of their duelling, Gigolo, a burly liver chestnut Hanoverian, has always had the edge. There are two reasons for this. This is a subjectively judged sport, and everybody knows that the Germans are the best. In all such sports, judges fight against the constant temptation to mark on reputation rather than performance - and do not, by the nature of things, always succeed.
Another reason is that the Germans really are amazingly good, and Werth and Gigolo have been the best of them. It is the accuracy of the horse that impresses you, and it is a thing of perfection to see the pair at work. There are no rough edges, nothing to interrupt the eye - just a long sigh of pleasure.
Bonfire makes a nice antithesis. Dressage people like to talk about “expressive paces”, and it’s a pleasing phrase. What the horse expresses by the extravagance of his gait is life itself. Bonfire expresses that little bit more. He is more extravagant, more fallible. There is just a tiny touch of the maverick in him. If he were a human athlete, we would warm to the humanity in him.
Four years ago at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, the two foes were locked in the self-same duel, and van Grunsven and Bonfire were in the lead as they went into the final musical session. Bonfire won the crowd, and Gigolo and Werth won the gold.
And this time around, as the two old gun-fighters looked each other in the eye for one last time, it was Bonfire in the lead by the merest fraction, and Gigolo waiting to pounce.
And so the parade of the lesser horses, each wonderful enough in all conscience, all strutting their stuff: passage and piaffe, pirouette and half-pass. It was a feast of beauty.
But it isn’t soppy, believe me. If you, like me, have ever had the good fortune to sit on a grand prix dressage horse - there is no higher category - you know that what strikes you at the very first pace is the crotch-shattering violence of it all.
The power of these horses is overwhelming; each step is a kind of leap. You’ve got rocket-power. The change you make in going from a regular horse to one of these is like stepping from a Porsche into a Formula One car. The difference is that all the power is expressed, not horizontally but vertically.
It was Gigolo to go first, and off he danced to a piece of specially composed music, called Gigolo’s Journey. The passage - the special slow-motion trot you see at the highest levels of this sport - was simply perfection. And if I said that Gigolo’s paces were less expressive than Bonfire’s, it was only a matter of degree.
The performance was a joy, and the judges marked it accordingly. When the mark came it was six points better than anybody else. Bonfire, the perpetual runner-up, was going to have to go some.
Enter Anky. She performed a series of half-passes of lyrical perfection, and the horses flowed from one movement to the next. Dressage riders talk about “getting a tune” from a horse: this was polyphonic perfection.
On into canter pirouette, and Bonfire, alone of all the horses, spun around his own hocks as if it were the easiest thing in the world. For a horse, it is probably the hardest.
Well, he and she had won on my card, as boxing writers love to say. And the judges? For once they were in outright agreement with me, marking it a spectacular four points higher than Gigolo, 86.05, an Olympic and world record. Exit to huge applause, and van Grunsven, as every good horsey person must in such circumstances, smiled and waved. And then pointed to the horse. He had kept the best for last.
