East Coast Equestrian

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Tad Coffin aboard Bally Cor, 1976 Montréal Olympic Games.
Photo: USET Archive / USET Foundation

Welcome to where every week we celebrate the breed with heart. We’d love to hear your submissions in the comments: past or present, top competitor or treasured companion. This week, we hear from our publisher, Brooke Knight Warner, who nominated

Bally Cor

In 1973, an unproven horse arrived at the U.S. Equestrian Team’s training center in Gladstone, New Jersey. Bally Cor wasn’t meant for greatness. She’d been donated to the program the way so many horses considered good not great were; expected to be a practice horse and nothing more. Paired with an equally unproven 21-year-old named Tad Coffin, the two of them had exactly one thing going for them: a willingness to keep trying.

It showed first on cross-country. Coffin later said you could raise a fence in front of her, three feet, then four, and she'd simply meet it. Never with style. Just with more try than the fence had asked for.

By 1975 she and Coffin had gold from the Pan American Games. By 1976, at the Montreal Olympics, she sat a modest sixth after dressage and used cross-country to move into second, ahead of a field stacked with the best riders in the world. She and Coffin left with individual and team gold.

Three years earlier, nobody had expected any of it from her.

She retired to a second life as a broodmare, and one of her descendants, Bally Mar, was named USEA Mare of the Year in 2001. Bally Cor herself was inducted into the Eventing Hall of Fame in 2004.

Where she spent those last years, whose fields she grazed, who fed her every morning, isn’t recorded anywhere we could find. That’s not unusual for a mare of her era; the care and keeping of retired horses rarely made it into print the way their ribbons did. We hope it was somewhere green. We hope someone was glad every morning to see her out the kitchen window. She earned that, even if no one wrote it down.

How are you and the horses in your life staying cool during this heat wave? Keeping our fetlocks and hocks crossed that this will be our last big one of the season. What do you think?

Link in comments to East Coast Equestrian Research Desk's summer heat guidelines.

What was your favorite article in this issue of The East Coast Equestrian? Link to the online edition in comments in case you haven't seen it yet.

With heat an ounce of prevention is everything — heat stress is easier to prevent than treat. If your horse isn’t recovering normally after exercise, seems unusually quiet, or stops sweating despite the heat, begin aggressive cooling immediately and consult your veterinarian. Be smart and compassionate with your partner and yourself in this brutal weather.