Our writer attended Jessica Springsteen’s Olympic debut, where she put on a strong performance but did not advance.
First, an admission: I know very little about the sport of equestrian. That said, I do possess a lot of knowledge about Bruce Springsteen. I know that he initially gave up on playing the guitar his mother got for him and returned it to the shop. Too hard. I know that “The River,” his song about a teenage couple who give up on their dreams because she gets pregnant, is about his sister, who is still married to the boyfriend in the song. I have also known for a while that Springsteen’s 29-year-old daughter, Jessica, is one of the country’s top equestrian athletes. I have never met Bruce, though I have “seen” him many times, and I do consider him a kind of companion of the past four decades whose songs are the soundtrack of my life. We’ve driven across the country together. You know what I mean. I have long harbored a silly fantasy that one day my work as a sportswriter and his existence as an equestrian father would bring us together. For years, Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa showed up at horse shows like any other equestrian parents. Eventually I would sit in the stands with Bruce and Patti — I would call them Bruce and Patti — and watch their daughter compete on the biggest stage in sports. But as it turned out, Jessica Springsteen’s Olympic debut arrived at these “Covid Games,” which months ago barred international spectators, including the families of athletes. So I figured I owed it to my imaginary good friend to take a break from track and field to deliver an eyewitness report on his daughter and her 12-year-old bay stallion, Don Juan Van De Donkhoeve. First, though, I needed to check in with my niece and sister-in-law, who live on a horse farm in western New Jersey and ride competitively, to find out how equestrian competitions work. Apparently the jumping event, which requires the horses and their mounts to complete a twisting,590-meter course in 178 seconds while navigating 14 jumps, nearly all of them more than five feet high, is all about the canter, with the horse and the rider trying to get to just the right spot to clear those jumps.
