THE United States show jumping team, dubbed the ‘Dream Team’, was never going to be caught in the chase for the gold medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Games.

Much to the delight of the 16,000-strong home crowd at the Santa Anita racetrack, Joe Fargis (Touch of Class), Conrad Homfeld (Abdullah), Melanie Smith (Calypso) and Leslie Howard (Albany) won America’s first team gold in Olympic show jumping history.

The chase for the individual medals resulted in an eventual jump-off between Fargis and Homfeld for gold. Fargis, on the former racehorse Touch Of Class, won out over Homfeld with the Trakehner stallion Abdullah.

In the individual medals curtain-raiser, an equally intriguing battle for the bronze medal took place between Heidi Hauri, then Robbiani, and the 10-year-old mare Jessica V, her Swiss team mate Bruno Candrian on another Irish-bred Slygof and Canada’s Mario Deslauriers with Aramis.

Neither could catch Robbiani’s flying round, which made her the most ‘recent’ Swiss medal winner in show jumping since Charles-Gustave Kuhn (Pepita) won bronze at the 1928 Amsterdam Games.

Their Los Angeles win also meant Heidi became one of five women to have won an Olympic individual show jumping medal. Marion Coakes (Stroller) and Ann Moore (Psalm), the British pair of Mexico City and Munich silver medallists, plus the bronze medallists Alexandra Ledderman (Rochet M) and Beezie Madden (Authentic) at Atlanta and Beijing complete this elite group.

And from a horsepower viewpoint, Jessica V and Norman Dello Joio’s bronze medal horse at Barcelona: Irish (Regular Guy) are etched in Games history as the most recent Irish-bred medal winners in show jumping.

The other interesting feature about the Los Angeles result is that Adelheid “Heidi” Robbiani and her brother Max Hauri also became one of a rare group of Olympic competitor siblings. Their father, Max’s namesake, was a farmer in the small town of Seon and had built up a substantial business, first buying cattle and later horses for the lucrative Swiss trooper market.

Susette Merz-Hauri, Max and Heidi’s first cousin, explained the background, saying: “Horses were for working and riding. Besides his job as a farmer, their father, Max senior, started to compete. Competitions then were for high society, Max even asked people to loan him a jacket for competing. He was just a farmer and always after the farming work was done, could he then go to competitions.

“He started to make a business selling horses and for a long time, he was in Poland. The Swiss Army bought horses there so he built up connections and he was going with them to buy horses. They went to Ireland later but first it was Poland.

Heidi Hauri and Annette Müller, the daughter of Heidi's first cousin Susette Merz-Hauri, at the yard in Seon \ Susan Finnerty

“Max, his son, was in the Army too and that is why when he was at the Olympic Games (Tokyo and Munich) he was in his military uniform. He took over the business from his father and then Heidi went with Max to Ireland in 1979. That is when she bought Jessica.”

A week after that conversation with Susette and her family, it’s off to Seon with her daughter Annette. “That’s the staff apartment,” she says pointing out the building, beside a single line railway, that was once home to scores of Irish riders and grooms who went to Hauri’s ‘Swiss finishing school’.

And the indoor school where her twin sister Silvia and their father Heinz Merz watched the young Clover Hill filly Samantha loose jumping. Not only did she become her horse of a lifetime but Silvia’s quest for full papers for her Irish import led to a unique photo album of her travels in Ireland.

Then there’s the lady herself: Heidi. Now living nearby, she’s a familiar sight at the Hauri yard where she trains the next generation of riders, including all three of Annette’s daughters: Chantal, Adrienne and Marielle. “I have to have something to do, I like to be busy training,” she says, stopping to have a few words in Swiss German with one of the riders, wearing a red jacket, tacking up her next horse.

Lighting up Limerick

“Down there, that’s where Jessica was when she first arrived in an ex-cow stable,” she said, pointing down the aisle. The Hauris haven’t forgotten their farming roots or days spent on the road in Ireland buying horses. Back to that 1979 visit when the brother and sister team first spotted Jessica in Co Limerick.

Is it true that Max turned her down because she failed the vet? “Yes, she was lame on the circle but she never had anything wrong afterwards. As soon as I saw her, I liked her. Max, he thought ‘No, you’re not going to buy her, she didn’t pass the vet check.’ And then I saw her again in Dublin, so I bought her myself!

“She was Candy Floss then,” added Heidi, dispelling the myth about it being bad luck to change a horse’s name. “We had her full-brother too but he was nothing like her. Sometimes the mares are good in the family or sometimes the geldings.”

The mare’s original name was a nod to Candleabra, her sire as the RTÉ show jumping commentator Brian McSharry mentioned when the Olympic heroine Jessica returned to jump in Dublin. “When I came back to the Dublin Horse Show, everybody was there. They came to see and touch her, saying ‘I’m the breeder!’ Everybody!”

Who was Jessica’s real breeder? Foaled in 1974, she was bred by the late Michael Kelly in Askeaton. His nephew Ronnie, an accomplished breeder himself with the likes of Alberta Mist and Talks Cheap, turns out to be equally adept as an equine seanchai.

“She was by Candleabra,” he confirmed. “He was a thoroughbred stallion and Captain Lyle stood him. Teddy Lee, she was married to Micky Lee at Lees Cross and they trained racehorses, it was her father that bred and stood Candleabra.”

Sporthorse Data, the pedigree database, suggests that Jessica’s dam was Gentle Miss. While this 1964-foaled mare is recorded on IHR Online, there are no details of her earlier foals or sire. Again, Ronnie obliges with the missing details.

“There was nothing really recorded at that time but Gentle Miss was by Coxcomb, another thoroughbred horse.” Which means Jessica and the Irish Sport Horse stallion Mill Jess are related? “Yes, she’s a half-sister to Noel C Duggan’s horse Mill Jess.”

Foaled in the same year as his half-sister won her Los Angeles medal, Mill Jess, by the Sunny Light son Ballyard Light, produced the five-star event horse Coral Cove. The Burghley specialist was competed by both Polly and Vere Phillips, (like Max Hauri, a patron saint for Irish sellers and producers).

Another Mill Jess offspring Millstreet Squire was out of Carran (Anthony). This thoroughbred mare produced Joe Fargis’s second Olympic medallist horse: Mill Pearl (King Of Diamonds). Bred by Noel C. Duggan, she won silver at Seoul.

“Ivan McDonagh bought the mare [Jessica V] from my uncle as a two-year-old and his wife Susan produced the mare and that’s when Max and Heidi saw her,” before adding this golden nugget: “I was in Max’s the time she was in L.A.”

Between Jessica arriving in Seon and Santa Anita, came a run of success for the Swiss combination. As a seven-year-old Jessica won the Aarau Derby, on the Hauri’s doorstep. The year before Los Angeles, the pair placed third in the formidable Aachen Grand Prix and were on the victorious team at the 1983 European championships, hosted in Hickstead.

Thomas Fuchs (Willora Swiss), Walther Gabathuler (Beethoven) and Willi Melliger (Van Gogh) were their teammates, the first time Switzerland had won a team gold European title.

How did Heidi and Jessica claim their Los Angeles place in the run-up to the Games?

“I had to do double than other Swiss riders, I was the only woman! They didn’t like to have a woman on the team in the beginning so I have to go to Rome, straight in the big classes; the Nations Cup and the Grand Prix.

“I had two clear rounds in the Nations Cup and then I couldn’t be put out. I had one leg already in the team!”

Silvia Röösli-Merz with her niece Chantal meeting Jessica V in retirement at John Hughes' Williamstown Stud

Party time

She recalls the Olympic courses built by ex-Hungarian cavalry officer-turned trainer and course designer Bertalan de Némethy as “very big! Between the oxers, I couldn’t touch the front and back poles.”

And then, two Irish-breds jumping off for the bronze medal. “Slygof (Imperius), he was also a very blood horse,” she said recalling the Slyguff Stud-bred. “Bruno Candrian … that girl in the red jacket in the yard? That’s his granddaughter Ladina Candrian, she works and trains here.” Another small-world moment.

After the medal ceremony at the Santa Anita racetrack, Heidi, Joe Fargis and Conrad Homfeld were whisked by police escort to the LA Memorial Coliseum, where the Games official opening and closing ceremonies were held, to parade on three borrowed horses.

“It was full, full of people. Then there was a big party in Seon and another down in Ticino where I was living then. And I had an Irish groom for Jessica at the Olympics: Gerry Sheridan. He was very, very good.”

Ronnie, who worked for Max for two and a half years, remembers the Seon celebrations vividly. “It was serious. The whole place shut down and there was a massive parade in the village afterwards when Heidi got back from L.A., it was great!”

And for his uncle Michael, tuned in to RTÉ to watch Jessica at the Olympics, an unforgettable week? “Can you imagine at that time in a small village like Askeaton what it would have been like? [to have bred an Olympic medal-winning horse]. He was very involved in the GAA too.”

A silver medal double happened the following year in Dinard when Heidi became the first woman showjumper to win an individual European championship medal, one podium place behind Paul Schockemöhle and the mighty Deister.

Steve Guerdat’s father Philippe and her Los Angeles teammates Walter Gabathuler and Willi Melliger completed the Swiss team that finished second to Great Britain.

More big results – winning the Grand Prix at Calgary, the first Swiss rider to do so – followed before Jessica’s career started to wind down. “She was two or three times Horse of the Year in Switzerland, her last big show was in St. Gallen and her last national show was in Brugg.”

Attempts to ‘replicate’ the feisty chesnut proved unsuccessful. “Jessica went back to John Hughes. She was pregnant with twins, she lost both. Then she got laminitis. We tried everything and that’s why we gave her to John.”

Which led to the photograph of a young Chantal Müller standing beside the retired Jessica in the field at Williamstown Stud. The Müller family were offered a substantial seven-figure amount for Chantal’s good mare U Tabasca, is it true that Heidi also turned down a blank cheque for Jessica?

“Yes, I could put on the cheque what I wanted but she was not for sale. At that time, it was not like today. I bought her as a five-year-old and brought her up.

"So, when you have the money and you go to look for a replacement horse, you never find another Jessica,” she replied with a philosophical shrug.

What made Jessica so special? “She was a very nice mare, a little bit the bitch! That’s what made her good. Chesnut mares! But I had several chesnut mares. She wasn’t so big, 167cms/168cms. We were such a team, Jessica and I.”

As a three-quarter-bred, she was also a typical traditional Irish-bred, as was another of Heidi’s later horses: Special Envoy. “They were a lot much easier horses then, than today. Today they have so much more blood, they are very quality, maybe not so easy. You [Irish breeders] sold a lot of the good mares abroad and that was a problem for the Irish horse.

“Special Envoy, he was a typical King of Diamonds. He jumped with me in Calgary and the Nations Cup. I was selected as reserve with him for Atlanta.”

Bred by Mary Hughes, Special Envoy did go to the Olympics when he placed ninth in the following Games at Barcelona with Rodrigo Pessoa in 1994. The field included Milton and a host of influential stallions, such as Darco, Quidam de Revel, Quito de Baussy and Touchdown.

“Nico Pessoa was my trainer, he came down here or I went to Belgium. He lost two horses with colic and, at that time, I didn’t like the indoors so much so I gave him Special Envoy to compete.”

End of an era

Heidi retired from show jumping in 1998 at Monterrey. “The last big show was in Mexico, Alfonso Romo’s show. I think now there are so many shows. If they’re finished outside, they’re going indoors. Now, it’s a business,” she remarked on the changes in show jumping, from the era of cavalry riders and high society to the multi-billion industry the sport is today.

‘Girl power’ is a too-trite soundbite to mention to this forthright individual but going back to her remark about how she felt it was difficult for a woman to claim a team place in the 1980s. “It has got better since,” she remarked.

Other changes are seen in the Hauri yard, where the breed codes on each horse’s stable door include Holsteiner, French and Zangersheide bloodlines. Some stables are empty as a batch of competition horses has gone with her nephew Markus Hauri to compete at Oliva. Others are stationed across the border.

“We have about 100 horses – mares, foals, yearlings, young horses, all in France. There’s not enough space here so they bring their mares there to breed them,” said Heidi, explaining how Max’s sons Markus and Thomas are now building up their own supplies.

Is it hard to find staff now? “Good ones, yes!”

As we walk past a new stable block under construction, Heidi shows us the bronze medal replica necklace she wears. Winning that medal in Los Angeles evidently means a lot to this fascinating character. If she had a choice between an Olympic medal or the financial reward of a Global Champions Tour final win, which would it be?

“The Olympics. The Global Champions Tour is more money! But the Olympics, I think so. I think it’s more important. I had a lovely time show jumping.

“It was friendship, real friendship.”

Next week: The next Hauri generation.