He looked at the world rankings and plotted an ascent. Kuerten was on the fringe of the top 20 and from there all climbing was steep and treacherous; by the north face. His target was the top 10. By September. Jessica returned home and Eckardt revealed his plan. Too late for consultation. No need, anyway.
“I went, ‘Eckardt!!’ Well, he said, ‘I’ve told Georgina already (Lady Georgina Forbes, owner of horses in the yard). She thinks it’s a good idea as well. I’m going to ring the other owners now and tell them our plan. There’s no pressure — we just think it would be a good idea.’”
By mid-summer she was pushing. The top 10 riders in the July world rankings are guaranteed an invitation to the lucrative World Cup events of the late summer and early autumn. All other riders must depend on an invitation from their home federation and Ireland only has one slot to give. In July, she was 11th, just three tiny points outside the top 10 on a list where points totals are counted in hundreds and then thousands the closer you are to the summit.
“Eckardt said straightaway, ‘You know where you lost those three points? You remember being at such and such a show with Libertina and you took a big risk through the corner and made a mistake? It’s your own fault that you’re not in the top 10.’
“I just said, ‘Oh, Christ!’ And that really made me angry and I just said, ‘It’s not going to be my own fault any more.’”
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“Eckardt said to me, ‘Right, we’re really going point-chasing in September. We’re going to chase it and you’re going to ride the best you’ve ever ridden.’ He really fired me up for it.”
They went from Russia, to Portugal, to Sweden and back to Germany, game hunters on a giant safari, bagging points. At Estoril in Portugal she won the Grand Prix, a trophy head for the wall. It was her first victory in a major Grand Prix for 10 years; worse than that, she had been second 37 times in the meantime. Count it out on your fingers.
“It’s something that really niggled me. I don’t know why, because I’ve won lots of other classes. I’ve had super success in the European championships (team gold), everything, and so many seconds in Grand Prix and every time it niggled me. If I was third I was nearly happier than if I was second. And I just kept saying, ‘Is it that I can’t win? Am I not good enough that I can’t give the last bit? Am I always holding something in reserve that I can’t actually win?’ It did niggle me — horrendously. And then, when we won in Estoril, Eckardt said, ‘Now it’s broken you’ll win again — now you’ll win again.”
When the new world rankings came out she was No 7. Done. Kuerten had read somewhere that champagne and Red Bull were divine together and she decided that this cocktail would be the toast of their success. The news came through at lunchtime, the stable staff were gathered in the kitchen and everyone’s glass was filled.
“It was disgusting, absolutely disgusting. But now that we’ve said we’re going to drink it, we’re going to drink it and we all drank it. We were eating peppermints afterwards to get rid of the taste.” In honour of the achievement, it was fitting that the celebration should require such guts.
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BY THE end of the year she had risen to No 5. In the cut-throat world of international showjumping only three Irish riders currently appear in the top 100: Billy Twomey at No 70, Trevor Coyle at 87. Since these world rankings were inaugurated in 2000 no Irish rider had been top five.
Last weekend in Dubai she won the richest Grand Prix event to be staged: US$250,000 to the winner. Nineteen of the world’s top 20 were in the 36-strong field. Kuerten returned early from a badly damaged shoulder — ignoring Eckardt’s pleas to go easy, be patient, wait, rest. She was first into the ring, the coffin draw, and first into the ring for the jumpoff. No matter. Kuerten and Quibell went clear twice and in the jumpoff nobody could match their speed. She travelled to Dubai as one of the top riders in the world and she delivered on her billing. A star among stars.
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It wasn’t always like this. She wasn’t always like this. Before Jessica Kuerten there was Jessica Chesney, a young rider with raw talent, one brilliant horse and a dream. Her long blond ponytail swished beneath her helmet and, in those days, in a different world long ago, there was no sense of the future. Not this future.
There was a donkey called Mrs Porridge in the beginning and a succession of wonderful ponies afterwards, each one a companion on the journey, but Diamond Exchange was a different kind of beginning and a special companion. Her father, George, paid £5,000 for him in the late 1980s and together they found a place on the world stage. David Broome had expressed an interest, too, but the horse had a wild temperament and in the end his quirks suppressed the price and spooked the competition.
“He was very difficult as a young horse. He was incredibly shy and nervous of people. I compared him to Lady Diana — could go out in public and give an amazing performance, but behind it all a little bit shy.”
To liberate his talent Jessica needed his trust and over years she won it. Together they soared: winners of a Grand Prix, a World Cup, 10th at the 1994 world championships, regulars on Ireland’s Nations Cup team. People wondered, though: was it her or was it the horse? “I made my name with one big wild horse and with a wild style of riding. I know exactly what people said: it was a flash in the pan. When that horse is gone, she’ll be gone. She’s only a girl. I know all these things were said and I know they were said to my father.”
Was it not the case that she made him and he made her? She came from “a horsey family” but her father had been denied the life that she was destined for. His family didn’t have the means to support a nascent jockey, so he became a dentist. “He said, ‘I’m going to have to get a job where I can earn money to keep horses.’ He always called it the grind. He went to the grind all week to make money to keep horses.”
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To make her study for her A-levels the yard was cleared of horses for a year and she consented to a year of third-level education but all of it was pussy-footing around the inevitable. She wanted horses to be her life. And her livelihood? Well, that too.
George removed all of the impediments that had blocked him. Jessica found clients to fill 15 stables; Mary, the groom, lived with them in the family home; a few sponsors eased the load and for overseas trips George paid for the ferry and diesel for the horsebox. Jessica drove, Mary kept her awake: Larne to Stranraer on the boat and 11 hours on the motorway to Dover. From Dover to the world. At home, some clients didn’t pay and the yard had elements of a Third World economy but to see that you would have missed the bigger picture.
“We were just having a party. It was just hilarious. We spent our day riding the horses, grooming the horses and going to shows. And we were really successful. We sold some of the horses and they jumped really good. We had 10 horses qualified for Dublin (horse show). We were just having a ball of a time. The money that I was getting from livery was keeping us going, but earning money, that was never the issue. I never thought about that — as long as I could pay the bills. I really only had one interest and that was to ride international. I may not have realised it was so strong but I was going one direction. Everything else fell by the wayside.
“Sometimes my parents did bring me slightly back to earth and said, ‘You’ve got to earn a living, you’ve got to think about buying a house,’ things like that. That didn’t really interest me. I’ve got to get the money to get to the show and be successful and get an invitation to the next show. It was all an adventure.
“In the back of my mind I knew there wasn’t a future in it but I was having such a whale of a time and everything was going so good and I was just saying, ‘Go with the flow. Something will turn up.’ And this Irish mentality of ‘something will turn up’ is very good but very dangerous because nothing just turns up. Things only come when you work for them. When I came to Germany Eckardt said, ‘Okay, you may think something will turn up but you’ve got to make it turn up.’”
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THEY met at the Dublin horse show 12 years ago. He asked her to dinner and stood her up. Germany had won the Nations Cup, Eckardt was friendly with the German chef d’equipe and he was drawn into their celebrations. He should have called. He didn’t.
Jessica went drinking with a few other Irish riders and ended up in Annabel’s nightclub. Eckardt was there. She gave him a piece of her mind and he put his cards on the table.
“‘I’m not married,’ he said. ‘I’ve no children and I’d like to see you.’ I stood there totally gobsmacked and then I gave him my telephone number.”
She was 24; he was a 39-year-old businessman, central buyer for a large German company. Naturally, romance blossomed. His job took him all over the world but he made it his business to show up at weekends wherever Jessica was riding. She already had plans to spend two months training at a German stable that autumn and after two weeks she realised she wasn’t coming home.
Her stint at the German stable didn’t work out; Eckardt stepped in. “‘What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘I want to learn and I want to stay with you.’” So they rented 10 stables, put an ad in the paper and assembled a team of cast-offs. Meanwhile, Diamond Exchange was standing in a field in Antrim.
“My father was very dubious about the whole thing. Anyone who knew my dad would say that he was a clever man but a man who really liked everything to be under his control — including his daughter and his horse. I think that was the biggest issue, to let go. For every parent it’s a big issue.” After six months George relented. Eckardt was embraced.
About 18 months later they made a decision that would change the life they planned to share: he quit his job. He earned a packet and their fledgling yard was being subsidised from his income. But he quit. “I said to him straight out that I’ll quit my job for you. And he said, ‘You know, your job is something that we can do all our lives.
“It was a very difficult decision for him and he had a very hard six months after he stopped work. He wasn’t accepted in the showjumping world. ‘Who are you? You’re not a horse dealer, you’re not a rider, who are you, coming in here, preaching your wife?’ We had hard years. Three very hard years of getting up in the morning and saying, ‘Right, I’m off to the show. I don’t know how I’m going to pay the entry fee.’
“There really were years where we had to live a very basic life. Making ends meet was a huge issue. It was the issue. There was no money and no time to do anything else and we really did work our butts off. People always say to us, ‘Oh, you never have any time, you work like crazy.’ It’s become our normal way of life. To achieve, we had to. We worked 24 hours a day. It was basically only the love we had for each other that kept us going because when one was down the other pushed. We were doing it for us and for our future.”
Eckardt used his management skills to pursue sponsors and keep the yard afloat. The work ethic, though, was a cultural thing. “People in Germany work hard and they don’t talk about it. They just get on with it and they expect everybody else to work hard.
“Eckardt was really strong for me. ‘You’re ambitious, but you can’t be ambitious on one side and lazy on the other.’ He did push and push and push and when I got down and said, ‘I’m tired,’ he pushed me again.”
They followed a five-year plan and in the fifth year it began to bear fruit. Good horses made way for better horses and her stock rose again. As a rider, she was ready for the next jump. Intrinsically, as a sporting discipline, showjumping doesn’t discriminate against women. Men don’t necessarily do it better and there is no reason they should. But it is still a man’s world. She was more ready than ever for that challenge.
“It is an equal opportunities sport — if you’re prepared to think like a man. We can beat the men in the ring, that’s no problem. Where we have to be strong is in the daily routine, in the lifestyle, family planning. Then you can succeed. If you want to cry, go and cry on your own. Cry, for sure, I’ve done it many times, but don’t do it in front of the guys. For a woman on her own, I’m sure it’s difficult. But if you look in our sport, the best women all have a man behind them.”
Has the grind made her harder? The competition, the pressures, the hours? Thinking like a man? “I think I have changed. I may have become a little bit more level-headed. If anything I’ve become softer. I think I’ve become more feminine. Owners come to the shows and we go for dinner and you’ve a chance to dress up, go out. Some of the shows have a wellness centre and you can go and have a facial or a massage. I think that allows me to be very feminine.”
Consciously feminine? “Not very much by me is conscious. The only thing that was conscious was to get my man and keep him.”
LAST YEAR was good and last year was messy, too. Irish showjumping lurched from one crisis to another and Kuerten was caught up in some of it. It still hasn’t been resolved and she has no desire to talk about it. It would serve no purpose, she says. The circuit rolls on, their life keeps moving; ceaselessly. In the German countryside they have 30 horses and a stunning yard: every aid to the equine athlete is here, every comfort. They have plans. More plans. Still more plans. Expand, grow, improve. No stop. Non-stop. How did it happen? They made it happen. “I’ve always said that a lot of my success is due to my dreams. I remember being a little kid, riding my pony in the field, and practising prize-givings for having won something. I remember dreaming of winning a showing class in Dublin (horse show) and then I won a showing class in Dublin. Then I dreamed to get on an Irish team. I’ve dreamed of winning the big Grand Prix and it’s happened. If you can follow your dreams — but not in a dreamer way — they might just happen. “I always had a dream to become a top showjumper but I didn’t really think that I could do it. I was always working towards a goal but I didn’t actually believe that I could achieve it. I always felt there were other people better. When I came over here I started to work and I felt, ‘Okay, either you’re going to go for it or you can stop.’ It sounds strange — although I’ve never believed that I belong to the top, I always believed that we’d make it.” Together. Indivisible.