Olympic Notes

This blog began on 2009, but having been an almost daily preoccupation, it seems much older—so much so that I thought I’d look back to see what I had written about the last Olympics only to discover that I hadn’t written anything. Neither about the Olympics—nor yet about the last presidential contest. Surprise.

Such events—well separated in time—have a certain character. I tend to forget, except as a token, the sequence of feelings that they will produce. Hence a kind of recurrence marks them; each time they come, I think: “That’s what I thought the last time too.” I will leave the negative reactions to sleep like dogs. Yesterday came two pleasing events. One was Dressage Riding, my Father’s passionate avocation. It has retained its spirit of sportsmanship, not to say aura of aristocracy—the reason why, this year, it was subject to sneers. My Father was a genuine product of the Austro-Hungarian empire; to be sure he arrived after it had passed, but its spirit still lingered in the Hungarian military. He was highly-enough qualified so that the family expected him to make the Hungarian national team in 1940—but World War II interfered (link). His other favorite sport was Fencing. It delighted me to see the Women’s team win a bronze medal in that sport—an achievement for a team ranked fifth over all. We only saw the last match-up in which Courtney Hurley defeated the 2004 Olympic champion, Anna Sivkova of Russia, to clinch the team’s achievement. Sometimes a bronze feels like gold. Other team members were Maya Lawrence and Kelley Hurley, Courtney’s older sister.

Two further notes—extending the timeline. Such games as these are the hallmark of secular times—although the Olympics began in 776 BC—which was decisively not a secular era in Greece. But as such times set in in earnest, the spectacles become more and more, well, secular. Thus it did not surprise me that Emperor Theodosius stopped such events—or they terminated during his reign.. He was engaged in imposing Christianity on the empire, and the times were turbulent. The ancient Olympics thus lasted for 1169 years. Nor does it surprise me that the Olympics were revived beginning in 1796 in Revolutionary France before evolving to the current games by 1856. Can we read into that, using such evidence, that Christendom, as a cultural epoch, lasted from 393 to 1796—thus 1404 years? Food for contemplation in the practice of the only sport I’m still capable of: walking. But my walk has nothing to do with the Olympic kind. Practice of that would surely land me in a hospital in just 15 minutes. Time is very elastic, you might say.

Dressage

My father was a soldier, indeed the child of a soldier. He began his military career at age 14 by entering Hungary’s foremost military academy, known as Ludovika. The year was 1921, thus he just barely missed being part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy’s military elite by three years. That union fell apart in 1918. But what are three years in a tradition-bound institution like the military? Father’s education began with learning to speak German because, at Ludovika then, and for quite a while after, the old habits lingered and the ghost of Austria took a while to fade away.

He remained a military person in fact for some 25 years—until Patton’s army released him from the P.O.W. camp where World War II had ended for him. He was then a man of 39, an ex-major, and an ex-professor of the institute where his career had begun, the Ludovika Akademia, as Hungarians render it. In the interim he had commanded a horse-artillery company, later a battalion, had fought against the Russian army, and in the process, not very far from Lodz, in Poland, where Brigitte grew up as part of a German family, he lost his left arm in a mine explosion. A military man in fact for a quarter of a century, but a military man in spirit for as long as he lived. He closed his eyes in 1981 in Kansas City.

But Father’s passion and life-long preoccupation was dressage, the equestrian sport. Here too his place and time of birth had a bearing—the rest was talent and inclination—because Austria then, and indeed since 1565, has been the home of the Spanish Riding School. It is still there and, so all agree, the last and perhaps final bastion of l’haute école where training methods as they were practiced in the eighteenth century still remain largely unchanged. With this part of the culture, and, in those days, equestrian sports being largely practiced by the military, Father became interested in the sport and advanced in it rapidly enough so that, before the war changed everything, he had risen to a national stature in the sport, once won a bronze in a national competition, and hoped soon to be ready for the next Olympics. I was born as the 1936 Olympics were being held in Berlin. Father anticipated participating, cross-your fingers, in the 1940 event—but it never took place. It was to have been held in Tokyo, alas. By then we were living in another world.

Dressage is the art of training pure-blooded horses a variety of intricate gates and leaps you do not see horses performing in the wild. It is a sport in which horse-and-human become a single performer—truly an art where, despite an endless preoccupation with technique, the ultimate performance is one of feel and interaction between two living entities, and the beauty of the thing is also perceived—and truly appreciated only—by the trained and prepared mind.

Horses and equitation, not surprisingly, were part of my childhood. I heard words like collection, pesade, levade, courbette, and mezair almost daily. Collection refers to an intensified form during all standard gaits; the other words refer to so-called school-jumps and airs above the ground. What I mostly saw, however, when I watched my father train his or others’ horses, was the animal, unsaddled, making endless circles around my father, standing at the center of the circle, and communicating with the animal by gestures, sounds—and sometimes it seemed only by facial expressions—re-teaching the gifted horse how to do the basics right—the walk, the trot, the canter—and, above all, how to come to a stop in a state of perfect collection.

It should not surprise you, really, that our very first acquisition in America, something like a month after our arrival, was a horse. Her name was Lady, a nice Palomino mare. To reach her we had to catch two bus lines, both to their terminal points. After that a third bus, I think it was Greyhound, got us far enough out into the country to reach Lady in her sylvan haunts. And I, in my middle teens, had the honors of carrying the saddle on each and every bus, and then lug it further on the long walk to the far off farm where Lady lived. I learned in this process that I can overcome all embarrassment and stare it right down—and if pretty girls were on the bus I also learned the power of a wink to conquer all.

My father rode horses and trained people in horsemanship right up to the point where, suddenly, he changed from a slender, active, hardy man, into his seventies by then, by the onset of stumbling, loss of balance, into an invalid. He was diagnosed with cancer. It took him off rapidly. If there is dressage in heaven, I’ll know where to go to see my father. I expect to find him there, patient, inscrutable, making strange noises with his mouth, waving an arm, snapping a finger, as some young Pegasus learns his piaffe.
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The picture, courtesy of Wikipedia, depicts the croupade. Other pictures, showing airs, are available at that site here. Those inclined to go deeper, herewith the web page of the United States Dressage Federation and here the web page of the Spanish Riding School; you can select English as a language there.