Sport: Young & Old Campaigners

The crowd at Manhattan’s National Horse Show last week had something special to watch. Along with the traditional pomp and splendor, the show offered such a competitive match as had not been seen at the National for years. The big event: the international jumping, with teams from Mexico, France, Ireland, Canada and the U.S. The chief competitors: Mexico’s famed Brigadier General Humberto Mariles, 1948 Olympic champion, and France’s brilliant Pierre d’Oriola, this year’s Olympic winner. As it turned out, Mariles and D’Oriola had their duel—but it was for secondary honors. The surprise star of the show, breaking a longtime Mexican monopoly: young (27) Billy Steinkraus of Westport, Conn., far & away the most glittering amateur rider to come up in the U.S. for years.

General Mariles led off with the advantage of years of experience over the tight jumping courses at Madison Square Garden; but Mariles no longer had his fabled Arete, the one-eyed jumper who carried him to Olympic and international laurels. Arete had broken a leg and died after an operation. D’Oriola, accustomed to the longer European jumping courses and hardly at home in the Garden, nonetheless was superbly mounted on his big chestnut Olympic horse, Ali Baba. Steinkraus was teamed up with an amazingly old (19) brown gelding named Democrat, a retired cavalry horse from the old Army Remount Service at Fort Riley, Kans. and a jumper of legendary prowess at many another U.S. horse show.

Up & Over. From the first day, Steinkraus was a show stopper; he won both opening international events, afternoon and evening, thus doubling the number of winners the whole U.S. team scored a year ago. Riding the skittish, younger (9) Hollandia, a horse that, Steinkraus says, “always thinks he’s in the third race at Belmont,” Billy slipped to a third place in the next event. Back on old reliable Democrat the next day, and traveling the course faultlessly, Steinkraus led the U.S. to a leg on the team title.

That night, competing for the President of Mexico Trophy (General Mariles defending), Billy brought forth such a burst of applause from the 10,000 fans that the announcer had to shush them to avoid frightening the horses. Astride Hollandia, the slight-built (5 ft. 10 in., 150 Ibs.) Steinkraus had his hands full, knocked down two of the eight obstacles. “It takes more strength than I’ve got to handle him,” Steinkraus said. But no other rider and horse did any better over the tightly spaced course.

Riding last on Democrat for the final go-’round of the course, Steinkraus needed a faultless ride to win. The crowd held its breath as the rider and his old campaigner approached the final obstacle. It was a 5-ft.-high white rail, where almost every other contestant had come a cropper. Up & over went Democrat, cleanly, bringing down a storm of applause. Later, grinning modestly, Billy explained his success by quoting an old jumping axiom: “The horse makes the rider.”

The Payoff. A rider since he was eleven, Steinkraus showed more than early promise as he matured, scored an unusual double when he won both the Good Hands and Maclay Trophies for juniors in 1941. With the 124th Cavalry (“unmounted, but we had boots and spurs”), Billy won three battle stars in the China-Burma-India Theater, ended up in China as a sergeant. After college (Yale ’48), Steinkraus combined his two main pastimes into a temporary career. An ardent musician (“strictly longhair”), he played the viola with the Connecticut Symphony Orchestra, joined a concert-management concern, spent all his spare time on the horse-show circuit.

For the last year, since the 1951 Olympic trials, Steinkraus has concentrated entirely on riding. He paced the U.S. team to third place in the Olympics, later shared the top title with England’s Lieut. Colonel Harry Llewellyn at the Dublin Horse Show. The intense training finally paid off last week at the National. This week, with three events still to go, young Billy and his old campaigner (“the finest horse I ever rode”) were just one victory shy of General Mariles’ alltime National record of five individual triumphs.