Horses A Lifesaver For Dressage Lover Ann Romney
By Deborah Welky
All of us have that one special something that elevates our spirits and makes us happy. For Ann Romney, that special something is the always-challenging sport of dressage. You can hear it in her voice.
“I had the best ride of my life today!” Romney enthused, unbidden. “There’s no one happier on the planet than me today! It’s like I won the lottery, and all I did was have a good ride on one horse.”
A breakthrough? Perhaps.
“He’s been tricky for me to learn how to ride, but I’m learning to figure him out, and he’s learning to figure me out,” she said of her current mount.
If you ride, you know that joy. It was a joy that Romney, however, had lost for a time.
“I rode as a kid,” Romney recalled. “I galloped around bareback and had a great time. But when I was 16, I started dating and moved away from horses. In fact, I see this as kind of a common pattern in girls of that age.”
Fast-forward through college at Brigham Young University, marriage to high school sweetheart Mitt (the former governor of Massachusetts and Republican U.S. presidential nominee in 2012) and the raising of five boys. Horses remained on the back burner almost out of necessity. But Ann’s athletic side would not be denied.
“I played tennis when my kids were young,” she said. “I could get out of the house and be athletic. I had a friend with whom I could play tournament tennis, and it was a great social and physical outlet for me. It kept me sane while I was raising all those boys.”
It was a health crisis that eventually led her back to her equestrian roots.
“Just before I turned 50, I started getting sick,” Romney said. “It took a few months to diagnose, but I was losing function very quickly. I lost feeling in my right leg and half my torso. But worse than that was the unremitting fatigue.”
When the diagnose finally came, it was not good. Ann Romney had multiple sclerosis (MS).
“It was sobering,” Ann recalled. “Mitt was with me, and we both cried. Then he said, ‘Ann, we’re in this together.’ And that’s the name of my book — In This Together: My Story. In life, we think we can do it by ourselves, but when we hit the bumpy road, we need emotional support. We need to learn how to put one foot in front of the other and find joy.”
In addition to providing emotional support to readers struggling with overwhelming health issues, Ann supports the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (www.bwhannromneycenter.org), which works to accelerate treatments, prevention and cures for the world’s most complex neurologic diseases: multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and brain tumors.
“MS has two stages,” she explained. “It can be relaxing-and-remitting where you’ll get attacked and then go into remission, or it can be progressive, where you get weaker and worse. MS is very treatable for some people. People can stay in relaxing-and-remitting. Or they can go into remission permanently, like I did. The medications are getting way more targeted. However, once you’re progressive, there’s no drug for that.”
Not yet, but Romney is working on it.
At the time, however, she looked to her future and didn’t like what she saw: “I thought: ‘Oh dear, this is not going well. My life is over. I’d better go do some things that I love.’”
That’s when she started riding again.
“I mistakenly fell into dressage,” Romney said. “I didn’t want to start jumping, weak as I was, and I thought, ‘This sport can’t be all that hard to learn.’”
Knowing what she does now, she laughed. “I had no idea what I was doing,” Romney said.
The year was 1998 — right about the time her husband took over control of organizing the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City.
“We went west, and I reinvented life. I couldn’t ride for long because I was so weak but, after I did, I’d have energy for about a half hour or so. And I continued to get stronger! Not physically stronger, but I had more energy,” she recalled. “I was on IV steroids — very aggressive — but through the combination of drugs and riding, I got my energy back.”
For close to three years, all Romney did was get out of bed, ride her horses and go back to bed.
–“The horses were my healing partners and my joy,” she said. “The fact that it was difficult was intriguing; that each of the partners had a different personality; that one could do a beautiful half-pass and the next one struggled with it. It’s always hard, always intriguing.”
Once she was back in good health, riding took on another purpose. As involved with dressage as she is now, riding served as a welcome escape during the years Ann spent on the campaign trail alongside her husband, first in his successful bid for governor of Massachusetts, and then in his two unsuccessful bids for the presidency.
“I didn’t ride very much then and, when I would, it was just to get my mental health back,” Ann said. “The campaign workers knew when I would get overly fatigued. Everybody knew that I had to get to the horses. It was like watering a flower if I had a few days with them. But I couldn’t compete. It was more of a ‘get to the barn, get dirty’ break.”
She’s not the only one who rides, by the way.
“Mitt rides. We had trail horses. But he gets on, and it’s more of a ‘let’s see how fast we can go’ thing. But he’s very supportive. He watches me go in 20-meter circles, and he can’t figure out the intrigue, but it works for me.” Romney said.
She enjoys riding so much that, when her horse Rafalca earned a spot at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, she just had one regret — she wasn’t the rider. That honor went to Rafalca’s co-owner, Jan Ebeling.
“When it comes to the Olympics, it’s fun to watch the best horses and riders in the world, but then I’m thinking, ‘OK, put me on!’ That’s just where I come from. I enjoy competing more than watching,” she said. “I had good success in Wellington last year.”
Indeed. At the Adequan Global Dressage Festival, Romney placed first with her horse Donatello in the FEI Intermediate II, then was honored as “Premier Equestrian” for the week by Premier Equestrian, an arena and footing company, for demonstrating “exemplary sportsmanship and admirable qualities.” While in town, she also held a book signing for her fans. Her book details how equine therapy and dressage helped her in her recovery.
She was back in Wellington this season as well. While dressage was on the agenda, Romney was also the featured speaker at the Feb. 2 installment of the Lunch & Learn series at WEF.
Last fall, Romney guided Donatello, a Hanoverian gelding, to victory with a 62.171 percent in the Intermediate 2 Adult Amateur Championship class at the 49th Annual California Dressage Society Annual Championship Show and GAIG/United States Dressage Federation Region 7 Championships in Burbank.
“I’ve really got that horse put together,” Romney said with pride. “For an amateur, I’ve climbed the mountain. ‘So aren’t you done?’ Mitt asks. But you always have the hope that you never have to quit. You never want to quit.”
