World-class equestrian trained here
♦ Locals who help their daughterin-law train here will travel to Tryon, N.C., to watch her compete for the Irish national team.
Anyone who has had to get a passport for themselves knows the painstaking process it can be. Now imagine that same process for a horse.
“They follow the nationality of the owner,” laughed Jane Waterman Moss, a native of Cork, Ireland, with dual citizenship in her home country and the U.S.
Moss will compete for the Irish National Team at the World Equestrian Games in Tryon, North Carolina, outside of Asheville, next week, joining competitors from 70 countries. She will compete in the endurance race with her horse Streak Afire, the fourth time she has taken on the 100-mile test.
“My secret talent is sitting on a horse for a very long time,” she said, adding that the race will take up much of a day, riding up in the mountains.
The demand of the terrain and the need to prepare for what’s to come led Moss to Rome, the hometown of her in-laws, Bob and JoAnn Moss. JoAnn is the former principal at Elm Street Elementary and now works at the Rome City Schools central office.
Their Horseshoe Bend Road home became the home base for Moss during her training.
With the addition of a paddock on their property to keep the horses, she was able to cut down on the travel time from her Atlanta home up to the mountain trails around Rome and Northwest Georgia, such as Berry College and the Dry Creek equestrian trails and the Pinhoti trail.
“I just won the lottery of in-laws,” she said, adding that it helps to offer the “bribe” of having their only grandchildren in the family.
Moss said she launched herself into the sport several years ago, after purchasing two cross-Arabian horses. With endurance races, the mileage goes from an entry level of 12 miles all the way up to 100 miles. She described it as an ultra-marathon, the “pinnacle of the sport.”
Moss finished her first 100-mile ride during an international event in Asheville, at the historic Biltmore Estate. After finishing, she was approached by a representative of Horse Sport Ireland and asked if she wanted to join the Irish team.
“No, that’s insane,” Moss said of her reaction.
She thanked the woman for the offer and said she would think about it. “I would sleep on it a bunch,” she said.
But before jumping into the twoyear training and qualification process, Moss suffered a brain injury while in Charleston, South Carolina, after being flipped off her horse in late spring 2016. The injury took her away from working as a professor at Georgia State University and put her in the position of prolonged recovery, which is still ongoing, but to a lesser degree.
However, a lingering voice in her head pushed her to pursue a chance at the World Equestrian Games. She called the Irish team representative back and expressed her interest, kicking off the process of setting things in order for qualifying.
Moss also had to get back on her horse after her injury, an idea her family was not all that fond of initially, since she was told she would not be able to ride within the constraints of an approaching competition and qualification rides, she said.
“Even my family was going ‘are you insane,’” she said.
After starting slow, walking the horse and moving with it from the ground, Moss laughed that “within two months I was back up to hell raising.”
Moss will have both her family from Ireland and her stateside inlaws in town for the games, which will start Sept. 11 with an opening ceremony. Earlier this week, she was working with beads and wire to adorn her horse for the ceremony. “That’s a huge honor,” she said. In looking forward to the competition, Moss said her main focus is on her horse. Though her horse has gone through hours of training and is as ready as ever after finishing its last training ride last week, anything can happen on the trail, and the challenge is keeping it calm, she said.
While some riders push their horses to extremes in endurance races, Moss said her goal is always to keep the well-being of her horse in mind. For the first loop of the race, which is a timed event, she plays it conservatively to warm her horse up for the tough miles ahead.