Gillian Rolton — won gold at ’96 Olympics despite broken bones

Gillian Rolton, an equestrian from Australia who broke multiple bones in falls from her horse during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta but remounted each time to finish the competition and help her team win a gold medal, died on Nov. 18 at a hospice in North Adelaide. She was 61.

The Australian Olympic Committee said the cause was endometrial cancer, a type of cancer that begins in the uterus.

Rolton had won an Olympic gold medal four years earlier at the Summer Games in Barcelona aboard Peppermint Grove (better known as Fred or Freddy) — the first Australian horsewoman to do so. And she returned with the horse to Atlanta for team eventing, a three-day competition featuring dressage, cross-country and show jumping.

In cross-country, an endurance test for rider and horse, Rolton was confident of her early progress. But at the fiveminute mark, Freddy’s hind legs slipped on gravel as he made a turn, and he rolled over her.

“That’s where I broke my collarbone and ribs,” Rolton told the Horse magazine in 2010. “He went sliding and I went splat.”

A spectator grabbed Freddy, and someone else helped Rolton back onto him. They galloped up a hill hoping to make up for lost time, but as they came to a water jump, Rolton realized that her left arm, which had become difficult to move because of her broken collarbone, lacked the strength to control Freddy, and she fell into the water.

Again, she remounted him, and they completed the 3 kilometers that were left, making the final 15 jumps. Each one rattled her broken bones.

Melanie Smith Taylor, the longtime equestrian analyst for NBC Sports, watched Rolton that day and was not surprised by her actions.

“Team eventing takes the most courage of all Olympic equestrian disciplines, and she was the epitome of courage,” she said in a telephone interview. “She had so much trust in her own ability and her own horse, and never held back.”

Rolton said instinct had compelled her to continue despite her falls and injuries. But there was also a practical reason to keep going: As the third of four cross-country riders for Australia, she needed to post a score in case something kept the rider who followed her, Andrew Hoy, from completing his ride.

After being treated for her injuries, she refused painkillers, which would have dulled her senses if she had to compete in the next day’s jumping competition. But she was not needed for that event; her fellow riders and horses had no problems and secured the gold medal. The United States took the silver.

Rolton’s athletic fearlessness became a signature moment in Australian sports history. But Atlanta would be her final Olympics as a rider.

Aboard Endeavour, whom she rode after Freddy’s retirement, she did not qualify for her country’s equestrian team in 2000, when the Summer Games were held in Sydney.

But she was one of eight Australian Olympic champions to carry their country’s flag in the Olympic opening ceremony, and she was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame.

Gillian England was born in Adelaide, in South Australia, on May 3, 1956. Her father, Lloyd, was a builder, and her mother, the former Esme Fraser, was a bookkeeper.

As a girl, Gillian excelled at swimming but wanted a horse. “Mum and Dad didn’t have any background with horses, apart from what they bet on at the horse track,” she wrote in “Free Rein” (2001), her autobiography.

But by age 10 she had her first horse, Randy the Rig, an ex-pacer, and her career as a show and dressage rider began. While on leave from Flinders University in Adelaide, she completed a riding instructor’s course in Edmonton, Alberta. (She returned to Flinders to earn a diploma as a schoolteacher.)

She started eventing and show jumping at 21, and met with increasing success. She nearly made the Australian eventing team for the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles. But her horse, Saville Row, injured a tendon in the final selection trial.

Then, in training to qualify for the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, she fell off her horse, Benton’s Way, and dislocated an elbow.

“My Olympic dream was shattered again,” she wrote in her autobiography. “I was so angry.”

She achieved her Olympic dream on Freddy, her most talented equine partner — “a big, boof-headed gray horse with an ugly scar,” she called him. Soon after she began riding him, he began to succeed in all equestrian disciplines.

As confident as she was on Freddy, there was no guarantee that they would compete in Barcelona in 1992. After the final trials in Wiltshire, England, she recalled in her memoir: “I was so hopeful of getting a spot, but I knew that they didn’t want a girl. I hoped that they would look past the gender thing and give us our chance.”

She was chosen as a reserve, but it was not until she was preparing for the opening ceremony that she learned she would be one of the four riders in team eventing.

After retiring from competitive riding, she remained active in equestrian events and continued to coach and support young equestrians, as she had done for many years. She was also a juror at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.