Sternlicht’s dream on hold
Greenwich native hopes she can return even stronger
In the first week of March, Adrienne Sternlicht felt like things were finally starting to fall into place. After being patient over the last year in bringing back her mare, Cristalline, from injury, the horse finally jumped her first important class and finished with a great result. Eyeing a spot on the U.S. Olympic equestrian jumping team, Sternlicht, 26, was hopeful that her dreams of making it to Tokyo would materialize.
Before the end of the month, the Tokyo Olympics were postponed until the summer of 2021 due to the coronavirus outbreak — leaving Sternlicht’s dream intact, albeit on hold. But after an initial wave of disappointment, Sternlicht, who is from Greenwich, believes that she and Cristalline can emerge from this period of uncertainty and disruption even stronger.
“I think that the year off has a strong potential to be to [Cristalline’s] advantage,” Sternlicht recently said over the phone from Wellington, Fla., where she’s still able to train. “It feels like a dream is put a bit on pause, but now I’m genuinely viewing it as an opportunity to take this time to work on my own riding and be better than I am now in a year’s time so that we have an even better shot at everything coming together in the right moment.”
Sternlicht’s emergence as an Olympic hopeful wasn’t guaranteed, partly due to her unusual path to the sport’s upper echelon but also considering the bumps in the road along the way. Competitive riding took a backseat to her education during high school and college, when she attended Brown University. She began to train with Olympian McLain Ward in 2016 but really broke through in 2018, when she went from being a “serious underdog” to earning one of four spots on the U.S.’s jumping team for the World Equestrian Games. Once there, the U.S. won its first jumping gold in 32 years and qualified for Tokyo.
But with Cristalline on the mend after an injury, Sternlicht had to recalibrate her expectations in 2019, all the while looking to time her horse’s return perfectly so that she could be in prime form by the time Olympic qualifying events were under way (though the U.S. as a country had qualified for the Games, the composition of the team was supposed to be determined in late June). With Cristalline missing so much time, Sternlicht’s path to Tokyo would have come down to qualification at the World Cup Finals, which were set to take place earlier this month in Las Vegas, or by earning a discretionary spot.
As the pandemic intensified and a host of upcoming international competitions were canceled, that mental recalibration became even more important.
“I was so ready for the grind,” Sternlicht said. “It’s not an easy process. It’s mentally grueling and stressful especially with horses because there’s so much that you can’t control, and your horse’s health is of the utmost importance. And so in many ways, I had to get over my own narrative of the way that I thought my year was going to go and what I had to look forward to.”
Though it’s unclear when international competitions sanctioned by the FEI (International Federation for Equestrian Sports) will resume, Sternlicht in the meantime still trains with her horses every morning.
In order to peak at the right time and avoid rushing Cristalline back, the horse will get an extra year under her belt before needing to be in top shape. Sternlicht hopes that’ll allow her to make the ‘long list’ of 10 rider-horse pairs who are in the mix for Tokyo qualifying earlier in the year.
Sternlicht describes equestrian as a sport that truly forces a rider to capitalize on a moment — particularly, when a horse is in best form — and then put all her effort into chasing that goal ahead. But that also means the Olympics won’t always be at the forefront of Sternlicht’s ambitions. She eventually would like to take a step back and get more involved in social justice reform.
In the meantime, the moment Sternlicht is reaching for, though delayed a year, is still in front of her. It’s her job now to put herself in the best position to capitalize.
“In so many ways it was, it’s been a pipe dream my whole life,” Sternlicht said of making the Olympics. “In [many] moments, I didn’t truly believe that I could be where I am today where my dreams have begun to manifest into my reality.”