LA28 Articles

Photo courtesy of Tad Coffin At just 21 years old, Edmund “Tad” Coffin had the surreal experience of standing on the podium at the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympic Games to receive a gold medal, not once, but twice. Coffin, on his mount Bally Cor, became the first American to win the individual eventing gold medal at the ‘76 Games, and was also a member of the gold-medal winning U.S. team. Photo courtesy of Tad Coffin Fifty years on, Coffin reflected on his road to the

The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics presented a unique logistical challenge for the eventing competition. While dressage and show jumping were held at the iconic Santa Anita racetrack, the cross-country phase took combinations two hours south to Fairbanks Ranch near San Diego. The travel distance meant the competition was spread over six days, with rest days built in on either side of cross-country, an unusual format that gave the horses more recovery time than a typical three-day event. The U.S.

Before she was “Chloe Kim, three-time Olympic medalist and snowboarding superstar,” she was Chloe Kim, a horse-obsessed preschooler who aspired to one day be a famous equestrian. “I said I wanted to be a ‘horsey racer’ like a jockey,” Kim laughed, recounting the moment at her preschool graduation when every kid took the stage to announce their big dreams. “I was obsessed [with horses] since I was a little girl.” It’s a passion that may

2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games Cross Country Course Designer, Alec Lochore. (Photo courtesy of Alec Lochore/Musketeer Events) When Alec Lochore first walked the grounds of Santa Anita Park as a prospective Olympic venue, he wasn’t imagining himself as the designer of the 2028 Olympic cross-country course. “I’d been to the venue before,” Lochore said. “I understood the challenges the course designer was going to face, but I wasn’t there thinking, ‘What

At first glance, Olympic figure skating and Grand Prix dressage freestyles appear to exist in entirely different worlds: one is performed on ice, the other on arena footing. Yet at the highest levels of sport, the similarities between the two disciplines become clear. Both demand extraordinary technical precision, athleticism, musicality, and an almost intangible quality of harmony between athlete and partner. Few people understand this parallel more intimately than Laura Roberts, Managing