Dividends Increase in Leaps and Bounds : Equestrian: Sisters CeCe and Lynda Younger have dedicated their lives to training and riding championship jumpers. Their efforts have paid off in cash, prizes and international prestige.

Two Mercedes 190s are parked outside the stables at Conejo Valley Riding Club. They belong to the Younger sisters, CeCe and Lynda, internationally known equestrians who jump horses for a living. The $30,000 cars--one black pearl, the other smoke silver--are reflections of the sport’s high-society image, but to the sisters, they’re illusions.

What’s real is the high cost of riding and the low financial returns. The long trips and the hard work. The ever-present danger.

“What we do is very stressful,” says CeCe, who at 28 is two years older than Lynda. “Competition is very stressful. So is all the traveling.” Forget about a jet-set life style. The Mercedes weren’t gifts from Arab sheiks; the sisters won them in lieu of prize money.

What’s real are the squadrons of flies attacking like dive bombers in a small tack room at the riding club. There’s nothing glamorous about flies buzzing your face. But horses attract flies. Horses also cost a lot to keep. Shipping one on a plane from L. A. to New York is $6,000 round trip, and the airlines don’t even give frequent-flier mileage.

A normal athlete has to worry about taking care of only himself and his equipment, maybe shining the irons once in a while. The sisters are “very serious athletes,” Lynda says, but horses complicate their lives. “Horses are a 24-hour-a-day job,” says CeCe, a petite 4-foot-11 brunette who lives in Woodland Hills. “They also last a lot longer than most boyfriends.” But who wants to compete with a horse for his girlfriend’s attention?

Until CeCe became engaged recently, neither sister had time to date. Even when they were youngsters in Bakersfield--competing nationally by their teens--horses had been an all-consuming passion. For most of their teen-age years and adulthood, “We had zero to no social life,” says Lynda, a 5-2 blonde living in Malibu.

And when they’re not competing in shows in and out of the country--the American Grandprix Assn. season and international events take up 10 months of the year--the sisters manage to run a full-time business training and selling jumpers for their Banner Farm company. They recently moved their base of operations from Malibu to the new riding club facilities between Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley where they stable 10 horses and soon will be employing a full-time groom/caretaker.

It takes six years to train a jumper, but the rewards can be great: Olympic-level horses can sell for as much as $1 million. The sisters want the business to help support their riding. In their best years, they each collected about $85,000 on the AGA show-jumping tour, but the figure includes the price of the Mercedes they each received for winning the Mercedes Grand Prix Jumper series.

The Youngers are hoping that prize money and corporate sponsorships increase in their sport. Show-jumping, according to the AGA, is the second-most popular sport in Europe behind soccer and the fastest-growing spectator sport in this country. The AGA’s first tour in 1978 had 16 events with only $247,000 in prize money, but this year $1.7 million has been given out in 31 events.

The sisters say they’re lucky because their father--a Bakersfield trial lawyer--initially helped finance both their riding and horse business. But this is the sport of kings. Even lawyers don’t make the kind of money it takes to launch and sustain a major equestrian campaign. Riders with either a rich family or corporate backers historically have ruled grand prix jumping.

“That’s the conflict in our sport,” CeCe says. “Talent doesn’t automatically buy you a ticket to the Olympics. A lot of riders can afford to go to Europe and buy the best horses.”

Horses are fragile creatures, however.

Malcolm, the Youngers’ black Scottish terrier, snaps his jaws at the flies buzzing his head in the tack room, then follows the sisters outside to a corral where Lynda’s 14-year-old American stallion, The Oregon Kid, stands forlornly. Injured for much of the past three years, the Kid has been been receiving magnetic-field and ultrasound therapy, acupuncture and even chiropractic adjustments.

“We treat our horses like pro athletes,” Lynda says. “When they break down, we have to repair them. My horse has been a wonderful competitor for 10 years, but now the maintenance level is high, like--I hate saying this--an old car.”

CeCe has had better luck keeping her horse tuned up and running. Poking his head out of a stall is Young Fleet, a 13-year-old distant relative of 1943 Triple Crown winner Count Fleet and “the only grand-prix-jumping quarter-horse stallion in the world,” CeCe says.

CeCe spots a young horse with his tongue hanging out of his month like a wet dishrag. It’s Santiago, a Dutch stallion that’s her No. 2 horse. “When he sticks out his tongue, he wants attention,” she explains.

Standing on the dusty earth, the sisters reach mid-flank on Santiago. They certainly don’t look big enough or strong enough to be sitting on the back of an airborne 1,000-pound beast, but size, they say, no longer is a limiting factor. Up until a decade ago, courses were physically demanding for both rider and horse. But the horses couldn’t take the punishment.

Jumping is the only Olympic sport in which men and women compete against each other. “Men used to dominate,” CeCe says. But then, to keep horses healthy, weight requirements were lowered and the courses redesigned, becoming more intellectual and technical and opening the way for women to compete with men.

“Before, people wondered how a little girl like myself could handle a stallion,” Lynda says. “But now, it’s finesse that counts.”

And the right horse. “You’ve got to find a horse who’s sensitive to women,” says Lynda, who describes The Oregon Kid as “hot-blooded, sensitive and very athletic, a genuine American thoroughbred.”

Hard as it is to picture either of the small women atop a horse as it flies over a fence, imagine them doing the same thing before they were tall enough to ride the Colossus at Magic Mountain. Growing up outside Bakersfield on a 25-acre farm--once owned by country singer Buck Owens--they were jumping at age 6.

Their older sister Lisa got them into the sport after seeing a horse movie on television.

Although Lisa eventually dropped out of competitive riding, CeCe and Lynda did practically nothing else but go to school and ride. “It was a hobby that went out of control,” CeCe says. No proms. No dates. No football games. The sisters bought and sold horses even then and took private riding lessons. One of her coaches, CeCe says, “just filled my head with dreams of making the Olympic team. I was just obsessed.”

At 18, CeCe was the youngest member of the U. S. Equestrian Team, but the U. S. boycott wiped out any chances she had of going to the 1980 Moscow Olympics. But riding still pulled fiercely at the Youngers. They went east to college--CeCe attending Drew University, Lynda going to Richmond--to get involved in the powerful East Coast jumping scene. When their friends were partying or studying, the sisters were flying to shows or taking riding lessons from such world-renown coaches as George Morris, who has ridden and coached with the U. S. team in the Olympics. “I remember them as both being very competitive, aggressive and determined,” Morris says.

Although CeCe majored in art history and Lynda in political science, they decided against careers in their fields and went into riding full time. “We both had top horses,” Lynda says, referring to Young Fleet and The Oregon Kid. Each horse cost the sisters less than $15,000 in the late 1970s but their worth has soared to about $500,000 each because in only three years, the Youngers--the only sister team in grand-prix jumping--consistently have placed among the top 10 in AGA events.

Lynda sees the irony. “We’ve developed this worldwide reputation on our little junior jumper horses we’ve had since childhood,” she says.

Despite their seemingly narrow focus, the sisters insist they’ve led “a balanced life,” Lynda says. “We ski, go to art museums, have friends. Our parents made sure we weren’t so consumed by the sport that we’d lose perspective.”

Despite accidents--the Youngers have suffered concussions after falling off horses--there’s still nothing like flying over a barricade on the haunches of a great animal to get the blood boiling. “It’s the same sensation you get driving a race car very fast and being on the edge of control,” CeCe says.

Lynda admits to being “an adrenalin junkie. Skiing’s the only thing that comes close to giving me that rush.”

After a momentary lull in their schedule this month, the sisters will be back to their routine of riding horses six hours a day during the week and traveling an average of two weekends a month to shows. At the shows, they’ll “compete against the course and not each other,” CeCe says.

Although they “argue all the time,” according to Lynda, their divergent personalities mesh. CeCe is more organized, Lynda more people-oriented. “We can generally rely on each other,” CeCe says. “It’s hard to find good reliable people in any business.”

And in times of stress, they lean on each other. Now that’s real.