Competitor Lives in a One-Horse World

Kathleen Raine has a horse worth $500,000, but no place to call home. Despite offers to buy the horse, Raine, 28, refuses to sell at any price. She’s worked too hard--and spent most of her earnings--to make him what he is today: A premier grand prix dressage competitor, the equine equivalent of a prima ballerina.

The payoff came recently when Raine won a place on the U.S. Equestrian Team. She is one of the few people in the country asked to compete at world-class events in dressage, an equestrian ballet where the horse performs intricate dance steps.

Nine years ago, Raine’s mother, Betsy, purchased Avontuur in Holland for a few thousand dollars. Kathleen Raine and her husband, David Wightman, who is also a dressage competitor, have spent the last decade preparing Avontuur (it means “adventure” in Dutch) for world-class competition. Raine and Wightman return so much of their earnings as riding instructors to their sport, “We basically live out of our car,” Raine said. Part of the week they live at Betsy Raine’s house in Rolling Hills and the rest with a friend near Moorpark.

“We don’t have (much) money at all, so to turn down $500,000 says a lot about the bond between the horse and the rider,” Raine said. Training and competing cost nearly $70,000 a year, she said.

Raine’s success so far has helped win sponsorship for supplies and equipment from a company in Canada and a grant from the U.S. Olympic Committee and the U.S. Equestrian Team to cover expenses incurred for two months of training and competing in Europe in 1993.

For centuries, dressage--created in the Baroque era of 17th-Century Europe--has been dominated by German and other European riders.

But at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, the United States won a bronze medal, the first one in dressage in nearly two decades, focusing attention on the sport as never before, Raine said. Raine has been riding seriously since she was 8. But until she graduated from high school, she didn’t show any more interest in the sport than her four brothers and sisters, Betsy Raine said. After graduation, Kathleen Raine began working at a ranch in Moorpark owned by Hilda Gurney, a six-time national dressage champion.

“I realized she was different,” Betsy Raine said, “when she started getting up at 4 in the morning to groom horses and stuck out four years in a demanding position as an assistant to Hilda.”

The young rider groomed, exercised and broke horses for little money. In return, she received lessons from Gurney.

“When you work that hard,” Raine said, “you’re mainly doing it for the experience.’

In 1989, Raine began training with a new coach, who helped prepare her and Avontuur for world-class competition. They entered their first international show in 1991. Since then, Raine has placed in several contests and was chosen as the only U.S. rider to compete in dressage at the World Cup in Sweden in April.

Under U.S. Equestrian Team rules, Raine must qualify for every major event she enters--including the Olympic trials in the spring of 1996--to stay on the team.

“I hope to make it,” she said. “But a lot can happen between now and then.”