Holding the Reins of Success : Gabriella Salick of Hidden Valley keeps proving she has the skills to make the jump to the U.S. Olympic Equestrian Team.

At her first international horse show eight years ago, Gabriella Salick, then 13, was so excited to see her name on a scoreboard that she fell off her horse--before the competition began.

Salick, who left her family’s horse ranch in Hidden Valley last week to return to her studies at Princeton University, now competes at the highest level of show jumping in tournaments throughout Europe and the United States. She rode for the U.S. team last month during a competition in Dublin, Ireland, one of the largest events of the international horse show community.

The kind of skill and composure Salick demonstrated in Ireland will help in her goal to earn a coveted spot on the four-member U.S. Olympic Equestrian Team, said her trainer of four years, Timothy Grubb, himself a three-time Olympic rider and two-time silver medalist.

But having the best horse and individual athletic ability won’t help if a rider is too nervous to concentrate, he said.

“Gaby was exposed to 60,000 people in the stands in Dublin, and she came through ice cold,” he said. “She shows she has the mental toughness to compete at the Olympic level.”

A series of eight Olympic trials over three months begins next April on the East Coast. At each event, Salick and the other 30 to 35 competitors will be asked to take their horses through a series of jumps over a course they have never seen before.

She could lose points each time her horse knocks down a rail or refuses a jump, said Sally Ike, director of show jumping activities for the U.S. Olympics.

“The jumps must be clean and at a certain speed,” she said. “But Gaby is young and she has made a wonderful beginning in a very, very competitive sport. We’re looking for great things from her.”

Nevertheless, Ike added, there are no guarantees. It’s all a matter of performance. “It’s anybody’s game,” she said.

Salick--who prefers Gabriella, “Gaby was fine when I was younger”-- wants to be in that game and she’s willing to work for it, hard.

Every morning, she rises early to ride for two to three hours with a pair of horses she keeps in New Jersey. Then she attends classes as a senior at Princeton, where her studies of the classics have earned her an A-average.

In the evening, she goes to practice for the school’s tae kwon do team, a sport in which she holds a black belt. Then she hits the books.

“I don’t get much sleep, probably three to four hours a night,” Salick admits.

But she’s hardly complaining. Salick counts herself fortunate to have the support of her father, a Los Angeles physician, and family to be able to pursue her interests.

“The classics are my passion,” she said during a recent interview at the family ranch, while fondly stroking a 17-hand-high gray Holsteiner named Sarasota. “But show jumping is my life. It’s the thing I love most--aside from my family.”

Every day during a brief stay this summer at the family’s sprawling Sandstone ranch, where a white wooden fence surrounds oak-shaded grounds with flowering shrubs, Salick has practiced with Sarasota, her first competition horse and the one she fell from eight years ago in Canada.

“It would be wonderful to represent my country in the Olympics,” Salick said from atop Sarasota’s saddle, her long, light brown hair tucked under a black felt riding helmet. “It’s the big dream of everyone who competes horses.”

But Salick said she also hopes one day to teach at a university or to write a book in comparative grammar and the linguistics of Sanskrit poetry. She said she has other goals in her life that are at least as important.

“At the end of it all, (the Olympics) are a big horse show, but just another horse show,” she said. “It would be just as meaningful to me to know that I had learned and progressed. Otherwise, it would be empty.”

With that, Salick took Sarasota slowly through his warm-up paces inside the white corral, before the two of them breezed over a white jump fence.

At 15 and semi-retired after years as Salick’s show horse, Sarasota needs more time to warm up than younger horses, she said.

“He’s been such a good horse. His job now is to be safe and happy,” she said, patting his cheek and fussing with the hair in his forelock turned gray with age.

But she stopped short of saying that he was her favorite mount.

She took both his long ears in her gloved hands to shield him from her words: “I have two horses at school in New Jersey I’m very close to,” she said.

Although Sarasota is an older horse, he goes to his workouts willingly with his mistress, said Nathan Hendrix, an assistant trainer at Sandstone, which also sells and trains Holsteiners.

“To do the big stuff she does, you really have to have the horse’s permission,” Hendrix said.

The oldest of three girls, Gabriella Salick has a close bond with her sisters, Elizabeth, 18, and Anna-Martine, 15. In fact, she has a tattoo on her wrist identical to one worn by one of her sisters.

She rolled back her riding glove to reveal an inked drawing of a heart with entwined branches. “My dad’s going to love this,” she said, laughing.

And to her parents’ dismay, Salick also has a small sunflower tattooed on her ankle as well.

But, she said, her parents are used to them, for the most part.

“In my time, you associated that with weirdo people,” said her father, Bernard, founder of the Salick Health Centers, which operate facilities worldwide including Westlake Medical Center and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. “But it’s a very pleasant way of showing a sign of independence, something that obviously one can survive.”

That her tastes sometimes run to the eccentric is a very minor annoyance to him, he said.

“She and her sisters all shop at these crazy used-clothing stores, enough to drive their parents crazy,” he said, adding, “Gaby has been a constant source of joy, as have all my children.”

Gabriella Salick was given her first horse when she was 12, her father said.

“That horse was nuts, very spooky, and I wouldn’t let her ride it,” the elder Salick said. “So Gaby would take the horse out for a walk each day and then sit and read a book to the horse, and talk to him and feed him. After two or three months, she got up and started to ride the horse. Everybody was stunned.”

Salick said the story illustrates his daughter’s determination for success.

“Gaby has ridden two to three hours a day since she was 10 or 11, no matter where we are in the world,” he said. “It’s a major dedication and a major amount of work. It’s not like a golden gift.”

The Olympic hopeful had time to spend only a week with her family this summer, as she spent most of the summer competing in horse shows throughout Europe.

In addition to the Nation’s Cup competition at the Dublin International Horse Show, Gabriella Salick rode in the Muenster Show in Germany, where her father said some of the best riders in the world compete.

Salick placed eighth at that competition, a better showing than a man considered the best jumper in the world, Franke Sloothaak, who temporarily coached Salick for two weeks and who had sold her the horse with which she competed.

“I think she’s headed for some major stuff,” her father said. “If she wants to get somewhere, she’ll get there.”