Five months after Beatrice de Lavalette lost both her legs below the knee in a terrorist attack in Brussels in 2016, she was doing what seemed impossible: riding a horse.
Then 17 years old, de Lavalette, who began riding at 3, was at the Brussels airport when explosives in a suitcase she was standing beside were detonated, part of attacks in the city that killed dozens of people. She awoke in the hospital with the big goal to ride again.
Today, de Lavalette is a decorated athlete in the discipline of paradressage, a balletic performance on horseback in which she rode for the United States in the 2020 Tokyo Paralympic Games, the highest level of sport for disabled riders. She trains in Denmark on her Oldenburg gelding, Sixth Sense, known as Sensei, with her eye on the 2028 games in Los Angeles.
A rider since she first toddled around on a Shetland pony in her hometown near Versailles, France, de Lavalette is in the position of experiencing riding both without a disability and as a para-athlete — and of training her horses to adapt.
Dressage horses receive their commands to perform by invisible pressure from the rider’s leg and heel. As well as her double amputations, de Lavalette sustained a spinal cord injury and has no use of her body below her waist.
Here, she explains what went into retraining her horse, body and mind to ride. This interview has been edited and condensed.
You’ve overcome so much — a devastating attack, more than 40 surgeries — and you always knew you wanted to ride again. How do you do it?
My way of riding is all upper body, weight, control and voice. Horses are incredibly sensitive. They feel absolutely everything. I mean, they will literally feel a fly on their back. So, depending on the horse, they react very well to those very slight movements, and those slight movements can be the difference between the horse understanding, ‘Go sideways,’ ‘Go forward,’ ‘Slow down.’
I’ve been riding since I was 3, kind of nonstop, and I’ve done various disciplines within the sport. And all of those combined gave me muscle memory — basically, even though I can’t use my legs and have no use of anything below the waist, like I can’t feel them or anything, my body remembers what to do even if I can’t physically do it. I do lose my balance, but I’m able to control that in a way that should not medically be possible.
Can you share how you mount up? That must also be something you had to navigate as a partly paralyzed rider.
That’s a tricky one. I’ve had multiple ways over the years, but the one I’ve used the longest is just someone picks me up like a princess from my wheelchair and places me in the saddle. But I am physically dead weight in a way, so that’s all of that without any help from me physically.
So it’s a whole thing. But over the years, I’ve had different machines, mechanisms.
Like a mechanized lift?
Yes. And I finally started using it a couple years ago, and it really changed my life because I don’t like having to rely on people. It’s just like in general, I’m very independent, so having to rely on the people — and I know I’m not the lightest person out there — so I have that aspect of like, I don’t want to hurt them or I don’t want them to put out their back, or stuff like that.
So I’m always a little self-conscious when it comes to that. So when I had the machine, I didn’t have that problem.
How do you teach a horse to tolerate that? New experiences can be frightening for them.
It depends on the horse. I’ve had horses that pick it up instantly, they don’t really care about it.
Others, Sensei in particular, is a little bit more of a drama queen when it comes to that stuff. He does not care about anything else, but if it’s a lift and it’s new, he’s like, I don’t like it. Once we had it and he understood it, he was like, OK, I’ll just stand here.
Falling off is part of riding. How do you handle falling off?
The first discipline that I did in the horse world was called horseball. It’s the most fun sport and you have to be completely nuts to play it.
The first thing they did — literally in the first five minutes of getting on ponies — was they taught us how to fall without hurting ourselves. And that’s come in handy many, many times.
So naturally my body remembers what to do, so the brain says, ‘Oh, OK, we’re falling, turn, keep your head up.’ It’s helped me even when I fall in the shower, or when I fall in the wheelchair.
What do you wish people knew about your sport?
There is a misconception that the horse does everything, and we just sit there and do nothing. That’s a misconception for the able-bodied as well.
But it has even more meaning for para riders because it’s not easy. We don’t just sit there. We have to put in a lot more effort to make our dreams come true.
Sarah Maslin Nir is a Times reporter covering anything and everything New York … and sometimes beyond.
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