Maher admits his Tokyo glory was a blur but says it will be ‘hard to top’ as he prepares for the
London International Horse Show
It was the achievement he had been working towards since childhood, years of graft and practice distilled into less than a minute in a Tokyo arena. So what does Ben Maher recall about the foot-perfect round that earned him the individual jumping gold at the Olympics in August?
“I don’t really remember anything,” he says, which seems a shame, as his 37.85sec aboard
explosion W was flawless from start to finish. But perhaps it had to be that way. The kid whose enthusiasm for show jumping was fired by a visit to the London International Horse Show decades earlier was still in there somewhere, but his 38-year-old brain flipped to short-term memory only, keeping him in the zone as the fractions ticked away.