LOS ANGELES 2028 will mark a 44-year gap since the City of Angels previously hosted the Olympic Games. Back then in 1984, an Irish-bred mare - Heidi Hauri’s horse of a lifetime - jumped off for the individual bronze medal place and duly won. Her name? Jessica V.
Bred in Co Limerick, hers and Heidi’s win bridged another gap as the previous Swiss medal winner at the Games was back in 1928 when Charles-Gustave Kuhn and Pepita also won bronze at Amsterdam.
Adelheid ‘Heidi’ Hauri (then competing as Robbiani) is the sister of the late Max Hauri, a patron saint for Irish dealers, producers and farmer-breeders after the number of horses he bought in the country over the decades. Not only that, for scores of Irish riders, going to work at Max’s yard was both a badge of honour and a golden opportunity.
Along with his great friend Seamus Hughes, whom he first met when Max went to school in Kilkenny, the pair brought Cavalier Royale to Ireland.
The Hauri family business began in the small Swiss town of Seon, first buying cattle and later horses for the lucrative Swiss trooper market.
Susette Merz-Hauri, Max and Heidi’s first cousin, spoke about their background story in the ’Clover Hill’ series in The Irish Field four years ago, saying: “Horses were for working and riding. Besides his job as a farmer, their father, Max senior, began competing.
“Competitions then were for high society, Max even asked people to loan him a jacket for competing. He was just a farmer and, always after the farming work was done, could he then go to competitions.
“He started to make a business selling horses and, for a long time, he was in Poland. The Swiss Army bought horses there, so he built up connections. They went to Ireland later.
“Max, his son, was in the Army too, and that is why, when he was at the Olympic Games, he was in his military uniform. He took over the business from his father and then Heidi went with Max to Ireland in 1979. That is when she bought Jessica.”
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Heidi Hauri
Family tree
Foaled in 1974, Jessica V was bred by the late Michael Kelly in Askeaton. His nephew Ronnie is an accomplished breeder himself, having bred the likes of Alberta Mist, by Kylemore Stud’s recent loss Womanizer and the 2015 Lanaken bronze medallist, Talks Cheap (Tinarana’s Inspector).
Ronnie’s name recently cropped up in Jessica Kürten’s Horse of a Lifetime feature, as he originally produced her great warrior Diamond Exchange. It was his Askeaton home that the Chesney family detoured to pick up the new purchase that they’d spotted at Millstreet.
Another of West Limerick’s gifted equine seanchaís, Ronnie had more reliable first-hand information about the mare’s background than a day’s worth of internet trawling.
“She was by Candelabra,” he confirmed. “He was a thoroughbred stallion and Captain James Lysley stood him. Teddy Lee was married to Micky Lee at Lees Cross, and they trained racehorses. It was her father who bred and stood Candelabra.”
One pedigree database, Sporthorse Data, suggests that Jessica’s dam was Gentle Miss. While this 1964-foaled mare is recorded on CapallOir, there are no details of her earlier foals or sire.
Ronnie had the missing jigsaw pieces again. “There was nothing really recorded at that time, but Gentle Miss was by Coxcomb, another thoroughbred horse.”
Which meant that Jessica and the Irish Sport Horse stallion Mill Jess are related? “Yes, she’s a half-sister to Noel C Duggan’s horse Mill Jess.”
Foaled in the same year as his half-sister won her Los Angeles medal, Mill Jess was by the Sunny Light son Ballyard Light. One Mill Jess offspring is Burghley specialist Coral Cove, competed by both Polly and Vere Phillips, himself a latter-day ‘Max Hauri’ to Irish owners.
Another Mill Jess offspring was Millstreet Squire, whose dam was none other than the great Carran (Anthony). This thoroughbred mare produced a second Olympic medallist horse for Joe Fargis: Mill Pearl (King Of Diamonds). Bred by Noel C himself, she won team silver at the Seoul Olympics.
“Ivan McDonagh bought the mare [Jessica V] from my uncle as a two-year-old, and his wife, Susan, produced the mare. That’s when Max and Heidi saw her.”
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Billy Lee, second from left, pictured judging at his local show in Newcastle West, with Joan Bateman, Jane Davis and Willie Corrigan. His grandfather owned Jessica V’s sire Candleabra \ Susan Finnerty
Breeders galore
That was in 1979, on one of the Swiss family’s Irish shopping trips. Candy Floss, as Jessica V was then known, was one though that almost slipped through the net.
Is it true that Max turned her down that day in Limerick, because she failed the vet?
“Yes, she was lame on the circle, but she never had anything wrong afterwards. As soon as I saw her, I liked her. Max, he thought, ‘No, you’re not going to buy her, she didn’t pass the vet check’. And then I saw her again in Dublin, so I bought her myself!
“We had her full-brother too, but he was nothing like her. Sometimes the mares are good in the family, or sometimes the geldings.”
The mare’s original name was a nod to Candelabra, the sire always mentioned by the RTE show jumping commentator Brian McSharry, when the Olympic heroine Jessica returned to jump in Dublin.
“When I came back to the Dublin Horse Show, everybody was there. They came to see and touch her, saying, ‘I’m the breeder!’ Everybody!”
Team place tussle
Between Jessica V arriving in Seon and that magic day at Santa Anita where they won their Olympic bronze medal, a run of success happened for the Swiss combination.
As a seven-year-old, Jessica won the Aarau Derby on the Hauri family’s doorstep. The year before Los Angeles, the pair placed third in the Aachen Grand Prix, one of the most formidable on the international circuit.
That same summer, in 1983, Jessica V and Heidi were part of a record-setting team, as Switzerland won its first gold team medal at the European show jumping championships, held at Hickstead.
Their teammates are also amongst a Who’s Who of show jumping names: Martin Fuchs’s father Thomas (Willora Swiss), Walther Gabathuler (Beethoven) and Willi Melliger (Van Gogh). With those contemporaries, competition was fierce for the Los Angeles team places the following summer.
How did Heidi and Jessica claim their place?
“I had to do double than other Swiss riders, I was the only woman! They didn’t like to have a woman on the team in the beginning, so I had to go to Rome, straight in the big classes; the Nations Cup and the Grand Prix.
“I had two clear rounds in the Nations Cup, and then I couldn’t be put out. I had one leg already in the team!”
She recalls the Olympic courses built by ex-Hungarian cavalry officer-turned trainer and course designer, Bertalan de Némethy as ‘Very big! Between the oxers, I couldn’t touch the front and back poles.”
“A massive parade”
The host nation won team gold by a six-fence margin, ahead of Great Britain and Germany, while Switzerland finished fifth. A rare team and individual gold medal Olympic double was then recorded after Joe Fargis and the ex-racehorse Touch Of Class won out in a jump-off against compatriot Conrad Homfeld, with the Trakehner stallion Abdullah.
The curtain-raiser, in front of a 16,000-strong crowd, was the jump-off between three riders for the individual bronze medal: two Swiss contenders - Heidi and Bruno Candrian with Jessica V and Slygof, plus Canada’s Mario Deslauriers and Aramis.
Two Irish-breds jumping off for the bronze medal, from a startlist that included show jumping greats like Big Ben, Deister, Jappeloup and Ireland’s Rockbarton. “Slygof (Imperius), he was also a very blood horse,” she said, recalling the Slyguff Stud-bred.
Jessica V, Aramis, Slygof was the final order. Then Heidi, Joe Fargis and Conrad Homfeld were whisked away, accompanied by a police escort, to parade on three borrowed horses in the LA Memorial Coliseum, where the Games official opening and closing ceremonies were held.
“It was full, full of people. Then there was a big party in Seon and another down in Ticino, where I was living then. And I had an Irish groom for Jessica at the Olympics: Gerry Sheridan. He was very, very good.”
Watching on with the Hauri team was Ronnie Kelly. “I was in Max’s the time she was in LA.”
Ronnie, who worked for Max for two and a half years, remembers the Seon celebrations vividly. “It was serious. The whole place shut down and there was a massive parade in the village afterwards when Heidi got back from LA, it was great!”
An unforgettable week for his uncle Michael, who tuned in to RTE’s Olympic coverage to watch Jessica V, formerly Candy Floss? “Can you imagine, at that time in a small village like Askeaton, what it would have been like? [to have bred an Olympic medal-winning horse]. He was very involved in the GAA too.”
Best-laid plans
Jessica V and Heidi’s top form continued the following year in Dinard, when she added a pair of silver medals to their Olympic bronze.
In fact, Heidi had become the first woman show jumper to win an individual medal at the European championships, one podium place behind Paul Schockemöhle and the mighty Deister.
Along with her Los Angeles teammates of Walter Gabathuler, Willi Melliger and Steve Guerdat’s father Philippe, the Swiss team finished second at these championships to Great Britain.
More big results and Swiss firsts followed - Heidi and Jessica V won the Spruce Meadows Grand Prix, the first Swiss rider to do so - before Jessica V’s career inevitably started to wind down.
“She was two or three times Horse of the Year in Switzerland, her last big show was in St Gallen and her last national show was in Brugg.”
Jessica V was sent to vet John Hughes, who later stood Cavalier Royale at his Williamstown Stud. Even this gifted vet’s attempts to replicate the feisty chesnut proved unsuccessful.
“She was pregnant with twins, she lost both. Then she got laminitis. We tried everything and that’s why we gave her to John,” Heidi recalled. Which also brought to mind the words of one wise breeder in Philip Heenan’s yard, who once said: “The best [competition and show champion] mares share neither their brilliance nor their beauty.”
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Swiss international show jumper and horse dealer, Max Hauri, who passed away at the age of 74 \ Hauri-Horses
Another Special
It was Suzette Merz-Hauri’s daughter Silvia Röösli, who documented many of the characters and stallions of Heenan’s yard with her photo albums, taken during visits back in the 1990s.
Amongst them is a photograph of a young Chantal Müller, her twin sister Annette’s daughter, standing beside the retired Jessica in a field at Williamstown Stud in 1998.
A three-quarter-bred, Jessica V, like one of Heidi’s later horses, was a typical traditional Irish-bred.
“They were a lot easier horse then, than today. Today, they have so much more blood, they are very quality, maybe not so easy. You [Irish breeders] sold a lot of the good mares abroad and that was a problem for the Irish horse.”
And that other horse? It turns out to be Special Envoy (King of Diamonds), another bred by Mary Hughes, who had a phenomenal strike rate of producing show jumping household names from a handful of mares, including Jessica Kürten’s recently profiled Diamond Exchange.
“Nico Pessoa was my trainer, he came down here or I went to Belgium. He lost two horses with colic and, at that time, I didn’t like the indoors so much, so I gave him Special Envoy to compete.
“He was a typical King of Diamonds. He jumped with me in Calgary and the Nations Cup. I was selected as reserve with him for Atlanta.”
Special Envoy competed at the Olympics, placing ninth in Barcelona with Rodrigo Pessoa, who rates the Pessoa ‘family horse’ as his horse of a lifetime.
Similar to Los Angeles, the Barcelona field included Milton and a host of exceptionally influential stallions, including Darco, Quidam de Revel, Quito de Baussy, and Touchdown.
Heidi Hauri retired from show jumping in 1998 at Monterrey. Her career and horse of a lifetime brought much pride from Askeaton to Seon and their Olympic and European medals were, in a way, a just reward too for the family’s support of Irish breeders.
What made Jessica so special? “She was a very nice mare, a little bit the bitch! That’s what made her good. Chesnut mares! She wasn’t so big, 167cm/168cm.
“We were such a team, Jessica and I.”
By the numbers
10 - Switzerland’s ranking amongst the top Olympic show jumping medal-winning countries.
Six - individual medals won by Swiss show jumpers in Olympic history: Alphonsus Gemuseus (Lucette) at Paris (1924); Charles-Gustave Kuhn (Pepita) at Amsterdam (1928), Heidi Robbiani (Jessica V) at Los Angeles (1984), Willi Melliger (Calvaro V) at Atlanta (1996) and dual-medallist Steve Guerdat, who matched Gemuseus’s gold medal when he won one at London with Nino Des Buissonnets (2012), followed by silver with Dynamix de Belheme at Paris (2024).
Five – women have won an individual medal in show jumping at the Olympics. The British pair of Marion Coakes (with Stroller) and Ann Moore (with Psalm) won silver at Mexico City and Munich; France’s Alexandra Ledderman on Rochet M and the USA’s Beezie Madden with Authentic, also matched Heidi and Jessica V’s bronze medal results after their performance at Atlanta and Hong Kong, respectively.
Three - European Championship medals - team gold and silver, plus an individual silver - won by Jessica V and Heidi.
Two - Olympians in the family. Both Max (Tokyo and Munich) and Heidi (Los Angeles) are amongst an elite number of siblings to have competed at the Games.
One - Olympic medal won by the Swiss pair.
Did you know?