Overall, I am well, thank you,” said Kevin Babington when we chatted on Saturday afternoon, almost exactly a year since the day his life changed.

Sometimes in life, bad things happen to good people. On Friday, August 30th 2019, a very bad thing happened to a very good person. In an instant, Kevin Babington’s life changed when he fell off his top horse at the Hampton Classic Horse Show. He was doing his job, a job he had done so well for almost 40 years.

A spinal cord injury left him paralysed, but his journey to recovery began that day and, after five surgeries with ongoing intense physical therapy and having just been accepted for a stem cell clinical trial, a remarkably upbeat Kevin only looks at the positives. “I try to, otherwise you would get pretty depressed,” he said.

Our interview was arranged for a time when Kevin had a spare few hours in his busy schedule at home in a “very hot” Florida. Despite people thinking he has a lot more time now that he is confined to a wheelchair, that couldn’t be further from the truth. In true Babington style, every minute of the day is counted for between rehab, coaching clients – in person and online – and keeping two businesses going in the face of adversity.

Three mornings a week, Kevin travels an hour to NeuroFit360 for his physical therapy. “I started at a new place. I go there three days a week for two hours at a time. It is very intense but I am really enjoying it. They are really pushing me.

“In the last six weeks, I have started to get some movement in my toes, so I’ve been working a lot on that, trying to really activate my feet, so that’s good.

"Maybe three months after the accident, I started to get a little movement in my right fingers and now the arm is working really well. I am not able to pick stuff up, but I am hoping to be able to drive my wheelchair with my hand,” he said.

Just two days before the interview, Kevin received the news that he has been accepted into a stem cell clinical trial at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. What is the process?

“Basically, they take fat cells from your belly and spin them. They are injecting your own cells back into your spine, low down. They do it in the lumbar area and then they are hoping that they will find their way through the injury to the brain, and get everything moving. The nice thing about it is there is no placebos in it, so if you are in you have a chance of it working.”

The accident

It was just a few days after his 51st birthday when Kevin left home in New Jersey for the Hampton Classic in Bridgehampton, New York. His wife, Dianna, decided to stay home, her first time to miss the show in many years.

He had his two top horses in Friday’s Grand Prix qualifier, the Irish Sport Horse Super Chilled and his then 14-year-old mare Shorapur, who finished second in the five-star Dublin Grand Prix in 2015. He jumper Super Chilled first and considered withdrawing the mare from the class.

“I remember the fall. I had jumped Super Chilled earlier in the class, you could put two in the qualifier. He had one very silly jump down, so when I came out of the ring I was thinking, ‘maybe I will do him in the Grand Prix on Sunday’, and then I had the opportunity to scratch Shorapur.

“There was a big class on the following day that I could have done. But then I was thinking, ‘She has won it before, if she jumps really well, she probably has a better chance of winning it’, so then I decided to do her,” he said of the decision.

“The combination that she had trouble in, lots of horses were struggling in there. There was a one stride to a two-stride, and the two-stride was very short. When I went, the sun was dropping and there was a big shadow in front of the third element.

“She picked up in one stride at the vertical. I just tried to stay behind the motion. She got caught up a little bit in the C element and couldn’t get her legs down quick enough, so I just got catapulted forward, landed on my head and did a summersault backwards on the Adam’s Apple.

“The first thing I tried to do was to get out of her way, because I knew she was coming down on me, but then I couldn’t move. Luckily she missed me, but I knew the second I hit the ground, something bad had happened. Normally I would be one to jump up right away but when people came towards me, I said ‘don’t move me’. I couldn’t feel my legs, I couldn’t feel anything. I just knew it was serious.”

He was airlifted to hospital and the diagnoses, as he feared, was not good. “It was the first time Dianna missed the Hamptons in years. She wasn’t watching live stream, thank God.”

On an episode of The Equestrian Podcast, Dianna explained the moment she learned about her husband’s fall. “The last time I saw him walking I was lying in bed and he left early in the morning to head to the horse show. I remember thinking, ‘I wonder if I should go’, and I didn’t. It was a holiday weekend and my friend had come and brought some stuff to barbecue. We were about to barbecue and I get a text from Brian Cash, it said, ‘We are here if you need anything’, and I thought that was weird!

“I wasn’t watching the class. My phone started to blow up. Elizabeth [Kevin’s head girl] called me, she was out of breath, she sounded like she was running, and she said ‘you need to get to this hospital, Kevin had a fall and he is being medevacked’, and she said, ‘he’s breathing on his own’.

“Three people called to offer to fly me from New Jersey to Long Island, and that is when I knew something terrible had happened.”

Pulling together

The youngest of 11 children from a Co Tipperary family, Kevin moved to the USA when he was 18 and met Dianna at a horse show in 1990. How is she and their two daughters, Gwyneth (17) and Marielle (14), dealing with the life-changing scenario?

“They are doing great, considering,” said Kevin.

“Dianna has been really strong. I don’t know how people get through this without having somebody like that behind you because, just dealing with the insurance company and staying on top of my schedule; that in itself is almost a full time job!

“And now she is very involved in the business, she does a lot of teaching, she is going to the shows. She helps Gwyneth and our other students and then she has a nice group of students in Massachusetts that she has to fly up and help also.”

American Thanksgiving in 2018: Kevin and Dianna Babington, with their daughters Marielle and Gwyneth \ Susan Finnerty

While some horses were sold and Shorapur was retired to Ireland to start her breeding career at Ballypatrick Stables, Gwyneth took over the ride on her father’s multiple five-star winner Mark Q, an 18-year-old Irish Sport Horse by OBOS Quality.

“The idea was I was probably going to give Gwyneth the ride on Mark Q anyway this year. For an older horse, he was still jumping really well and I thought if I use him for one more year, she is not going to get enough mileage out of him. As soon as the accident happened, I gave her a couple of lessons, it went well. She started showing him and they clicked pretty much right away.

“My goal with him is for her to do some national level Grands Prix over here, they are about 1.45m. She can certainly so some of the smaller, early in the week ranking classes.

“She has got a cool head, she definitely has the mentality for the sport. I wish I knew as much as her when I was 17,” the proud father said of his eldest child.

True horseperson

Marielle, like her dad, is a true horseperson and adores being around the horses. “She is a very very good rider. She is a little bit in Gwyneth’s shadow right now, but we are just working on finding the right horse for her. She is a horse person.

“She really loves working behind the scenes. She practically runs the barn at 14, she is fantastic.”

The coaching is keeping him involved and he was honoured to be named as an advisor to senior Irish show jumping manager Michael Blake. “The was really nice. I love working with Michael, he is really good at his job, he is really enthusiastic, and he is giving some of the younger riders an opportunity. The thing about Michael is he wants to win. It is not like I have a lot of impact but I love to be part of it and I love to be involved.”

While he is relishing the opportunity to coach, the business model at Kevin Babington LLC has of course changed. “Obviously it’s not like it was, a huge part of the business was me riding and competing and coaching. We lost a lot of clients after the accident.

“Part of my training programme was, not only would I coach them at the shows, but we would set the horses up at home and sometimes I would ride the horses the first day in the ring for the client. Gwyneth can take over that role a little bit, but she is only 17 and I have to be careful what I put her on.”

Huge medical costs

That is why the support of the Kevin Babington Foundation has been so invaluable to the family.

The funds have enabled Kevin to buy a van and are helping with renovations to their Florida home, which was not wheelchair accessible. People have given him the use of private planes for travel, donated horses to auctions, held horse shows for his benefit and much more. His heart is warmed by the generosity of people.

“We had a very good insurance but there is so many expenses, other that the first surgery [which left them with a $100,000 bill] and the follow up, that the insurance wouldn’t cover. They wouldn’t cover a lot of the pieces of equipment that I need for recovery that we use at home. I am on a lot of medication, the insurance will cover probably 80% of that, but that additional expense is huge because I am on four or five different meds.

“The physical therapy is not covered by my insurance. They covered a certain amount of it but not all of it and that is very expensive. And without that, I have no chance of recovery,” he explained.

“When I am at the gym and when I am working hard, it is not only for me and my family that I want to recover, I want to recover for everybody that got behind me. People have done so much, it is unreal.”

And it is hoped that the Foundation will help others that need it to. “There was a young girl who had a fall in Tryon and she was paralysed when they took her out of the ring and we were able to help her with her initial costs getting into the rehab.

“Hopefully nobody needs to use it, but that is what it is set up for. The goal is we would love to continue the fundraising during circuit every year and if we can continue to raise the funds for the foundation, it is there to help people.”

Dianna tried, at the beginning, to be her husband’s carer, but between juggling a business and dealing with all the changes, the decision was made to get more help.

“I have a night nurse and I have a day aid that comes five days a week. Dianna tried to do it herself at the beginning and it really is a full-time job, you couldn’t expect your spouse to have to do that and run a business,” Kevin said.

Ride again

Kevin’s accident has in no way changed how he feels about horses. The Olympian, who finished fourth individually with Carling King in Athens in 2004, is fully focused on riding again. He is someone with true ‘feeling’, that word that describes the rider’s connection with the horse, and that is what he misses the most.

“I have to aim high. I’d rather aim high than aim low, you know. I would love nothing more than to ride again. The hardest thing about the injury is not being able to ride. Now that I am doing a lot of teaching, it makes you want to get on. My teaching style is if a student was having difficulty, I would sit up, walk them through the motions and put them back on and then have them feel that. I miss out on being able to for that for sure.

“And my life was built around competition. The sad thing about it is I was on a really good streak right before the accident. Super Chilled was really stepping up, Mark Q was still wining, Shorapur was winning a lot. I had a horse Call Me Ruth that had just stepped up to the Grand Prix. I felt like I had a nice string. Out of that string, three of the four Grand Prix horses were Irish,” he said, displaying his love for Irish horses.

In the month before his accident, Kevin scored a 1-2-3 in the $100,000 Grand Prix at Lake Placid. In a sad anecdote, after that win he commented: “I’ve been pinching myself ever since my last round. I never would have foreseen something like this happening.”

Not being physically close to the horses is another tough part of his injury. “The other thing I really miss is, I used to love at the end of a busy day… Dianna used to go mad because she would have dinner ready and it would take me forever to come in because I was out feeding or fixing a fence or working on the walker or dragging the ring… I used to love to do that.”

Yet, as we speak, Kevin never once sounds defeated, never once a shaky answer or shying away from personal questions.

“Mentally I think I am very strong. I don’t let myself have time to be depressed or get down, I really don’t.

"My day, believe it or not, is very busy. I have people sending me books online saying ‘not that you have more down time’, but I actually don’t.

“The three days that I go to physio therapy; that is four hours of the day gone. I have to get on my bike in the morning, do my stretches; I am teaching lessons, teaching online.”

He also oversees the family’s second business, Babington Mills, which is run by his sister-in-law. “I have a lot of balls up in the air, so it is good. One thing that I do that I never did before is I watch some Netflix programmes, so I end up going to bed late. I never did that before!”

Kevin could star in his own Netflix superhero show. Determined and hardy, but gentle and kind, is how I would describe Kevin Babington.

The rest of his story is yet to be written.