46 SIDELINES AUGUST 2014
FOR HORSE PEOPLE • ABOUT HORSE PEOPLE
Kim Walnes and The Gray Goose
Photo by Mary Phelps
of reminding herself that she really could do all that and still have
a family. She was absolutely determined and told herself, “OK, I
may be a nobody from nowhere but I have an enormous desire
and my horse has amazing talent, so we’re going to find a way to
get there.”
Learning to Ride
Kim had a long way to go to fulfill her dream. Although ‘horse’
was the first word she spoke, riding lessons were not a high prior-
ity for her military family. The only lesson she’d had was at a riding
stable near her family’s home in El Paso, Texas. After that one
lesson, the cowboy teaching beginners said she rode well enough
to be tuned loose out on the dessert with a horse, although she
was only 10 years old. “I did scary things there, unsupervised.
I went galloping around, jumping arroyos — water channels left
from flash floods,” Kim confessed. “I scared myself really bad and
it gave me a fear of jumping right at the beginning that I had to
overcome later in life.”
After Kim’s father retired from the military, he made good on his
promise to get her a horse, but there wasn’t money for lessons,
and there wasn’t an organized Pony Club nearby. She made do
with 4-H and reading everything she could about horses. Kim ex-
plains that she learned to ride simply by riding bareback with her
friends. “We rode double a lot,” she said. “We did crazy things and
stayed on.”
But the fear of jumping remained. “I had a friend in high school
who had a mare that jumped and when I got my own horse, I
asked her to help me get over this fear of jumping because it was
my greatest desire,” Kim explained. “All I wanted to do was jump,
but I was just terrified of it. My friend started me over crossrails
with her mare, very slowly, very patiently, just the way one teen
would talk another through it.” From then on, Kim had a lot of fun
jumping bareback. The fear was under control and an occasional
fall didn’t matter.
Kim said that the fear didn’t return until she was pregnant with
her first child. She remembered looking at a photograph of Prin-
cess Anne coming off at the Normandy Bank at Badminton, one of
the few world class competitions. Kim said that it would normally
make her think that she couldn’t wait to jump that, but then when
she looked at the picture, she felt the fear again. Kim said, “I real-
ized it was the hormones. Of course my body wouldn’t want me to
“Gray was so catlike,” Kim said, adding that Gray landed on his
feet after this jump although they both got very wet from the
tremendous splash!
Photo courtesy of Kim Walnes
Kim on the podium at the Luhmuhlen World Championships in
1982. Kim’s groom Lisa Fox is holding The Gray Goose in the
background.
Photo by Hugo Czerny
In 1984, Kim and Gray sailed over the broken bridge jump at the
Green Springs Olympic Selection Trials. “This was a rider ‘psych-
out’ fence,” Kim said. “The horse never saw the ditch as long as
he was forward and focused on the next jump and the rider never
looked down! Gray aced it!”
Photo by Leslie Vincent
Continued on page 48
