There’s never been a stranger time for elite athletes. Olympic medallists such as Megan Jones have their dreams on hold while they navigate an uncertain path preparing for an event they are not even sure will run.
“Having a baby was a curveball,
but definitely a really,
really lovely one.”
For Megan Jones, 2020’s pandemic and subsequent cancellation of events was an unwelcome disruption, as it has been for everyone. However, for Megan it’s also been a time to enjoy and appreciate what she truly loves – her family, her horses and her home.
In June 2018, Megan Jones was on a mission. With just over two years until the Tokyo Olympics, the Beijing silver medallist had a team of exciting upcoming horses, and if she could have written the script for the next two years of her life, it would have featured a series of eventing competitions culminating in the Olympics. Little did she realise that a volley of curveballs – good ones and not so good – were headed her way.
“In June 2018 we were meant to go to Melbourne International Three-Day Event,” says Megan, taking a deep breath. “We’d just come home from shopping for horses in Europe with a wonderful owner, and had bought a going three-star horse and also a 1.30-1.40m showjumper and some younger ones. The plan was to have those horses arrive here ready for 2019, get them going, and then get the four-star horse to Adelaide for the 2019 Australian International Three-Day Event CCI5*-L. Then we would have two horses knocking on the door to go to Tokyo in 2020.”
However, Megan did not make it to Werribee for the Melbourne International 3DE that year, as she suffered extreme nausea. “We got home on about the Wednesday and were leaving on about the Sunday or Monday to go to Werribee. I got really sick coming home from Europe on the plane and I was sick the whole time we were over there. I thought it was motion sickness from all the flights and car trips. Little did I realise it was morning sickness because I was actually pregnant!” Megan recalls with a laugh now.
Megan didn’t compete again that year, but she continued riding her lovely team of horses, including the new ones that arrived from overseas in September. In fact, she rode on until December, by which time she and her husband, James, had just five weeks to wait for the arrival of their son Finn.
“So yes, having a baby was a curveball, but definitely a really, really lovely one. It was just amazing. The pregnancy went really smoothly, and being able to keep riding the whole time was great,” Megan enthuses. Motherhood clearly agrees with Megan Jones, and the delight in her voice as she describes the joy that Finn has brought to her and James’s life is palpable.
Megan wasted no time getting back in the saddle after Finn’s arrival and went cross-country schooling when Finn was just six weeks’ old. Soon eventing again, she competed at Wandin in Victoria and then at a local event, where the next curveball came hurtling at her. Her horse slipped over during the cross-country phase and stepped on her leg.
“There’s always next year,
or as it turns out,
the year after!”
“When it first happened, I was hitting the ground, swearing, and then also saying, ‘Suck this up Megan, just breathe it out!’ I almost wanted to be sick it hurt so much, but I could move everything. I thought ‘I haven’t broken anything, I can stand, it’s all good’, but gosh it hurt! So I got back to the truck, bandaged it, Equissaged it, but it kept swelling and the knee was getting bigger and bigger. I kept thinking, ‘Can I ride the next couple of horses?’ I got on the tailgate, bent my knees and squatted like I was in jumping position, and thought, ‘hmm, I probably can’t, really’. So I said to James: ‘Look, you stay here with the car and the working students, let them finish their event, I’ll load the truck up and get home with most of the horses before this leg stiffens up and I can’t drive the truck’. That was going to be easy, the truck is semi-auto, it would be much easier than driving his ute with its big clutch!”
The X-rays the following day indicated that Megan’s leg wasn’t broken, just extremely green and swollen. The dedicated athlete allowed herself a week off riding, however, with Lockington Horse Trials looming she was soon back in the saddle despite the knee being extremely swollen and painful to the degree that she could barely tolerate contact between her leg and the saddle.
While Megan did make it to Lockington Horse Trials, her leg was still in a bad way and she had devised a riding technique that involved minimal contact between her injured leg and the saddle. With gritted teeth and fierce determination, she made it through four dressage tests and two showjumping rounds before falling off when her horse stopped at the water jump on the cross country course.
“She stopped at the water going in, because clearly my leg wasn’t very useful, I was aware of that. I fell off like a bit of Lego! And I thought, ‘oh, that was a bit useless!’ So I was cleared to get back on and rode back up the hill, because I wasn’t going to walk back up the hill with my leg like that, and then I got on my next horse to showjump. I was trotting around and that’s when I thought, ‘you know what? I’ve got to stop. This is actually really pretty sore, don’t be a hero, Megan, call it a day’.”
Megan had an MRI, and when the results came back some weeks later they revealed she had suffered a severe compression fracture and cracked disc. Fortunately, surgery was not required, but it was months before Megan could ride again. In fact, the extent of the injury was yet to be realised; a CAT scan eight weeks later revealed that she had suffered an additional fracture to a bone on the inside of the knee which the MRI had not picked up!
Defying the odds and with minimal lead-up events, Megan still made it to the 2019 Australian International 3-Day Event, competing in the CCI5*-L with her homebred mare Kirby Park Impress, and the CCI4*-S with the imported RLE Barina. Despite her extensive time away from competing, the event started extremely well for Megan, with ‘Candy’ placing 6th after the CCI5*-L dressage and Barina 4th in the CCI4*-S dressage. The dream finish to 2019 was unfortunately not to be — after a promising start, Megan and Candy parted ways three fences from home on the CCI5*-L cross country course, both walking away from the incident unhurt.
Great athletes display great sportsmanship – Megan Jones is no exception. Despite the personal disappointment of the previous day, she was there in the crowd with James and Finn on showjumping day; a happy family of proud South Australians cheering on fellow competitors and enjoying time together at their home town’s premier event. Despite all of 2019’s ups and downs, Megan was in a happy place: “My view was, it’s happened, I fell off. It’s done, there’s no point being down in the dumps about it. I have a really beautiful baby, and there’s always next year, or as it turns out, the year after!” Megan laughs.
Megan’s result at the Australian International 3-Day Event meant she was not qualified for the Tokyo Olympics, however, she had a back-up plan: qualify at Sydney or Melbourne in the first half of 2020. But first she had to endure 2019’s fiercest curveball yet – a devastating bushfire just before Christmas.
“We’d gone up to Melbourne, Canberra then Sydney that week to see some friends and look at a few horses. We obviously had an eye on the weather and decided on the Wednesday, no, we’d better just come home, and we got home on Thursday afternoon to be there for the bad day, Friday,” Megan explains. “As I told on my social media, we were just outside the house chatting to the girls about moving two horses that didn’t have enough shelter from the sun that day. And we just smelt this smoke, tried to work out which way it was coming from, and saw a skinny but bad-looking plume of smoke.”
The situation escalated quickly. There was an uncontrolled fire burning south-easterly and extreme winds were building. “I rang James. He could smell the smoke from the house, and I just said, ‘We’ve got to go right now!’ I’ve never said that before,” Megan recalls.
“I don’t know how we got
them all out so fast.”
“I don’t know how we got them all out so fast; the truck wasn’t even here, it was in town getting serviced, so friends came and we were doing the bolt, transporting horses to Mum’s place. The girls were there… we’d do a U-turn in the driveway, ramp down, horses off, ramp up, back home again to get more,” Megan explains. “James called me at my Mum’s saying ‘I think the house has gone’. I was outside and I thought ‘I can’t believe that, it couldn’t have happened, no…. I can’t believe that’.
“I was upset but I was also getting myself together and saying to myself, ‘come on Megan, you haven’t seen it yet, don’t worry’. We did everything we could; everyone’s out, animals and people are safe. We just need to hope that it hasn’t burned down. Then when James was able to come back up and check everything out once the fire front had gone past Woodside Oval, he called me and said: ‘The house is still there and the indoor is still standing! We’ve lost some stables and stuff but everything that’s really important is still standing!’”
Relieved yet exhausted, Megan and James soon set about rebuilding. “We had friends over, it was about three days later; it was not even New Year’s yet I don’t think, and they were digging trenches and laying pipe, it was crazy how fast everything worked and happened,” Megan recalls. “James, well, he’s a machine. He’s done the work of 100 men. Obviously he’s had some help, but he’s such a driving force, it’s just unreal.”
Megan and James’s Hallmark Farm is now an oasis of green; the bushfires are a distant memory and the property has a fresh new look as a result of good rain and the restoration and rebuilding works that followed 2019’s horror finish. As Megan explains, her horse facilities are now better than ever. “The water jump burnt down, so we’ve got a whole brand new water jump. And all the trees and hedges that we were about to plant, we hadn’t yet planted when the fire came, so now they’ve all gone in and look amazing! We’ve got a new shed because our other stables just exploded in the fires. So, for all the awful things with the fires, we’ve made as good as we could from it all.”
Making the best of the situation at hand is a theme that has continued for Megan and her family as 2020’s events unfolded. She’s grateful that the fires came first – then Covid-19 – rather than the other way around, as it meant they have had time to finish the rebuild and spend time together enjoying family life at Hallmark Farm.
“People complain that they’ve not been able to compete, which I understand. I missed competing too, but I’ve quietly just really enjoyed being home and riding my horses and rebuilding, training and just having a year off. I mean, I really didn’t need a year off!” Megan laughs, “Honestly, I feel like I haven’t competed for about 10 years! But it’s also been lovely. It’s been nice to enjoy a lot of time with Finn. I’m not missing any of those special moments that he is going through as he’s growing up.”
Having great people around her is part of Megan’s success, and helps her navigate through the good times and the challenging times. This team extends beyond her family and hardworking staff at Hallmark Farm – it includes companies such as Barastoc who have supported her for over 15 years.
“I really couldn’t wish for a better team, and Barastoc is part of that, they’re a really good bunch of people and we have a lot of fun with them when we get to catch up in person. They give me all the nutritional advice that we need and supply us with great feeds for our horses. They have an amazing range of horse feed, from pelleted feeds to muesli mixes, and even steam-flaked barley.
“There are so many different options in the range. Because we have so many different types of horses, with Barastoc’s help we can tailor everything to them perfectly. We use a lot of the Calm Performer — it’s a nice simple feed; I like to keep feeding simple when I can. There’s also a low GI cube which Barastoc have developed with KER – those are the two products that we use on most of our horses, and then some are fed Barastoc’s Steam Flaked Barley if they need that,” says Megan. “When we were breeding a lot we always fed their range of breeding feeds to the breeding stock.”
After two years of twists and turns, highs and lows, and interrupted plans, Megan is optimistic about the future and finishing 2020 on a high. With competitions starting again in South Australia and borders opened to some states, we will soon be seeing Megan and her team competing in FEI events again.
“I’m just so excited to take my horses out, including some of my ‘secret’ ones that no one’s really even seen yet!” Megan enthuses. “I’ll get to Wallaby Hill International in New South Wales with Toulando; I bought him earlier this year from Rachael Lee, I’ve only done one event with him. ‘Lando’ and Barbie will be in the two-star… I’m not quite sure whether long or short format, probably short because it will only be their second two-star run. And then Candy in the four-star!
“I really couldn’t wish
for a better team, and Barastoc
is part of that.”
“Initially I thought, ‘oh there’s no point getting her fit and taking her there because if Tokyo doesn’t happen, what’s the point in running her legs off?’ And then I said to myself, ‘You enjoy competing and enjoy riding your horses, Megan, that’s why you’re going to go’. My life doesn’t revolve around just going to the Olympic Games. I do get a bit sort-of-on-that-path sometimes, and I have to remember, ‘no, you got these horses because you enjoy riding and you enjoy competing, so let’s have our Tokyo plan, absolutely, but also enjoy your horses and ride them and compete them’. So Wallaby Hill, here we come!”
In preparation for Wallaby Hill, Megan will compete at Naracoorte in mid-November. “They are running up to four-star level there which is going to be amazing. It will be a bare bones one because the Victorians can’t come over, so it will be a very small class, but at least I get to run Candy around there,” Megan explains. “However, our cross country course at home is now so epic and we’ve got some good proper big fences here! I’ve reviewed my fitness program: some of my gallops will now actually be cross country runs. I’ll run a cross country course in my paddock and also showjump the next day, too. So I can put their body under the same pressure as I would at a competition. You need those competition runs to harden them up and get them used to do going cross country and then jumping the next day. I’ve got the opportunity to do that at home, I’m really lucky. I can just get them prepared like that and my cross country fences are all portable so I can move things around if I want to and change the lines. That’s my plan!”
Hallmark Park’s revamped facilities are indeed impressive. The cross country paddock is over five acres in size and has 130 jumps, from very small ones to four-star dimensions. “I’ve spent a lot of time looking at my lines; we put the fences out in a way that one jump can then relate to something else, and make five different lines. I’ve got unending options out there!” Megan enthuses.
It’s clear that Megan Jones has emerged from two testing yet rewarding years with as much motivation and determination as ever, matched with a rational and down-to-earth approach. “I’m not even qualified yet for Tokyo, so Wallaby Hill is my qualifier with Sydney and Melbourne as my back-ups,” she explains. “And I’ve realised that, gosh, even if I don’t qualify, we’re going to have enough high-calibre events over here next year even if this Covid thing keeps going, to compare Australian-based rider to the overseas-based combinations who have already been able to compete at major events this year. As long as we’re doing good tests, jumping clear rounds, and we’re strong cross country, we can – and we have – shown in the past that we can do this.
“If you’re an up-and-coming rider it wouldn’t be so possible. You’d just think, ‘you know what? I’ll wait for next time, I’ll just keep training for next time’,” Megan observes. “But for the likes of Shane, Stuart and I, the selectors know us, they know what we can do, and if we’re producing good things here we’ll do the same thing over there. So that’s the way I think about it. I just have to go and do a good job,” Megan explains.
Home at Hallmark Park, preparation and practise for good – perhaps great – performances continue. Riding eight horses of her own each day, teaching countless lessons, and even finding time for personal training sessions and Bikram yoga, there’s never a dull or quiet moment. With the support of husband James and son Finn, a wonderful team of staff, and companies such as Barastoc, the future is bright for Megan Jones. EQ
