Just eight weeks after her second lower leg amputation, Suzin Wells competed at her first Australian Dressage Championships, claiming National Reserve Champion at Boneo Park. We catch up with her to hear her remarkable story of courage, resilience and positivity.
I confess. I’ve known Suzin for a while now. I don’t recall when we met but it was at a horse competition. I’d call her a friend. She’s one of those friends. The kind you don’t see regularly but when you do the conversation flows from banter to brilliance and you belly laugh like Santa Claus together. She is a person who is unafraid to speak out for who or what she believes in. Resilient, intelligent, funny; that’s Suzin. I tell you this because it’s an important insight into how the woman that has undergone not one, but two, lower leg amputations made it back in the saddle.
The road Suzin has travelled with her health would test even the strongest, but there’s not one moment I get the sense Suzin includes defeatism in her outlook. In 2018, a blister on her right toe became septic. It spread to her bone and after lengthy courses of antibiotics and numerous operations that failed to eliminate the infection, she underwent her first amputation in 2021. She was back on her horse in eight weeks. But then another setback, a bowel infection, which she attributes to such a long time on antibiotics, put her back in hospital for a month and she describes herself as “very sick”.
“It takes a long time after your body being so burnt out to get to back to reality and I’m still not there,” she says. “It was a massive feat to actually get back riding.” Less than two years later she had another life-threatening infection in her left foot that six weeks of IV antibiotics couldn’t eliminate. Her choice was to either continue with operations taking small pieces of her foot, potentially for years, or amputation. Suzin, with obvious stoicism, opted for the amputation.
One of the ways Suzin coped with all these challenges was to focus on her self-identity: “I had to keep my identity as a horsewoman. This is who I am, regardless of whether I was in a hospital bed, whether I was on the couch at home or in the paddock with a horse. It’s in my DNA and that’s who I am.”
TAKING CHARGE
Suzin is from south-west Western Australia and when we catch up she’s in Perth for an appointment with her specialist. She needs a new prosthetic leg because her current one is giving her severe blisters. This leads us into a discussion about her legs and she explains that she has her “riding legs” and her “walking legs”.
With no one in Australia making riding specific prosthetics, she took matters into her own hands. In a display of determination, a trait infused in her personality, she contacted Rodolpho Riskalla. He’s a Brazilian gold medallist Grade V para rider living in Paris and working for fashion house Christian Dior. Suzin wanted to find out how his legs were made. We joke that she will have designer label legs.
“He’s a bilateral amputee too so I contacted him asking him what he did. He sent me detailed photos of his legs and I took those to my prosthetist who then made mine. They are designed a little lower cut for when I am in the saddle and to help look after my skin integrity,” Suzin explains.
ART OF ADAPTATION
It’s nothing short of awe-inspiring that Suzin was back riding less than four weeks after the second amputation, and she competed at the WA State Dressage Championships as part of her prep for the Nationals. I ask her how she managed this in such a short time. “I guess what drives me is when you haven’t been able to ride and then you get on your horse and it’s the feeling of this is my place, this is where I want to be. I can get on and I feel good. It takes away all the stress.”
Suzin says she is “extremely lucky” to be coached by fellow West Aussie and Paralympian Sharon Jarvis, whom she credits for teaching her a “great deal”. Beyond her prosthetic legs, Suzin has had to make a number of amendments to both her training and her competition riding. From wearing an ice vest in the heat, to riding for less time are some of the tools she has put in place with the help of her coach to enable her to avoid getting too exhausted.
“I’d knew I’d be challenging myself through exhaustion and heat. I had to give myself strategic training times and Sharon helped me with that.” This means Suzin can’t train every day and sessions need to be focused so she doesn’t overdo it, including at competitions so she is fit to compete. “If you don’t have that type of guidance, you will just burn out so it’s really good to have Sharon’s experience behind me.”
In a normal training week, Suzin will ride three times a week, including a lesson from Sharon. Additionally, her horse Kendall Park Odyssey, aka Odie, is lunged two to three times per week to keep him fit. Getting back to hacking out is on the agenda. She also enjoys liberty training with him, having completed a course after her first amputation.
“I thought, ‘what am I doing?
Can I actually do this’?”
CHALLENGES AT THE NATIONALS
Settled in at Boneo and hitting the pre-comp training, the wheels became a little wobbly. “I had a bit of a meltdown and I thought, ‘what am I doing? Can I actually do this’?” Suzin was overheating, and her heart rate and breathing were what she describes as “out of sync”. Along with circulation difficulties from the bilateral amputation, Suzin has a secondary condition from Type 1 diabetes that can elevate her heart rate and this was contributing to her discomfort.
Once again, Suzin took charge of her own scenario. She spoke with the riders’ physio at Boneo Park, did some research around blood flow and found a simple solution. She bought some compression clothing to ride in from the sports store and it was a “game changer”. This assisted her circulation and enabled her to keep up with her horse. Prior, she had been slowing him down because she felt she couldn’t keep up.
“You have to research, experiment and try stuff or you are just going to wait, and who has time for that?” she laughs. “I then went into the competition feeling really good and I thought, wow, I’ve got this now.” She certainly did. When I ask her what went through her head the moment she knew she was the CPEDI2* Grade IV Reserve Champion, Suzin displays her down-to-earth nature. “I was like, me? Really?”
The competition was tight and Suzin was only 1.3 per cent behind the CPEDI2* Grade IV Champion, Helen Batson. She says that she had the best competitors and that they were all happy for each other. Suzin says her horse was fantastic and led the way for much of the competition and that she gained her confidence from him instead of the other way around. “He really looked after me. He’s just a bloody champion.”
SUZIN’S ‘BLOODY CHAMPION’
Odie is a 14-year-old Friesian sporthorse. The 17hh brown gelding, officially known as Kendall Park Odyssey, was bred by Tashlin Jefferies at Kendall Park in WA. Odie was Suzin’s first dressage horse, and he has made the transition seamlessly from being her able-bodied mount to now being her para horse. “I’ve had him since he was three, so he had to put up with my crappy riding earlier,” she laughs.
This leads Suzin into chatting about connection and her relationship with Odie. She says this bond has “absolutely” heightened post-amputation. “A long time ago, one of my main goals was to have an unbreakable relationship with my horse – and it is unbreakable. When you have that close connection with an animal it’s a reciprocal relationship and they become family.”
It’s Odie who helps Suzin on her darker days and when she is feeling disconnected from him, she heads out to his paddock. “I will grab a towel and go and lay in his paddock. He will come up and start licking my legs and grabbing my hair. I’ve had times where I’ve sat in that paddock and bawled my eyes out. To be honest, if I didn’t have my horse, I’m not quite sure what I’d be doing right now. I don’t know what direction my life would be in. That’s really key in my recovery and my positivity is having him and him healing me.”
MINDFUL APPROACH
Suzin says it is mostly gratitude and mindfulness she has developed recently. When before she may have taken riding for granted and been in a rush, she is now much more aware of slowing it all down. “I used to be a real bull at a gate but now I am more, ‘get this right, get that right and do it at a pace where everything is calm’. My aim is to be the best rider I can be in my lifetime.”
For Suzin this is not necessarily moving through the levels and winning competitions, but more about developing her depth of knowledge and building awareness around what her body creates within the horse. She has a philosophy to her competition riding that embraces the journey rather than the end result. She believes in a holistic approach and developing a relationship with her horse that is beyond the competition arena. “It’s not so much the win for me,” she declares. “I’m here for this amazing journey called life!”
MAKING IT WORK
Suzin runs her own small business and jokes that being a rider is a full-time job. I ask her how she makes it work financially in a sport with continually rising costs. “I’m lucky we have our own property and I don’t have to pay agistment, we grow our own hay and I try and keep it as a simple as possible.”
She is a small business owner which involves being on her feet much of the day. With plenty of days when she needs to stay off her legs, it’s becoming less viable so she’s exploring options around this for the future with corporate motivational speaking on the list.
From the health and disability side of things, Suzin falls under the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) which helps cover her very expensive prosthetics, for example. “One of the biggest challenges I have found is going from an able-bodied person to a disabled person and the red tape to be accepted and included in our sport, although this is changing for the better.”
She says this change is welcome but highlights there is more that needs to be done, citing examples such as good parking and improving proximity at competitions to stables and arenas as practical ways to help. She would really love to see more building of the sport of para equestrian because she says it is such a positive and supportive group of people. “One of the greatest things that I’ve found about para sport is the camaraderie between riders,” she says.
GREATNESS OF OTHERS
When I ask about the team that supports her, Suzin is quick to acknowledge having good people around is integral, but she emphasises it must be reciprocal and you can’t be “a spoilt brat rider”. “If we talk badly to those around us, we will soon find out what it’s like to be alone and what it’s like to struggle.”
Her team includes two regular grooms, her coach, family and friends. She explains her grooms need to be like “show mums” managing all the obvious horse requirements plus monitoring Suzin’s health. For example, checking she is on top of her blood sugar levels and hydration. “I can’t be thankful enough for the people in my life because my life doesn’t happen without them and that is fact.”
“I fall in love with people’s
greatness all the time.”
Her affection and admiration for her husband, Clint, is beautifully transparent. We talk about his role at the Nationals and it seems he may just be the whole team’s favourite member. “My husband was just fabulous for the whole journey. He fixed fingernails, he changed tyres, he led horses, he fed horses, he cleaned stables, he got coffees. He’s just brilliant and I’m pretty lucky I have this fabulous person to look after me.”
Suzin says she is so amazed by her fellow para riders’ humanitarian side and their strength of character and is motivated to be like them. “I fall in love with people’s greatness all the time.”
I get the sense that those who spend time with Suzin may just reciprocate the sentiment. EQ
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