In the blue blood sport of equestrian competition, Amy Tryon is distinctively... blue collar.
She’s not independently wealthy. In fact, she's a veteran firefighter in suburban Seattle, like her husband Greg.
And fittingly, her four-legged partner on the journey to Athens is a mountain packhorse she named Poggio that she found in the classifieds for $2,500. But Poggio had just the right traits to carry his owner as far as her precocious talents would take them.
"He would definitely be a type-A personality — he's kind of a go-getter, he can't sit still," says Amy.
But Amy and Poggio would have had to sit on the sidelines if she couldn't get the time off from her day job. So within hours of learning she'd qualified, her fellow firefighters had covered ten weeks of her shifts. After all, she'd force-fed them her rarified sport, and she was their teammate too.
"It's a very personal experience for us, because we feel, as a crew, that we're there with her," says Bill Pitt of East Side Fire & Rescue.
So Amy went off to train in England.
"I didn't want to wake up when I was 50 years old and say, 'God... I wished I'd tried,'" she says.
American team coach, Captain Mark Phillips — once married to a princess — saw qualities beyond her Cinderella story.
"She's a great competitor and a very, very good rider," says Capt. Phillips.
Phillips was impressed enough to choose her for individual show-jumping and for eventing — a combination of dressage, jumping and cross-country.
In Athens, Poggio did what Amy said he's always done for her.
"This horse trusts me so much that I can put a loop in the rein and gallop him down to the biggest fence on the cross-country course and he says, 'oh, ok, I got it, I understand this," says Amy.
They had a clean ride in eventing, helping the team come oh-so-close to a bronze. In fact, under a continuing protest, they may end up with a medal.
And the firefighter on the packhorse came in seventh in show-jumping. That’s seventh best in the world in the sport she's loved since childhood.
"You can't ask for anything more. I mean, you dream of stuff like that," she says.
Now she heads home — to her other life and to the other team that shared her dream, now realized.
