When Michael Pollard sent off an application to participate in the Mongol Derby a couple of years ago, his other equestrian commitments were pretty minimal.

“I had a couple ponies for [my daughter] Sterling at the farm, but I wasn’t really doing anything too horsey. In the subsequent years, since I put in an application, I’ve started riding a lot more and teaching a lot more. And then I had, you know, 15 to 20 horses at the house,” he said. 

He’d been following the race for several years, and thought the combination of an adventure race and horses would be fun. When the organizers finally called out of the blue and invited him to participate this year, he hesitated because his horsey life had gotten so much busier. But his wife Amber Pollard encouraged him to go ahead, so he started preparations—keeping up his fitness with high intensity interval training to prepare for all the hiking, and getting down to his competition weight from his five-star eventing days. He was already riding seven or eight horses a day anyway, so he was well-prepared to spend all day in the saddle.

But when the time finally came to actually head to Mongolia, Michael had second thoughts. He had just gotten back from a very productive week training with John and Beezie Madden. “I was really excited about continuing helping Sterling and the other kids at the barn, and I was really just not wanting to come,” he said. “Again, my wife, like, kicked me in the bottom and said, ‘Look, I really feel like this is going to be good for you. Go do it.’ So, she was right,” he said with a laugh.

What he definitely didn’t anticipate was actually being on the winner’s podium at the end in a four-way tie for first place.

“It was literally an amazing experience. I mean, I’ve done some hard things in my life, but it was certainly up there with that. It was the most emotional thing I’ve ever done, that’s for sure,” he said. 

“It didn’t have anything to do with the result. I mean, obviously the result is awesome. It’s been incredibly amazing to do well and to do it with people [I rode with],” he continued. “But the race itself was exactly what I had thought it might be years ago when I decided to try it, and it tested everything that I have done with horses.”

Billed as the longest and toughest horse race in the world, the Mongol Derby retraces the mounted relay route Genghis Khan established in 1224 to send messages across the Mongolian Empire. Competitors ride semi-wild native horses, changing mounts every 35 kilometers (21.7 miles), and cover 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) over the course of eight or nine days.

Michael approached the race with what he called an “anti strategy.”

“I’m so competitive all the time with everything I do—maybe too much so, sometimes—and I really didn’t want this to be that way,” he said.

He was well prepared, as far as his fitness and what he’d decided to pack. When he arrived in Mongolia for the four days of training organizers do before the race, he focused on finding the most knowledgeable people he could. By chance, he ended up bunking next to Anna Boden, the 2022 winner of the Gaucho Derby, and partnered with her for most of the race.

“As soon as I realized how good she was at the things that I just didn’t know anything about, I was like, ‘OK, I gotta stick close to her for a little bit until I kind of figure out what’s going on!’ I kind of got my own navigation going by the third day, but then we connected again around day four, I think, and then we pretty much rode the rest of the rest of the way in together,” Michael said.

The physical endurance required to cover that many miles over rough terrain is a major aspect of the race, but the centerpiece—the Mongolian horses—present their own set of challenges. They don’t really want to be touched, Michael said, and they definitely don’t want you on them.

“They are broke, but it’s like getting on like a young race horse or something—you expect that you’re going to get on and you’re going to be moving right away, and you better be ready to go where you want to go,” he said. The horses are bred for exactly this—navigating the treacherous terrain with skill and speed.

“I would say 60% of them, if they go out with a partner, they feel like the power is bottomless. If you look at the pictures, what I felt underneath me and then the pictures that I see are like two totally different things,” he said. “The strongest horse that I rode felt like he could have been a five-star horse. And I look at the pictures of me riding him, and he looks like a pony. That thing did four different mountain pulls, 6 kilometers each, and he went up as fast as any event horse I’ve ever ridden; it had to be like 550, 600 meters a minute up these mountains. And it never took a break. I would come slowly down—when I say slowly, still like 25 [kilometers] down—and then it would go again, and it would rock it up the next 5 or 6k mountain. I mean, I’ve never felt anything like that, like it was insane. 

“I got off of that horse, and I told the organizer, ‘It was worth the money to come here just to ride that horse.’ That was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever felt. It made me cry three times!” Michael continued. “I couldn’t believe that a horse that size had that much try. It was crazy. I’ve very rarely ridden a horse like that, and I’ve ridden amazing horses my whole life.”

On the final day of the race, four riders were in contention—Michael, riding for the U.S.; Boden, riding for Great Britain; and Eisa Al Khayari and Khalifa Al Hamed, riding for the United Arab Emirates. Although they started out the day together, Michael’s horse got tired and he had to get off and walk alongside, so ended up five to 10 minutes behind the leaders.

“The next horse I got on was just one of those ones that needed to be with another horse or it was just going to trot all the way,” he said. He was about 20 minutes behind the leaders at the next station, and got a good horse and tried to make up time by not stopping to get food or water for himself, just consuming what he was carrying.

“I thought if one of the two other guys had a rough horse, then I might be able to catch up, because mine was pretty fast,” he recalled. “Then I gave mine water and I got one more good run out of it, and I saw [the other riders] kind of waiting in the distance, and I thought, ‘Oh no, I hope somebody’s not hurt, or a horse is hurt.’ 

“It turns out, as I got there, they were just waiting for me. They all had horses that had gotten pretty puffed out—it was a really hot day—and they had decided to go together, and they all sort of decided that they didn’t want to do that without me. We had pushed each other to the limit, and I should just go with them. And, like, I just broke down. Honestly, I was already resigned to congratulate everybody and just be thankful for what I had been able to do, and that I could be there with them, and for them to to recognize the same effort that I put in and want to be with me was really, really beautiful.”

It was a different type of victory than a top placing at a five-star event or a team medal, Michael said.

“This was more like a test of all the things that I’ve done in my whole life,” he said. “It was a physical exertion that I didn’t really know what I was getting into. And then once I got into it, I realized that all the other stuff I’d done was actually the perfect training for what I was now doing. So I’m really proud of it, because I think it was a test of, like, total horsemanship, not just about getting ready for a specific competition or having a specific horse that’s good at it. It’s like, what can you do with very little support and 30 different types of horses to ride, like, right now, ‘1, 2, 3, go.’ ”

Michael said he was especially proud of being able to complete the race without any penalties, feeling that he kept the horses’ best interests at heart, even when they conflicted with his own competitive ambitions. 

“It’s not a gold medal, but it means a lot to me,” he said. “The number of breakdowns and things that I had along the way, and then just resolving that I was never going to have a bad attitude. I was always going to stay as kind as I could with anybody that would offer help, anybody that needed it.

“To have been able to feel that I held my head high, even when things went wrong, I just am really proud of the whole thing,” he continued. “It was so good for me. It just reaffirmed what I already knew about my love for horses and how healing they are for me in my life. It’s just wonderful.”