Rio de Janeiro’s famous Christ the Redeemer statue was voted one of the “Seven Wonders Of The World.” But were the vote to take place today, the panel would find a greater achievement in Rio de Janeiro: Sue Benson’s cross-country course.
   
When the British-based Benson agreed to design the three-star course for the Pan American Games in Rio, she knew it wouldn’t be an easy task. She’d been warned about the challenges of working in a different culture and understood that bureaucracy would tangle her efforts.

“Everyone is telling you that everything gets done at the last minute, but you sort of think, ‘Yeah, yeah. I’m sure I can persuade them to get things done sooner,’ ” she recalled with a laugh.

The veteran course designer boasts an impressive resume: she has many three-star courses to her name throughout Europe and is slated to design the 2012 London Olympics cross-country course. But building the track in Rio proved the biggest challenge—and biggest achievement—of her long career.

“They’ve done a tremendous job with the course,” said Stephen Bradley, a member of the gold-medal U.S. team. “When you look at the footing they had to start with, it’s really unbelievable. They did an equally fantastic job designing a course that’s challenging with a good flow to it.”

Benson made her first trip to Brazil in April of 2006 to survey the land and start to plan. She found a rolling landscape awaited her design, with plenty of natural features to incorporate with mountains looming in the background.

“I loved the site,” she recalled. “There were fabulous undulations and lovely trees, but I was a bit defeated by the unkempt state of it. But they assured me that they would clean it.”

Encouraged, Benson returned to her home in the U.K. to sketch her fences while the grounds crew set about “cleaning” the land. She returned in May to find her terrain destroyed. The landscapers had plowed a track straight through the undergrowth, reducing the terrain to a flat rocky path. “You could land an airplane on the course,” she deadpanned.

Thus began a series of misunderstandings and bureaucratic hurdles that plagued the entire project. CO-RIO, Rio’s Pan American Organizing Committee, scoffed at the prospect of a test event and refused to hire professional course builders. There was no one on site with any idea what a cross-country course was or what Benson was trying to achieve, or why a 1.2-meter fence was right but a 1.21-meter fence was not.

Benson had no knowledgeable liaison to coordinate the builders provided by the municipal construction company that CO-RIO hired to build the jumps and no way of checking in on the progress of her course. The two-star course designer hired to draft Benson’s fences to mechanical specifications was fired when the original construction company came in over budget and backed out, replaced by a second construction company, rather than a crew of experienced builders.

Benson traveled to Rio every few months— seven times over the 15 months leading up to the Games. She pegged out fences during tropical downpours with mud up to her calves only to have the pegs removed when the crew drained the land. She was constantly negotiating to get more timber, always in short supply despite having the world’s largest urban rainforest only a few miles away.

When Benson returned to the project in May, with just two months until competition, she was horrified. Three fences had been built, and none was safe, jumpable or the correct height.

“There was no one keeping an eye, no one checking on how things were going,” said Benson.

While the Brazilian crew was good-natured, the utter lack of understanding of what Benson was trying to achieve posed a huge problem. Benson had an interpreter unaccustomed to her pronounced British accent and regularly mistranslated her instructions, once instructing workers to add 10 tanks of water into the water complex when Benson asked for it drained.

But work did progress. Five months before the competition, the grass was being planted along the track, a painstaking process that involved planting each tiny plant by hand.

After negotiations and threats to cancel the competition—and one emergency meeting with Fédération Equestre International officials—CO-RIO eventually agreed to let veteran course builder Eric Bull fly down from the United States to Rio twice to organize the builders. Bull, who spent seven days on site, arrived to find the builders horribly ill-equipped, with just hammers, nails and one old chainsaw. He quickly outfitted the team and gave them a crash course in course construction.

Benson, Devizes, Wiltshire, made her final trip to Rio two weeks before the start of competition to finish the half-built course. But when she arrived there were no builders because they didn’t yet have the required accreditation to get into the military facility. When the builders did arrive, they were devastated to learn that much work remained, such as rolls of sod to be planted where the grass had failed and fences to be refined (including two huge corners, built too tall, that needed digging in). “When I got down there they didn’t even have a level,” recalled Benson. “I had to go out and buy them a level.”

The night before the cross-country competition Benson was decorating the final jumps by the headlights of a military Land Rover. And after the last horse raced across the finish line without any major incidents, Benson could finally stop holding her breath.

“There were times when I wanted to quit for the sake of my reputation,” said Benson. “I didn’t want to construct an unsafe course and have it be my fault if there was an accident.”

But instead of ruining her reputation, Benson’s miraculous achievement should cement it. “When you think that three months ago there was nothing here, it’s amazing,” said U.S. team gold medalist Gina Miles. “They’ve done a fantastic job with the footing. I think it asks a lot of good questions of everyone.” Benson refused to take full credit for the achievement, noting that at the end of the day Technical Delegate Roger Haller and Assistant Technical Delegate Ataide Pereiro Barcelos provided the strategic assistance to get the tremendous project done.

“I’ve been told by several people that this is the best cross-country course in South America, so that does make me feel quite proud,” she said with a smile.

Mollie Bailey