When Ema Klugman heads out on cross-country Saturday, for her third start at the five-star level, she’s going to have a team of more than three dozen physicians and other medical professionals carefully monitoring her progress.

It’s not that anything is wrong with Klugman—far from it, in fact, given the professional event rider stands out from her peers in that she’s both competing successfully at the top of the sport and preparing to graduate law school and launch her career as an attorney. It’s that her mare, Bronte Beach, is owned by a syndicate of 41 women, 38 of whom are members of the Facebook group Physician Women Equestrians. 

“One of the biggest reasons I was initially drawn to Em is the fact that she is so multidimensional,” Elena Perea, a psychiatrist in Asheville, North Carolina, who first proposed joining the Bronte Beach Syndicate to fellow members of the PWE group, wrote in an email. She first met Klugman in 2017, when both were at Duke University (North Carolina)—Klugman as an undergrad and Perea as a faculty member. “She could make a good living as a professional rider, but she went to law school because she loves to learn. Her mentor, Packy [McGaughan], really fostered that in her (he was also a lawyer and a Duke grad). We all went to a lot of school (four years of college, four years of medical school, anywhere from three to seven years of residency and fellowship) so we feel pretty strongly about achievement, and all have some obsessive-compulsive personality traits required to make it through.

“None of us rode at the level Em is riding, but many of us did ride through the whole process,” she continued. “All of us ride now as we are doctoring and saving lives in various ways.  None of us would have it any different, and I would guess that to a person, we mostly feel lucky to be a part of another woman’s journey.  It’s a dream come true to be able to support my friend, be even a small part of a horse at this level, and to share it with a bunch of badasses like the PWE syndicate.”

Perea and Klugman started riding and boarding together during their Duke days. When Klugman made her five-star debut at Kentucky in 2021 aboard her improbable but irrepressible partner Bendigo, Perea went with her to groom: “It snowed; I braided and was comic relief; he was amazing,” she recalled.

While public eyes were mostly on Saddlebred-Thoroughbred cross Bendigo and his fairytale story with Klugman, the rider had other horses coming along at home, including “Bronte.” 

She’d sourced the Zangersheide mare (Verdi TN—Dalpine, Chopin) in England as a 5-year-old in 2017, and brought her up the levels from novice to finishing fifth in her advanced debut at Fair Hill (Maryland) earlier that spring. Perea and Klugman talked about the mare’s future at Kentucky. 

Klugman’s mother, Jeni Klugman, had helped her purchase the mare, and along with her two longtime supporters, Lucia Hanmer and Barb Hendrie, had joined the syndicate already, but Ema needed more investors to support developing and campaigning Bronte to the top of the sport. 

“After that event, she was hoping to syndicate Bronte, who was looking pretty special,” Perea recalled. “I didn’t have the money to buy in on the syndicate myself (helloooo, medical school loans), but I did have 3,000 friends who are members of the Facebook group Physician Women Equestrians, some of whom I thought might be interested.  I made a post in the group inquiring about interest.  We joke that, as a group, we are bound together by a trauma (medical training) and a passion (horses), and it happens to be a fairly tight bond. … We celebrate together, mourn together, consult with each other on clinical questions, I talk to them every day, and we truly enjoy each others’ company.”

Perea hoped to get 10 women on board through her Facebook post. Instead, 34 responded with enthusiasm. The number has grown since, and some have gone on to invest in other horses Ema campaigns, including RF Redfern.

“Everyone was excited about supporting a strong young woman with a horse and a career: strong women supporting a strong woman,” Perea wrote. “One of the syndicate members, Catherine Crawford, said ‘So many owners/syndicates are super wealthy, but this syndicate made it possible for me to be part of this level despite being a starter-level rider.  And it’s really cool to support a rider who not only is achieving in eventing but also in academia.”

Today, the syndicate has 41 members, including Jeni Klugman, Hanmer, Hendrie, Perea and the small army of other women in medicine, including oncologists, pediatricians, emergency medicine and family medicine practitioners and many more. All of them ride in an equally broad variety of disciplines: eventers from intro level to intermediate, hunter/jumpers, trail riders, saddleseat, western and more.

“It’s cool because, obviously they have [the health care field] in common, but they’re also a hugely diverse group in other ways,” Ema said.

While managing a syndicate with such a large number of owners could be daunting, Ema said it has opened doors and enabled more people to get involved, some of whom have gone on to invest in her other horses. 

At Kentucky, the syndicate members able to attend the event have had the chance, some for the first time, to meet Bronte in the flesh, help graze her, and have the opportunity to walk the five-star course with Ema.

While the PWE members are drawn together supporting Ema, the rider/lawyer is drawing inspiration from them as well.

“They all went to med school, which is arguably, I think, worse than law school,” she said. “They kind of know the slog of it, and how it can be stressful and how at certain times you have to prioritize some things over others. But it’s also encouraging for me personally, because I know that they’re all doctors, and that’s an incredibly demanding profession. All of them, or most of them, ride at varying levels. It’s cool to see that they can do the big career and then also do the horses.”

As for Ema herself, who recently passed her bar exam and graduates from the George Washington School of Law (Washington, D.C.) in May, she’s still figuring out the finer points of how to balance riding professionally with launching what is sure to be a demanding career in law, beginning with her clerkship at the Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C., this fall. While she lives in Vienna, Virginia, she’s long ridden from her mother’s Snowy River Farm in Clarksburg, Maryland. Now she’s on the hunt for a barn within an easier commuting distance of downtown D.C.

“When you’re in school, at least you kind of get to pick your schedule, and you have a bit of control over your time,” she said. “Obviously you want to sit the exams and everything like that, but in terms of times of the year when I really buckle down and study, versus the week of Kentucky when I have to be focused more on the competition, it’ll be different for sure because I’ll have a boss, and it’ll be a bit more demanding in terms of schedule and stuff like that.

“But my hope, my goal, is to keep doing it,” she continued. “I want to keep riding at the five-star level as I work, so I’ll just kind of play it by ear a little bit.”

If it sounds like an impossibly demanding mission, Ema’s heard that before. 

“From the time when I went to law school, people told me not to ride, and I was like, ‘OK, that’s not gonna happen.’ But they said, you know, you’re not going to be able to ride. … I had Bronte, she was just stepping up to advanced, I had Bendigo trying to get to five-star, and I had some other young ones. And I was like, if you have the horses, these horses are rare right now. They’re not a tennis racquet; you can’t just put them away for three years, pull them out and hope that they go to Kentucky. It takes a lot of planning and timing everything, and they’re only at the prime of their careers for five or six years usually, so it’s not like you can delay it too much.

“If you find yourself in the lucky position that I feel like I’m in—I’ve really built a team of horses—you’ve kind of got to go with the flow and let them take the reins a little bit and figure out all of the rest of the stuff around it,” she added. “So yeah, I’m working on it.”

The Chronicle is on-site at the Kentucky Horse Park with two reporters to bring you everything you need to know at coth.com, so you don’t have to miss a minute of the action. You can find all of our coverage from the week here. You can also follow along on Instagram and Facebook. Be sure to read our May 20 issue for more in-depth coverage and analysis of the event.