In 1964, 25-year-old Lana duPont Wright became the first woman to compete in eventing at the Olympic Games, winning team silver and immediately etching her name in the annals of equestrian sport as a trailblazer. But she never saw herself that way, say the people who knew her best.

Instead of making the trek to the Tokyo Games focused on breaking a glass ceiling, Wright’s Olympic appearance was simply the natural outcome of her lifelong passion for horses and horsemanship—a passion she pursued with a level of drive and enthusiasm that raised the game of everyone around her.

“She had no clue what she was doing for the future,” said fellow Olympian Donnan Sharp, 86, of Unionville, Pennsylvania, one of Wright’s best friends since childhood. “She did it because she loved it, and she could do it. The thought of ‘look what she did for women,’ she had no inkling of.”

In fact, eventing was just one facet of Wright’s storied career in horse sport. She was also a lifelong foxhunter, and she went on to represent the U.S. on international teams in both combined driving and endurance. A strong advocate for U.S. Pony Clubs, she hosted the Middletown Pony Club at her Unicorn Farm in Maryland, and she provided mounts for countless children over the years.

As an organizer, Wright was responsible for coordinating, designing and building for equestrian competitions ranging from local paper chases to horse trials to international combined driving and endurance competitions, often on her own farm. Wright was somewhat famously unassuming, humble and reticent to talk about herself, but when she died in April at age 85, she left behind a legacy of excellence and service to equestrian sport that continues to benefit future generations and inspire those who knew her.

“She was such a big deal,” said Diane Trefry, 75, who was Wright’s team manager for over 50 years. “She was such a gentle professional with her horses. If you watched her ride or drive, she was very precise, and kind to them, but she also took no nonsense. She never bought something that was made. Part of her pleasure and joy was to make a horse herself. She was hands-on.

“Every horse should have a job, in her book, and every kid who wanted a pony should have an opportunity to ride a pony,” she continued. “She took van loads of ponies to Vermont in the summer, and the Pony Club kids could go and do an event. Many kids were the recipients of that, and she made so much happen for Pony Club, through gifting her own horses and giving lessons. She was just very generous. What she had, and what knowledge she had, she shared.”

From Foxhunting To The World Stage

Wright and Sharp lived near each other as children and soon bonded over their mutual love for ponies and riding. The pair spent hours hacking out in the countryside together, unencumbered by rules, adults, or real-life responsibilities. Both young women loved to foxhunt, first with the local Vicmead Hunt Club in Delaware, then later with many of the prestigious Virginia hunts, including Orange County, Piedmont, Old Dominion and Blue Ridge.

Foxhunting remained a lifelong passion for Wright, and the skills both women gained in the hunt field set them up for their early encounters with the sport of eventing as young adults. It was Wright who first learned about the sport—then new to civilians—as a preteen while studying at Oldfields School, an all-girls boarding school in Maryland.

“The coach who was there at the time had just been exposed to eventing, so he got all the Oldfields riding people interested,” said Sharp. “Lana got involved, and for the next three years, just kind of played around with it at school.”

When the girls graduated in the late 1950s, both skipped college in favor of pursuing their equestrian goals. By then, eventing had caught their interest. Riding across country came naturally, thanks to their years in the hunt field, as did show jumping—but the dressage phase proved more problematic.

“Neither one of us had a clue,” says Sharp. “We’d read a few books, but we didn’t really know what the heck it was all about. That’s when we became involved with Richard Wätjen.”

Wätjen, a highly accomplished German dressage trainer who had previously trained and taught at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1950s to work with Karen McIntosh at her family’s Sunnyfield Farm in Bedford, New York. At the time, there were few coaches specializing in dressage, making someone with Wätjen’s skill and experience invaluable.

“We found Wätjen was the guru to go to for this peculiar dressage event,” said Sharp with a chuckle. “We took a couple of foxhunters up there, in hopes he could teach us something.”

It wasn’t long before the foxhunters were back in their stalls, and Wright and Sharp were learning dressage basics on trained schoolmasters. But Wätjen quickly discerned that both women were truly interested in learning and had bigger goals than simply riding circles at home. When Sharp and Wright were invited to train with the U.S. Equestrian Team in Gladstone, New Jersey, in the early 1960s, Wätjen accepted the women’s invitation to join them. It was a move that proved fortuitous to the success of riders on the nascent U.S. eventing and dressage teams, many of whom worked with Wätjen until his death in 1966.

Meanwhile, in 1958, the friends hosted the first Vicmead Horse Trials in Delaware. It offered just two levels, novice (now preliminary) and advanced, and it attracted only eight entries. The competition was significant not only because it was the first of many that Wright would go on to host and organize in her career, but also because in its second year, the Canadian squad entered it as a final prep for the 1959 Pan American Games in Chicago.

“We really beefed it up,” Sharp recalled with a laugh. “Wätjen even came down to judge dressage.”

Seeing some of the best amateurs in the sport compete at her own event was the first of several fortuitous occurrences that helped set Wright up for an Olympic bid just four years later. She and Sharp took great inspiration from spectating at both the Chicago Pan Ams and the 1960 Olympics in Rome; along the way, they also attended a meeting in Illinois that would result in the creation of the U.S. Combined Training Association (now the U.S. Eventing Association). And around the same time, a special partnership began to solidify between Wright and a somewhat quirky homebred Thoroughbred of her mother’s, Mr. Wister.

Though bred for the track, “Wister” wanted no part of that lifestyle. He dumped all his jockeys; he often refused to enter the starting gate. Though he did eventually run a handful of times, it was with modest success. Wright took over the ride when the rangy gelding was 3 or 4 years old.

“I’m not sure what she saw in him, except he was a gorgeous, big-boned Thoroughbred,” said Sharp. “She had quite a tussle with him. It took her a summer to be able to stay on and get him to be manageable. But he caught on quickly that this might be OK, and there was obviously a great rapport between the two of them. He went on to do anything for her, which in itself is a pretty good story, having seen him from day one.”

Wister and Wright trained for several years at Gladstone, then in 1963, went to England to train there as a final preparation before attempting the Badminton Horse Trials, where she placed 10th. Sharp, who married U.S. eventing team stalwart Mike Plumb in 1964, remembers that during their time with the team, no one thought them less capable for being women.

“No one was really thinking, ‘Oh, girls can’t do this,’ because there were girls out there competing,” said Sharp. “The boys had gotten used to us girls competing against them at the national level, and they were fine with it. It’s just the rules [for the Olympics] didn’t allow it.”

By the time the rules did change, before the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, Wätjen had convinced Sharp to focus exclusively on dressage, and she went on to help the U.S. win team silver at the 1967 Pan Ams (Winnipeg) and rode on the team at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. But Wright, bolstered by her success with Wister, stuck with eventing.

“Lana hung in with the eventing because she had this awesome horse,” said Sharp. “She battled it out, not really aiming for the Olympics but aiming to do the best she could do at all the events. So she eventually out-rode and out-performed everybody, and when the rules changed, they took her on. We didn’t have a very strong group in those days, but the horse—and Lana—legitimately made the cut. She may have been the only female, but she wasn’t an oddity, because she could do the job.”

On endurance day at the 1964 Olympics, it poured and poured, and the horses churned the footing into a deep muck. By the time Wister and Wright headed out on cross-country, conditions were poor, and the pair fell not once but twice on course. Unbeknownst to anyone, Wister had broken his jaw in the first fall, but he seemed game to continue. Sharp happened to be standing nearby when the pair fell the first time, and she gave her friend a leg up back into the saddle.

“She was a mess, and can you imagine, a horse with a broken jaw, and went on anyway,” says Sharp. “Obviously, we can’t get away with that anymore. But she got around.”

In an oft repeated quote, Wright recalled her Olympic cross-country experience as follows (here from the “U.S. Team Book of Riding”):

“When we finished, we were a collection of bruises, broken bones, and mud. Anyway, we proved that a woman could get around an Olympic cross-country course, and nobody could have said that we looked feminine at the finish.”

“No one was really thinking, ‘Oh, girls can’t do this,’ because there were girls out there competing. The boys had gotten used to us girls competing against them at the national level, and they were fine with it. It’s just the rules [for the Olympics] didn’t allow it.”

Donnan Sharp

Maybe not, but that finish nonetheless broke down a door that other women were waiting impatiently behind.

“She was our friend, and she had made it to the top, and we were thrilled to be part of it,” said Sharp of Wright making eventing history. “But England had all these girls who should have been on their team, and they were banging on the door. It was an evolution, I think, more than Lana having done it. [Women in Olympic eventing] had to happen, and good for the U.S., to let it happen.”

Those Olympics, where Wright and her teammates earned the silver medal, were essentially her swan song at the elite level of eventing. Not long after, she left the team, married and started a family. But she was far from done with horses.

Driving Into The Future

Trefry first met Wright when she was working for her mother, the acclaimed Thoroughbred breeder Allaire duPont, at Woodstock Farm in Maryland. It wasn’t long before Trefry was giving riding lessons to Wright’s young daughters, and soon, she moved over to work at Wright’s Unicorn Farm—contiguous to Woodstock—full time. She stayed for five decades.

“She became more than an employer to me,” said Trefry. “She was my friend, she was like my sister, and she called us a team. And we were a team; we did everything together. It’s been wonderful, and I had a great life because of her. All I ever wanted to do was be around horses, and she made that happen for me.”

As her children grew up and moved on to larger horses and other pursuits (her late daughter Beale Morris was short-listed for the 2000 Sydney Olympic eventing team), Wright amassed a small collection of ponies. With her philosophy that “every horse needs a job,” Wright soon began using them to learn how to drive. One auspicious day, she and Trefry spectated at a combined driving event in Pennsylvania.

“We watched Clay Camp with his four-in-hand drive over the top of a log in the marathon, and we were like, ‘We want to do that!’ ” remembered Trefry. “That’s how we got started.”

Using a trio of related Connemara-Thoroughbred geldings—Greystone Sir Rockwell, Greystone Sir Oliver and Greystone Billy Moon—Wright pursued her new sport with the same zeal she embraced anything horse-related. In training her driving horses, Wright applied the many dressage lessons she had learned decades earlier from Wätjen, schooling the horses both under saddle as well as in harness.

“Back in the day, people weren’t such big riders of their driving horses,” said Trefry. “That was a bonus for her, because they got a lot of dressage work under saddle. Her eventing certainly contributed to her driving.”

Trefry soon found herself coordinating trips to Europe for horses, carriages and more.

“My strong point was doing the paperwork and the organizing of all that—she was the ‘get out there and know the horse and do the job,’ side of it,” said Trefry with a laugh. “Paperwork was never her strong suit. She was interested in being outside, loving the outside, and loving animals.”

Soon, Wright and Trefry began organizing driving events. Wright designed the hazards personally, and she helped Trefry and others with their construction. She often used her signature yellow and gray jeeps like they were bulldozers. One time, she overheated her Jeep after hay got into the radiator when she was using it to push 450-pound bales onto a dump truck to make a hazard.

“It was so rewarding to her, to design these obstacles so that people would really need to think,” said Trefry. “She put so much thought into it, and people always said they really appreciated her designs. She was a bit of an artist and creator that way.”

In 1991, Wright and her Connemaras competed at the Pairs World Driving Championship in Zwettl, Austria, where the U.S. team earned its first gold medal in history. The victory, in some ways, meant more to Wright than her groundbreaking Olympic appearance, recalls Trefry.

“When she got her medal in the Olympics, she didn’t feel like she earned a medal, even though she did a great thing for women in the sport,” said Trefry. “She never credited herself with earning the Olympic medal [because hers was the drop score].

“When she did the driving—and in each section she earned a place—that medal meant the world to her, because she felt she’d earned it,” she continued. “She didn’t take anything for granted. She worked hard, every day, for everything. Winning that medal was rewarding for her—that was a dancing-on-the-table moment.”

“When she got her medal in the Olympics, she didn’t feel like she earned a medal, even though she did a great thing for women in the sport. … When she did the driving—and in each section she earned a place—that medal meant the world to her, because she felt she’d earned it.”

Diane Trefry

Wright took particular pleasure from the process of conditioning a horse for his job, and she did most of this work herself. She was dismayed that sports she loved—including eventing and combined driving—changed their formats in recent years to reduce the emphasis on endurance.

“It was kind of sad for her, as time progressed and those things were taken away, because conditioning was so rewarding for her,” said Trefry. “So the 100-mile endurance was really the next step.”

Wright, who had previous experience in shorter endurance and competitive trail rides, made her 100-mile endurance debut in Vermont riding a purebred Connemara stallion—and she quickly learned that he wasn’t the right mount for the job. And that was how Wright, a devoted Thoroughbred lover who had once quipped that “she would never have an Arabian come down this driveway,” had to “eat her words,” according to Trefry.

“We joked with her a lot about that,” said Trefry. “After the ride in Vermont, she said, ‘I guess we need an Arabian.’ So we went out and got an Arabian. It didn’t take her long to figure out there are horses that are really bred for it.” 

Wright and LL Stardom were selected for the 1999 Pan Am Games in Winnipeg, Manitoba—even though she never specifically verbalized that as her goal—and yet again Wright found herself representing her country on a championship team, in a third sport.

“That’s just the way she was,” remembered Trefry. “Everything she did, she reached for the stars—and she usually reached them.”

A Tradition Of Excellence, Shared

Though Wright may never have set out to be a role model for other women in equestrian sport, her commitment to excellence and success in anything she set her mind to helped shape countless horsewomen—including those who never had the opportunity to meet Wright in person.

“She made things happen, and if she said it was going to happen, she was going to make it happen one way or the other,” said Trefry. “She was an amazing motivator. A person might say no to you or me, but she always managed to get that easy yes. She would never ask you to do something she wouldn’t do. She got down in the trenches, she dug the post holes, she marked the courses.”

Five-star eventer Sharon White was a teenager when she first met Wright through her daughter Beale. The family embraced White, offering her experiences that changed her life and the arc of her professional career.

“I was so unbelievably lucky to have met them—it’s like you don’t know what you don’t know, and I just happened to end up at an eventing barn when I started riding lessons,” says White, 51, of Summit Point, West Virginia. “I basically knew nothing, and then to be put into Lana’s hemisphere, into her world, was huge. I pride myself on my horsemanship, and so much of what I know I learned from her. Lana has got to be one of the best horsewomen I have met in my entire life.”

White spent time at both Unicorn Farm and Wright’s summer residence in Reading, Vermont. In each place, Wright guided the young people in her orbit, often without saying much at all.

“Lana had a very distinctive voice, and I remember it would get so bemused when I would do something [wrong],” recalled White. “She would say, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing, Sharon.’ She never meant it to be this way, but you knew you were doing something stupid. She was so cut and dry.

“But she was never one to make you feel like you were in the presence of all she had done,” she continued. “She was always so approachable in anything that had to do with horses or horsemanship, and so thoughtful, so dedicated to it. You just felt like she cared so much about the horses, that you could ask her anything about them. It would really matter to her.”

Suzy Stafford made history of her own in 2005 when she became the first U.S. combined driver to win an individual world championship, but as a junior, she was an eventer and a member of the Middletown Pony Club. A serious riding accident in her late teens meant that a professional riding career was no longer in the cards, and it was Wright who helped Stafford start in driving.

“She was certainly an inspiration, and a force to be reckoned with in anything she did,” said Stafford, 48, who is based near Fair Hill, Maryland.

“It was always two hundred percent or nothing. In that sense, being around her at the farm, it was certainly influential in my experience in driving. Watching someone with that level of drive and talent and experience was very inspiring to me.

“She never thought anything she did was special, or significant, or anything like that,” she added, “it was just how she carried on her day: We train horses. We go and win medals. That’s just what we do.”

Stafford remembers that Wright held everyone to the same high standard, and she wasn’t afraid to call someone out if a detail was amiss. But in doing so, she showed each person they were capable of more than they thought.

“It’s rare to find someone with the high standard she held for herself and the people around her,” said Stafford. “In a sense, those were the most important lessons she taught.”

While Wright may continue to be best known for her historic Olympic appearance, perhaps she would prefer to be remembered for her many and varied contributions to equestrian sport, from the grassroots level up.

“She wanted everyone to get the rewards she got,” said Trefry. “She got medals. But she gave way more to the equestrian world than she ever took from it. And she took pleasure from doing that, as well.

“It was about teaching everybody to enjoy the horse, at the lowest level, the medium level, or the highest level—whatever is for you,” she continued. “It made no difference. Anything to enjoy the horse, and learn to care for the horse, and the importance of the horse. For Lana, it was really about appreciating, enjoying, and making the most of your horse or pony, no matter what he was.” 

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This article originally appeared in the July 2025 issue of The Chronicle of the Horse. You can subscribe and get online access to a digital version and then enjoy a year of The Chronicle of the Horse. If you’re just following COTH online, you’re missing so much great unique content. Each print issue of the Chronicle is full of in-depth competition news, fascinating features, probing looks at issues within the sports of hunter/jumper, eventing and dressage, and stunning photography.