Lis Hartel

Lis Hartel: Horse hero

By Icelynn

Do you know who recovered from polio? Also was riding in the Olympics paralyzed from the knee down?! ALSO was the first woman to ride in the Olympics? Well I'll tell you... Lis Hartel is that woman and I'm going to tell you about her. Lis Hartel was born on March 14 1921 in Herlap Denmark. She was just a normal horse loving girl who grew up riding alongside her sister and under her mother's watchful eye. She began in dressage (fancy horse competing) her first and last love but as a teenager also competed in show jumping. (A competition where they go over jumps.) She married at 20 to a fellow horse lover and was pregnant with her second child at 23, when tragedy struck in the insidious form of polio....

Initially she was almost entirely paralyzed but with the help of her mother and husband she decided to immediately begin her rehabilitation process to ride again! After delivering a healthy baby she started learning to lift her arms again, learned to crawl, and finally walk with the help of arm crutches.

Determined to get back to competive dressage riding, Lis decided to pick up where she left of and rebliitated on her Olympic prospect and longtime family mare jubilee, a throurbred oldberg cross. She suffered several dramatic falls even at the walk and trot![ the walk and trot are slow moving gaits for a horse] as she learned to balance and cue with little or no muscle control. Only three years after her initial sickness Lis competed at the Scandinavian riding champion ships in 1974 and finished in second place, at the time no one on the international scene was aware of Lis's condition and it was jubilee's first foreign test.

While her scores would have qualified her to compete in the Olympics it was not the disability nor the skill that prevented her from competing but woman were still not allowed it would be another four years before the gender bar was lifted and Lis would represent the Denmark in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics.

While Lis was not able to mount and dismount jubilee without the aid of her husband she managed to clinch the Olympic silver medal the first woman to ever do so and in the first year woman were allowed, in one of the sports finest hours the gold medal winner Henry saint Cyr of Sweden carried Lis from her horse to the Olympic podium and it was said to be one of the most emotional moments in Olympic history.

Lis passed away in 2009 at the age of 87 after 75 years of riding and coaching Lis fought innumerable odds to ride again and to create new Olympics and truly it is stories like hers that make the Olympics an insatiable. element of our collective humane experience. I think Lis is an excellent horse rider and a horse hero to all horseback riding woman.

"Horsing around the World." HORSE NATION. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Apr. 2017. "Main Page." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 23 Apr. 2017. Web. 24 Apr. 2017.
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Presentation Notes:

"hi! i just got back from a competition it really tired me out. i got a silver medal though its no gold medal but still really good! im super glad my husband and mom helped me recover from polio otherwise i would not have done this i have to go soon to visit my sister but do u have any questions for me?"