Boyd Martin has broken everything during his career riding horses. Except his chance for Olympic glory.

PHILADELPHIA — Lounging on a bench, Boyd Martin sipped an almond-milk latte one recent morning before he began cataloging the physical cost of his career in eventing. Inside the cavernous arena at Windurra USA, Martin's farm and training facility in southern Chester County, a woman was riding one of his horses, and he leaned back and watched and drank. He had never tasted coffee until he came to America. But the first time he tried to order tea in a café here, he said, "they wouldn't sell it to me." Coffee, it was. He had no choice.

The soft clopping of hooves on dirt gave the arena a heartbeat. Martin is a rider himself, one of the best in the world, and he kept an eye on the woman as he pointed to one body part after another and, as casually as he had talked about his transition from Earl Grey to espresso, detailed the damage that his sport had done to him. His right arm ... his left arm ... his shoulder ... sip ... his right leg ... his left leg ... his torso ... sip ...

"Got a rod down here ... a plate there ... a plate there ... a plate down that arm," he said, "two screws in there ... a screw in this wrist. Had core surgery four times. My groin has torn off the bone a couple of times. Got scars here, scars here, scars there, and scars there."

Fourth time the charm?

Martin, who, come the Summer Games in Paris, will be an Olympian for the fourth time, turns 45 in August and has the weathered good looks of a man who has seen some things, broken some hearts, and broken some bones. The last of those numbers might be the highest. By his count, he has suffered 18 fractures and undergone 22 surgeries, all of those injuries and operations born of the tumbles, falls, and crashes that equestrians risk every time they climb into a saddle.

For all their beauty, despite their veneer of wealthy formality and sophistication, eventing and show-jumping have wounded Martin and people close to him in unimaginable ways. He estimated that he competes three times as frequently as the average rider; hence, he injures himself three times more frequently than the average rider.

Cutting back on that workload, however, is not a consideration, and the word retirement is bile in his throat. He couldn't give up the sport if he tried. He will be at his best, he said, in Paris and over his next 10 years in the sport: "It's a wise man's game." Besides, he is a competitive rider, and competitive riders break bones and tear muscles and sometimes are killed. As far as he's concerned, he has no choice.

"It comes with the territory," said Martin, who emigrated from Australia in 2007. "If you're in this sport, you're going to have it. You sort of get spat out. You dust yourself off and get back on and go back to work. I don't really think about it much.

"This is all I know, ever since I was 16 years old. I wasn't good at anything else."

Beginnings down under

Martin has the Olympics in his blood. His father, Ross, a cross-country skier, became in 1968 just the fourth Australian athlete to compete in the Winter Olympics. There, in Grenoble, France, Ross met Toy Dorgan, a speed skater from Springfield, Ill. — his wife, Boyd's mother. In the Sydney suburbs where Martin grew up, riding and jumping horses was something that kids just did, like football or basketball in America. Nothing else interested him.

There was never a moment at his family's dinner table when Ross and Toy suggested that Boyd might attend college, for they understood, and empathized with, their son's single-minded devotion to a sport. At 17, he moved into a bunk house at the New South Wales Equestrian Center to train as a horseman, an international career his ultimate aim.

"All parents are terrified of, 'If this doesn't work out, what are they going to do?' " Martin said. "You go to the country club and there's a tennis pro there? I'll bet he started out hoping he'd make the tour. If you go to the golf course or driving range, the guy teaching the old ladies thought he'd make the PGA. So there's the terrifying thought of 'What if I'm not good enough? Where will I end up in this world?'

"I was lucky I was really good at it."

He tore through competitions in Australia and New Zealand, then tore through them again. Winning events there more than once wasn't enough. He felt like he was locked away in the Southern Hemisphere. He had to test himself, move to the States, and answer a question that smoldered inside him: How did he match up against the rest of the world?

He flew to the United States on a cargo plane, accompanied by his off-the-track thoroughbred, bound for Chester County on the hope that Phillip Dutton — another Aussie who had settled snugly within the county's equestrian culture, a seven-time Olympian, a friend of a friend of a friend of Martin's — would take him under his wing. Dutton did. For two years, Martin trained horses and worked for Dutton as an assistant rider and, he once said, "just went for it."

Going for it has meant winning three gold medals at the Pan-American Games and being part of a U.S. Olympic team that finished sixth at the 2020-21 Summer Games in Tokyo and winning the Maryland 5-Star in 2021 — which made him the first American rider to win a CCI5---L event, the highest-level event in the sport, in 13 years. It has meant changing his diet and training regimen since turning 40: no more alcohol, yoga once a week, an hour of daily stretching before he ever gets on a horse.

It has meant, if not outright celebrity in the United States or even the Philadelphia area, then at least the privilege of being fame-adjacent. Martin counts as a friend Flyers president Keith Jones, whose daughter, Adrian, rides competitively. After he tore his groin for the first time, Martin ended up convalescing at the Vincera Institute in the Navy Yard; there, his rehab partner was former Eagles wide receiver DeSean Jackson.

"It was awesome, actually," Martin said, "seeing how this champion wide receiver would be all fun and games, but when it was time to work, he just blanked out, and for the hour and a half we were there, he was all business."

Enduring grief

But going for it has meant something else to Martin, too, something darker and more difficult. It has meant withstanding a succession of tragedies that, had they compelled him to quit his career in a fit of despair, would have given no one any cause to blame him.

In May 2011, a malfunction in a hay-steaming machine sparked a fire that burned down his barn in West Grove and killed six of his horses. Two weeks later, his father died in a bicycle accident. In 2014, his wife, Silva, was thrown from a horse while giving a riding lesson to a friend. She suffered a seizure. Her brain bled. She lost the sight in her right eye. In 2021, as Martin was preparing for the Tokyo Olympics, a rider who had apprenticed under him, Annie Goodwin, 32, died during a training exercise when her horse, Bruno, stumbled during a jump, fell on top of her, and crushed her.

At the request of Goodwin's parents, after having trained and competed with the horse over the two years since her death, Martin will ride Bruno in Paris. The incident, to him, is ancient history; it gives him no pause. He loves the sport so much and is so accustomed to its inherent danger that he has made a deal with himself: He will do it until he can't walk.

"If you have a person who's prepared to travel halfway around the world, leave the comfort of home and friends and family behind, just for the pursuit of a sport, that's a hungry individual," he said. "In a weird kind of way, being an immigrant to America, you can't tuck your tail between your legs and go cry to mom and dad because they're not here when everything goes wrong."

Nevertheless, those risks are there, always right there, there lying next to him in bed, there with every twist at his waist and bend of his knee. He and Silva have the farm, which has what he calls "a huge jaw-dropping mortgage," and he knows very well that if he gets hurt again, hurt seriously, the music will stop, because if he gets hurt seriously, he will not be able to ride a horse himself or train someone else to ride a horse, and his entire raison d'être will disappear. Yes, he conceded, at times it wracks his nerves.

"But I don't know," he said, still stretched out on the bench in his training arena, one of his horses passing in front of him. "If you're going to be unique and special and different from other people, you have to lead a different lifestyle and have a different mindset. I feel like if you want to be a champion, you can't be normal. You know what I mean?"

(c)2024 The Philadelphia Inquirer

Visit The Philadelphia Inquirer at www.inquirer.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.