Major Tom takes off to the Paris Olympics

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Earlier this summer, Major Tom headed to France to settle in before he was to compete in the 2024 Paris Olympics. Major Tom, an 11-year-old Chestnut Belgian Warmblood, was first brought to the Island in 2020 by the Clarke family when he was seven years old. The Clarkes also own Pond View Farm, a horse riding school in West Tisbury.

Major Tom will be ridden by Rodrigo Pessoa for Team Brazil. This year will be Pessoa’s eighth time competing in games at the Olympics. His name is one of the most widely recognized when it comes to international equestrian sports, and has come to represent a very long and successful career. 

Equestrian sports in the Olympics are split into three disciplines: eventing, dressage, and jumping. Major Tom and Pessoa will be competing in the jumping discipline, during which they go over a set of jumps in numerical order, scoring penalties if they knock down any jumps or the horse refuses to go over a jump. It is ultimately a test of a rider’s skill and a horse’s ability.

Rodrigo Pessoa and his wife, Alexa Weeks Pessoa, run Amethyst Equestrian, a horse riding, training, and management center, and also spend part of the summer with their family in Edgartown. 

Sarah Doyle, who has run the youth program at Pond View for the past 24 years, trains the Pessoas’ daughters, Sophia and Lua, as well as the Clarkes’ children. 

“Generations of horse lovers from the Vineyard come back, I have grandparents bringing their grandkids here and the grandparents rode here when they were kids. The horses are such a constant, and they weave this great thread between people’s lives,” said Doyle. 

According to Doyle, when the Clarkes bought the farm, they felt very strongly that there was so much more to horse riding than being competitive, you had to be a horseman, you had to learn how to take care of a horse. “This really magnifies the fact that now their horse is going to the Olympics for Brazil, it’s one of the top horses in the world, and they’re doing this at the same time, one thing doesn’t supersede the next,” said Doyle. 

Alexa Pessoa grew up riding at Pond View, and rode for the first time on-Island in the 1990s at Arrowhead Farm. Although she is here less, she looks back fondly on her time spent on the Island. “That’s what’s nice about coming here, you can do a little bit of everything,” said Mrs. Pessoa. 

The Clarkes bought Major Tom for Mr. Pessoa to ride at the end of 2020, during a time when it was very difficult to travel, “Normally when you are going to buy a horse you would go over there and see the horse and ride it and all that stuff but we couldn’t because of the pandemic, so it was actually kind of an unusual situation. We never saw him in person before the Clarkes actually bought him,” said Mrs. Pessoa. 

They have been working with Major Tom for four years now with the Paris games in mind, with the objective that he would be at his prime for this Olympic cycle.

Major Tom typically has a nine-hour routine, starting with breakfast at 7 am, and then spends time in the paddock, going out for walks, being groomed and being exercised. “A horse at that level, the attention to detail is so high that there’s somebody with him the entire day. It’s a labor of love for sure,” said Mrs. Pessoa. It’s very important to find a balance between building stamina and muscle without overtaxing the horse, so that they are arriving at a peak physical state.

Before the games, Major Tom was in Normandy, France, and on his off weeks between competitions he worked on the beach. “At low tide they go to the beach and it’s an ideal surface for them, the sand is very compact and wet so they can gallop. It’s basically a racetrack they can go for 15 minutes before turning around,” said Mrs. Pessoa. 

Mrs. Pessoa commends how quickly Major Tom was able to train, stating that his personality made him a quick study. “Not only is he very, very intelligent in the way that he learned everything that we tried to teach him on the first try, he has an incredible competitive spirit. He’s happiest when he’s competing, he’s very anxious by nature leading up until he is in the arena and then once he’s in the arena, he’s most relaxed when he’s performing,” said Mrs. Pessoa. 

In order for a horse and a rider to be a successful pair, both the athlete and the horse need to be able to rely on one another. “Rodrigo’s relationship with him is so based in positivity and trust, he really believes in the horse implicitly,” said Pessoa. 

“It’s kind of a unique sport in that way, the horse is the primary athlete and we’re kind of like pilots. You have to be obviously physically fit but you’re nothing without the horse underneath you,” said Pessoa 

Mrs. Pessoa highlighted the importance of places like Pond View that bring kids and horses together. “Horses are something that give people tremendous therapy and freedom. You feel different after you’ve ridden a horse. A lot of that eventual dream starts at places like this,” said Pessoa. 

In the Individual Jumping Qualifier on Monday, August 5, Mr. Pessoa and Major Tom had zero total penalties and finished in just 77.03 seconds, ranking 17th out of the 74 competing and qualifying to advance to the final. Although he didn’t end up bringing home a medal, Mr.Pessoa and Major Tom were among the 30 most talented jumping riders in the world, which is no small feat. Find out more about how they did here.