‘I had no feeling below the waist and was told I wouldn’t ride again’: an extraordinary five-star debut

Shannon Lilley thought she was on track to make it to five-star soon after winning Pan American team gold in 2011 on Ballingowan Pizazz. But as she put it, “Sometimes life has another plan.”

For Shannon, that involved a serious spinal injury, which doctors told her meant she would never ride again. But 13 years on from waking up one day unable to feel anything from the waist down, she makes her five-star debut this week at the Defender Kentucky Three-Day Event.

Speaking after her dressage yesterday, Shanon Lilley said: “I had a disc explode and crush all the nerves at the back of the spinal column. I was lucky because it was below the cord, but I lost everything from my waist down – I could walk, but I had no sensation, no feeling and no pelvic function.”

She had emergency surgery, during which doctors decided against fusing the vertebrae and instead spent hours removing the fragmented disc material.

“It was a lot of rehab, like uncomfortable rehab for people to talk about,” said Shannon, whose problems included incontinence for the first year and having to catheterise herself.

“I have always been fairly strong mentally. I think that’s one of my strengths. And I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I wouldn’t settle for, ‘This is as good as it’s going to get and this is sort of what you have for the rest of your life.’ Maybe you call that defiant, I don’t know.

“I just thought, you just keep plugging away. There’s got to be a better way. If you work hard enough, it’ll get better. And it did. I did a ton of functional strength training, movement-based strength training, I was in the gym a lot doing things like that.”

Shannon Lilley: ‘Just get comfortable with your new body’

Alongside her physical recovery, Shannon Lilley had to grapple with what to do with her horses – eventually selling Ballingowan Pizazz to Alexandra Baugh, who won young rider individual gold and junior individual silver at the North American Youth Championships on him – and professionally. She spent some time working outside equestrianism in events and then rebuilt her equestrian business, focusing on coaching and eventually riding and competing again.

“They said I wouldn’t ride again and I didn’t really ride for two or three years. It was about five years to get back to close to the same level I was at before,” said Shannon, who also had to work through the mental game of returning to eventing.

“I was like, just go novice [90cm level] and get comfortable with your new body. That was the biggest thing in the beginning. And then after that, okay, now I’ll go training, now I’ll go preliminary. And then it all went away and it was fine and everything kind of snapped back into place. And it was good, but it did take a while.”

It’s not surprising Shannon said yesterday after her Kentucky dressage debut: “It feels pretty special just to be here and I’m very thankful for that part.”

At 45, she added that she’s probably the oldest rookie – not quite, in fact, as Mary Bess Davis takes that honour at 46 – while her equine partner Eindhoven Garette is one of the younger horses at 11.

Shannon bought the Selle Français from J-P Sheffield through her Pan American Games team-mate Buck Davidson.

She said: “I give Buck all the credit because he saw him on the video and said, ‘You have to buy this horse. You need better horses.’ And he was right. I was sort of leery [wary] in the beginning because he was a little challenging when I first got him as a young horse.

“But Buck was absolutely right, because he kept saying, no, he’s a class horse, he’s all class. And he was right because he goes and he’s such a professional. He works so hard, he’s so brave and he can run for days.”

Having put a first-phase score of 39.8 on the board, Shannon will head out across country at 3.10pm local time (8.10pm British time) today. It may be more than a decade after she anticipated galloping across the hallowed Kentucky bluegrass, but she’s made it, and there will be huge goodwill behind her.

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