ChallengeAccepted HOW JACQUIE CHEIKHA PERSEVERES

Through Disability To Excel At The Sport She Loves

WORDS: PIPER KLEMM PHOTOS: SARA SHIER PHOTOGRAPHY

CLOSE YOUR eyes and think about how hard it is to ride a horse. Then think about how hard it is to jump 1.30 m. Think about how tight those turns are and how fast those combinations come up. Think about what it takes to win a jump-o . And then consider doing all of that when you can only maintain balance and posture with one leg. You’re always aware that you could get jumped loose or turned o . That you struggle to walk and have to rely on information on your coursewalk from others (unless maybe your brother is there to give you a piggyback ride to show you around the rollbacks).

And then imagine that you can’t get enough of riding. That your dreams stretch all the way to the Olympics. Your parents don’t panic every time you cry out in pain; you tell them you want to be there and they listen. Your trainer doesn’t hold you back or play it safe when you want to go fast.

That rider you imagined is Jacquie Cheikha.

Cheikha, 17, was born with an extremely rare form of cerebral palsy—a chronic condition with no cure—that affects her left leg. She also has a Cavovarus foot, a deformity that affects that same leg as well as the arch of her foot. She has spent most of her life in physical therapy and struggles to walk. But she excels on horseback.

“Jacquie started spending time at the barn in her stroller while her older sister rode,” her mother Kim tells The Plaid

Horse of Jacquie’s babyhood in the barn. “Anytime a horse would come near the stroller, she would reach for the horse’s head with her little hands and legs and pull them into her stroller, which is really unusual for a baby. Their heads were practically as big as she was! There was never any fear; she gravitated toward every horse.”

She began riding in leadline and then walk-trot lessons, and while she was challenged by learning to ride with a rare condition, it didn’t damper her excitement to learn. Moving up to Short Stirrup Hunters and Equitation, trainer David Bustillos taught her the basics on the well known show pony Dunkin Donuts. Without motor control of her left leg, Cheikha couldn’t push her heel down, wrap her left leg around the pony, or get weight in her stirrup. While she was able to have some success in the hunter classes, she was not able to be competitive in equitation classes.

“At first David tried to train my position at home and we tried everything