Stephen Bradley had a lot on his mind as he cantered down the centerline at the 1996 Rolex Kentucky Three-Day Event on Dr. Doolittle.

Having been eliminated after a cracking cross-country round at the Burghley Horse Trials CCI**** (England) the year before due to spur marks on Dr. Doolittle’s sides, Bradley needed to complete Rolex, then a CCI***, to show the U.S. selectors that they were worthy of the team for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games.

“Especially any Olympic selection trial you always feel a certain amount of pressure, but this was a little bit of a sink or swim thing for me because I had to finish it, and I had to do well to be considered,” Bradley remembered. “If I didn’t, I was out completely. He had been going really well, and he had been consistent, and we were really hoping we had a shot at going to Atlanta.”

The pair steadily moved up the leaderboard over the weekend, and sat third after cross-country behind Mara DePuy on Hopper and Stuart Young-Black on Market Venture.

Bradley and Dr. Doolittle jumped clear in the show jumping, so when DePuy and Young-Black dropped rails, Bradley took home the big win.

“For me it meant a lot because a few years earlier I’d won Burghley with Sassy Reason,” said Bradley. “Dr. Doolittle was the next horse that I brought up to the advanced level. It meant a lot to me as a horseperson because I’ve never been one to have a string of horses. It made me feel like I was a doing a good job and training the horses right. It gave me confidence as a horseman.”

Bradley had taken over the ride on the off-the-track Thoroughbred gelding (Masked Dancer—Miss W.I.P.), about four years before his big win, from his owner Nicola Hales.

He produced the gelding from preliminary to several three-stars, as well as his Rolex win and a ninth-place finish there in 1995.

Bradley fondly recalled his time at Rolex, and remembered Mike Etherington-Smith’s track as big, technical, and perfectly suited to Dr. Doolittle.

“It didn’t have as many spectators as it does now, but it was still very popular. There were a lot of people there,” he said. “The course, as always, was big and technical and had a lot of really big questions on it. It was just the typical Kentucky that you expect going in to it!”

He remembered Dr. Doolittle as a big, strong cross-country horse, and always a trier.

“He could get a little tight on the flat, and definitely was very strong cross-country. He was the type of horse that the first couple of competitions of the year, I would never go out and go to make time,” he said. “If I settled him and got him more rideable early on in the year, it made the whole year a lot better for him than if I came out and rode him strong and tried to go fast right off the bat. He just got more and more competitive as the competitions kept coming at us.

“He was very brave. We always went the straight ways. He was very fast and had a huge step. And he was very strong!” he said with a laugh. “It wasn’t a matter of being able to hold him as much as it was just having his mind right and having him thinking about being rideable early on in the course.”

Sadly, even though Bradley impressed the selectors with his Rolex win, he didn’t get to go to Atlanta because the gelding tweaked a tendon in his final outing at North Georgia.

He was rehabbed and retired from the upper levels, becoming a schoolmaster for Hales at preliminary.

“He just had a really, really strong personality,” Bradley remembered. “He was one of those horses who always had his ears up. You never saw him pin his ears. He was always happy with what he was doing and really loved what he was doing, so it made him a really fun horse that you look forward to riding. He wasn’t always the easiest horse, because he was big, and he knew it, and he knew how to use his size sometimes, but he always had a such a good attitude.”

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