When Jan Byyny and her 9-year-old Thoroughbred gelding, Beautiful Storm (Get Stormy—So Beautiful, Arch), placed 15th in the $60,000 Adequan Advanced Final at the 2024 American Eventing Championships (Kentucky), she was delighted to take home a ribbon, but the real reward was being back at the advanced level on a capable partner. 

There are a number of pieces that have to come together to make an advanced horse. But Byyny said that when she first met Storm as an awkward off-the-track 3-year-old, she could see that his future was bright.  

“I’ve always thought a lot of the horse,” she said. “The whole time, I’ve known the horse was super scopey.” 

While she might have had faith in Storm’s potential, Byyny’s own path hasn’t always been linear. In 2010, the then 42-year-old rider had a cross-country fall at Pine Top Horse Trials (Georgia) that fractured her wrist and, more seriously, dissected a carotid artery, resulting in a stroke in the language center of her brain. The injury interrupted her riding and training and required intensive physical and speech therapy. 

While others may disagree, Byyny is reluctant to qualify her rise back to the top as anything special. Nearly 15 years after her accident, she is just grateful to have an equine partner with so much promise.  

“I think we all have amazing stories,” Byyny said of her comeback. “We all have our own stories, and I think no one’s life is easy. I feel really lucky.”

In fact, she’d much rather talk about her luck with horses—Thoroughbreds, in particular. Her allegiance to the breed comes from an admiration for their work ethic. Even before 3-year-old Storm arrived at her Surefire Eventing in Purcellville, Virginia, he was already a veteran of one career. With off-the-track horses, you can think of their early start as a negative, or you can reframe it as valuable life experience, she said. 

“For Storm to have survived that track and 10 races—I mean, he knows there’s a job,” she said. “I think they’re just so trainable; I just love them. I mean, sometimes it can be difficult as far as they have some baggage from the track. But I think we all have baggage, right?” 

When Byyny bought Storm, she gave him time to settle and grow into himself, leaving him at home in Virginia when she took horses to Florida that first winter. Her neighbor of about 20 years, Marlene Lyons, worked with the young gelding while Byyny was away.

“ ‘Gangly’ would be the word,” Lyons said, remembering his early days. “He was 3 and all the pieces were still growing, and they kept growing. I think that’s really been fun, just to watch him over the years change. Not his personality—he has a great personality, and he’s such a good boy—but to watch him go physically from being that 3-year-old Thoroughbred to kind of the horse he is right now.”

About a year later, Storm’s first event happened nearly by accident. Byyny’s friend Debbie Snyder had traveled up from Louisville, Kentucky, to compete in the horse trials Byyny hosts at Surefire when her horse came up lame. 

“I’m like, ‘Well you know, I have Storm, and you could do the 4-year-olds and beginner novice if you like him,’ ” Byyny said. “She started to ride him that Monday, and they were so great.”

She laughs that Snyder, who got her start raising race horses, didn’t recognize the horse under her as a Thoroughbred. When another rider asked which horse she was on, she replied, “This is Jan’s Beautiful Storm horse. He’s some kind of warmblood.” 

The young horse had started to fill out impressively. 

“He was maybe 16.1 hands when I bought him,” Byyny said. “Well, he didn’t stop growing until April of his 7-year-old year. He’s probably about 17 hands now.”

Lyons, from her view back in Virginia, was shocked at his transformation season by season. 

“When they would go to Florida and come back, he would just be bigger,” she said. “I’m like, ‘What happened? Where did little Storm go?’ He’s bigger, and he just kept getting bigger.”

Byyny had planned, as she does with most of her off-the-track projects, to resell Storm after some training, but she showed him to a few potential buyers without very much interest. As she invested more time in the gelding, she was increasingly impressed by his ability and began to think he might be the right fit for her own aspirations. 

“He has a really unusual technique,” she said. “Because he’s really tall and really long, I wouldn’t say he’s fast with his front legs, but he knows how to move his body right.”

She worked with her coaches, Phillip Dutton and Lynn Symansky, to develop the horse into a competitive partner. As with his physical growth, the key to his training was time and patience. 

“It took a while,” Byyny said. “Both Lynn and Phillip really encouraged me to take my time, because he needed that. He needed that time to kind of sort out being able to stay with me.” 

As the gelding developed, Byyny learned to balance the gelding and his big movements.

“There is no more determined rider than Jan,” Dutton wrote. “Storm is a big, strong, scopey, powerful horse that I wouldn’t have thought was that suitable for Jan, but they have both learned to adapt to each other and make a great partnership.” 

As the physical pieces came together, Byyny developed a deeper appreciation for his mind. She calls Storm a mix of confident and spooky, but in a combination she believes makes him well-suited to his job as an eventer. 

“He has a really kind of comical personality, like, ‘Oh, I’m just going to train you. I can write that book!’ ” she said. “He’s super spooky but he’s really confident in himself. It’s actually been really fun because of that. 

“It’s that he’s just smart about what’s on the ground,” she continued. “People often mistake horses that are spooky for being not confident, but I think they’re often just smart because they don’t want to put themselves in trouble.” 

Outside of the ring, she describes the horse as a “cuddlebug.” He loves attention and has special connections with the people in his orbit. Byyny said he has a particularly sweet relationship with her longtime partner, Tom Finnen. 

“My other half, Tom, he is not a horse person at all, but he is always supportive,” she said. “He was like, ‘Jan, does Storm always put his head in your arms?’ I’m like, ‘Tom—only you, dude.’ ”

Byyny had been to the AECs only once before, in 2016 with her now retired partner, Inmidair. This year, she felt the event could help her decide whether to take the leap of shipping Storm abroad to compete at the Blenheim CCI4*-L, held Sept. 19-22 in Woodstock, England. 

“It was great,” she said of competing in the AECs. “He did actually quite a respectable test. I guess it’s just still a work in progress, because he’s not strong, but he had some moments in this test that were really nice. Then cross-country, it was actually quite a good course. It was certainly proper.”

Their only big hiccup came the night of the AEC show jumping when a rain delay had them competing after dark. Storm was unhappy with their walk along an unlit path to the show jumping stadium, and she said he was so out of sorts by the time he finally made it to the warm-up she wasn’t sure she would be able to walk him over a ground pole, let alone cleanly through the course. She wondered if the bright lights had triggered a flashback to his racing days where he was sometimes run at night. Eventually, she recentered his focus and was impressed that he seemed to gain confidence with every jump. 

Byyny felt she had her answer. When she loaded up Storm for his first international flight, she knew that making this trip to Blenheim represented a big moment in her own story. 

“I will be 58 at the end of October, and I have a really nice horse,” Byyny said. “I just kind of felt like, you only live once, right? And I really wanted to have this experience again.”

She said the “sea of spectators” at Blenheim made the event a more overwhelming experience than the American venues Storm is accustomed to. But each day, although they picked up 20 penalties on cross-country, she felt the horse prove himself a bit more capable of handling the big environment. 

“You could tell that he was like, ‘Oh my god!’ But this is the best thing about it,” she said of the intimidating atmosphere. “Look, did I come home with a ribbon? No, but my point is that he just grew so much from it.”

His performance abroad, especially in the cross-country, convinced Byyny that both of them would benefit from another trip to Europe. She’s already set her sights on returning to Blenheim and going to Aachen (Germany) next year. 

“I really feel my heart that he is a five-star horse, but I wanted to make sure—it’s been a while since I’ve been at that level—that I am as competitive as I can be,” she said.

“I mean, some people can just get on a horse and make it work. But with my horses, I’ve always had partnerships with them,” she said of riding at the five-star level. “You just know so much about them and also, because you train them, they understand you. I think the heart and desire makes it a five-star horse. But I think also you have to have the heart and desire as a rider, as well.”

Riding her American-bred horse across the English countryside was a dream come true. While her journey back to advanced eventing has had its unexpected bumps, she has her own metric for measuring her success, and it has little to do with ribbon color. 

“I’m trying every day to be better,” she said. “By being better as a person, as a trainer, as a daughter.”