Maggie Deatrick may have to drive her three-quarter ton truck into downtown Philadelphia every day so she can head straight to the barn after work, but it’s all so she can juggle her life as a working amateur and an upper level event rider.

This week, Deatrick’s planning to use some of her precious vacation time to compete her 13-year-old Thoroughbred gelding Divine Comedy at the inaugural Great Meadow International CIC*** in The Plains, Va., where she’ll test her skills against some of the top horses and riders in the country.

“The company I’m keeping for this weekend is pretty impressive, so I’m not holding my breath for a ribbon, but I definitely want a solid completion,” said Deatrick, who’s making her first three-star start in nearly two years. “The bigger the jumps are the better he jumps. I’m excited to get back between the blue flags.”  

Deatrick grew up in San Antonio, Texas, where she picked up eventing. Unable to afford a horse of her own, she rode several project horses throughout high school and during college at the University of Kentucky.

While she’d always dreamed of being a jockey, Deatrick realized she “loved chocolate too much” and wanted to own her own horse, so she earned her animal science degree in hopes of working in the Thoroughbred industry.

When she was a senior, Deatrick was finally able to buy her own horse. She came across Divine Comedy, or “Dante”, as he’s known, on DreamHorse.com. The coming 5-year-old was in training at a hunter/jumper barn, but Deatrick thought he might make a nice lower level eventer.

“[He] had been online for a few months, and I loved him, but he was out of my price range,” she said. “One day his price dropped, and it was still higher than I could afford, but I called the trainer up and told her my price range and she said, ‘I’d let him go for that.’”

While Dante (Mazel Trick—Madam Bear, Dreadnought) had never raced and didn’t have a tattoo, he seemed quiet and “kind of a good sort.”

“I had a list of hundreds of names that if I ever got into Thoroughbreds that I would name my racehorses and none of them fit him,” said Deatrick. “I started thinking about it more and I was looking into literature.”

She decided on Divine Comedy and Dante, inspired by Dante Alighieri’s poem, Divine Comedy.

Building A Life

Dante’s training came along well as Deatrick graduated from college and tried a working student stint at Water’s Edge Farm in Maryland before she decided that the life of a full-time rider wasn’t for her.

“I was doing a lot of mucking and things, which isn’t a problem, but my brain was just so stagnant after so many years of schooling,” she said. “I felt like I really wanted to think more. If you stay at it long enough, [eventing] is definitely a thinking-man’s sport. It just got to the point where I didn’t want to see my horse on my day off and I didn’t want anything to do with horses. I just wanted to get out of the barn and go elsewhere. I didn’t want to feel like that. I wanted my horse to be something I enjoyed and not something I had to do.”

So Deatrick packed her things and moved back to Texas with Dante to obtain a second degree in mechanical and energy engineering from the University of North Texas.

During his training while Deatrick was a working student, Dante had developed a fear of water after falling while cross-country schooling, but with the help of Mike Huber and Gold Chip Stables in Texas, he gradually overcame it.

“He fell in a lake as a 5-year-old with me. We were trying to school cross-country on the edge of it,” said Deatrick. “At the time, water made him a little nervous so he would try to get across it as quickly as he could. He saw the lake and kept going deeper. He swam back to shore and I was still trying to swim in my tall boots and helmet. He lunged up on the shore toward my trainer and managed to impale his chest with a tree branch. It went in five inches.”

While Dante’s injury healed, it took a solid year for him to go near water again. 

“Once we did, we came up through the levels fairly easily. The cross-country was never a problem, even the water [at those levels]. The dressage, he’s not bad at it, but he started to just worry in the ring once we hit intermediate. It became a little more difficult, but we think we’ve resolved that,” she said.

Point Him At Anything

After graduating with another degree, Deatrick got a job in Middleburg, Va., for a contractor and relished the opportunity to train in an eventing mecca.

She and Dante did their first advanced in 2012 at Rocking Horse Winter II (Fla.) and started their first CIC*** at Plantation Field (Pa.) in 2013 but didn’t complete.

They went on to complete their first CCI** at the Dutta Corp. Fair Hill International (Md.) that fall with no cross-country jumping penalties and were hoping to contest the Jaguar Land Rover Bromont CCI** (Quebec) last spring and move back up to advanced, but a move to Philadelphia to be closer to her fiancé and a new job changed Deatrick’s course.

Now settled at a new job, Deatrick keeps Dante at Missy Ransehousen’s Blue Hill Farm in Unionville, Pa., and commutes to the barn two to three times during the week and on weekends to ride.

Ransehousen and her working students help with Dante’s trot sets and gallops when Deatrick isn’t there.

On nights she doesn’t go ride, she heads to CrossFit to work out and then runs after. “My fitness has been suffering from sitting at a desk all day,” she said. “During lunch hours, I do a lot of show analysis for EventingNation.com. I keep myself busy. It’s definitely tough. It helps that my fiancé [Eric] doesn’t have a lot of time either. I go to work usually from 8 to 5, but on days I got to the barn I wake up early and do 7 to 4.”

Deatrick, 29, has her show schedule already planned out for next year and is “very stingy” with her vacation days, especially this year since she’s planning a wedding and honeymoon.

While she’s hoping for a qualifying score at Great Meadow this weekend in hopes of contesting the Fair Hill CCI*** this fall, whatever happens, Deatrick’s just happy she’s riding Dante, the only horse she’s ever owned or competed above novice level.

“I never rode Murphy Himself, but I imagine Dante gives me flashes of what it was like to ride him,” she said. “He sometimes has his own opinion about what we’re going to do and can definitely surprise me a little bit with it, but he’s so bold that I just feel like I could jump anything on the world with him. The cross-country never scares me. I’m usually more terrified heading into the dressage and stadium! He’s an easy horse to be confident on.”