She was afraid. Her whole life had prepared her for this moment, yet now it was here, it was hard not to doubt. She had never felt older. The opposition had never been stronger. The tension between riders had never felt greater. The jumps had never looked bigger. (Some really were bigger: several ditches had been widened since Norma [the little golden mare on which Lata had been trying to win this steeplechase since 1932] first rode here.) More than ever, this felt like the Devils Race.
The bookmakers rated her chances at 12:1 not a great deal better than they had been for her first attempt, a decade earlier. But Lata knew that the public had higher hopes: otherwise, the odds would have been longer. Perhaps for the first time, she felt the pressure of national expectation. Could she really reverse a decade of hurt and repel the strongest raiding party the Germans had ever sent? She wanted to believe it You have to, when you want to achieve something but it wasnt easy. Yet she also knew that, if she didnt beat the Germans today, no one else was likely to.
She wore her medallion, as she always did, trusting in the Virgin Mary to keep her safe; St Anthony, inside her helmet, provided back-up. A horse-drawn ambulance coach, with four horses in train, waited ominously nearby. All around her were soldiers. Counting Lieutenant Henri Massiet, who rode the excitable French horse Iarbas, the line-up of 15 jockeys included seven army officers and, by my count, five enthusiastic officers of Nazi paramilitary groups: SS-Untersturmführer Oskar Lengnik, SA-Oberführer Heinrich Wiese, SA-Scharführer Heinz Lemke, SS-Scharführer Hans Schmidt and SS-Unterscharführer Curt Scharfetter.
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