TAKING the LEAD
The killing of George Floyd last May released a wave of pent-up rage against racism and police brutality that swelled into a global rallying cry for equality and justice, echoing through the small towns and big cities of the United States but also heard as far away as war-torn Syria and even the racially homogeneous societies of South Korea and Japan. ¶ Yet life continued as normal in many wealthy American communities, the storm a mere darkening of the distant horizon. One such isolation tank, according to Sophie Gochman, a teenage show-jumping champion, was the elite equestrian enclave of Wellington, Fla. Sophie, whose family owns a large horse farm in Wellington’s Grand Prix Village and an estate in nearby Palm Beach but who attends a private high school in Manhattan, set out to burst that bubble.
A few days after Floyd’s death, outraged by the lack of response from her Florida friends, Sophie, then just 17, fired off an angry opinion column to the venerable equestrian periodical The Chronicle of the Horse, which published it online. In it, she denounced the exclusive equestrian world as an “insular community with a gross amount of wealth and white privilege” that had chosen “the path of ignorance.” She accused trainers of outwardly supporting President Trump’s anti-immigration policies while hiring undocumented Latino grooms, and Olympians of “silently support[ing] social inequity.”
“Neutrality is racism,” she declared, vowing to “tear down the dazzling structures that uphold my privilege.” Addressing the equestrian community directly, she announced: “I’m disgusted by your willful ignorance, and I refuse to accept anything but action.”
For a sedate country sports journal, the reaction was “very heated,” in the words of the s executive editor, Beth Rasin. Comments oscillated from vituperative to supportive to unprintable. One read: “Way
