Team Cinnamon

Training for the Olympics in Nicasio

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On an early summer morning at Edgewood, a 60-acre farm on Nicasio Valley Road devoted to training and breeding performance horses, a slim, handsome rider lifts himself onto an equally handsome mount.They move together with ease. Mariano Alario’s body is relaxed, his tanned arms lightly holding the bridle’s reins. Cinnamon 005’s neck is elegantly arched and held high as he steps carefully, mincingly almost, into the sandy exercise arena.

Moments before, Alario, neatly but casually dressed, had briskly brushed his dark riding boots on a patio outside the low-slung putty-colored barn and donned a pair of black gloves.

Inside, Cinnamon stood patiently, being groomed. A pair of young dogs wrestled in the breezeway and the pulsing beat of norteño music, a favorite of the Mexican stable hands, wafted in from a dusty boom box.

Like the seductive tango dancers of Alario’s native Argentina, the professional show jumper and his equine partner primp and prepare for their own interspecies version of intense synchronized dance. Today, the workout is easy: an escalation from walk to trot to canter performed in small loops and larger circles within the arena.

A bystander unfamiliar with the equestrian world might mistake it for a mindless exercise instead of the active effort of concentration that Cinnamon’s owner and Alario’s employer, Nancy Hersh, knows is crucial to their progress as a team. “There has to be a chemistry between them,” Hersh says of the two newcomers to the valley and to each other. “They really have to develop a relationship.”

Top-level equestrian jumping is an exhilarating sport wherein composed fearlessness, controlled speed, supreme athleticism and impossible grace meet in midair when man and horse, communicating swiftly and silently, soar as one. That unity only comes with time together.

Hersh, a crisp-spoken San Francisco personal-injury attorney, has developed her own chemistry with horses. She began riding as a child on a neighbor’s horses. Three years ago, Hersh bought Edgewood with her husband, Joe Boyle, her law-firm partner Mark Burton, and his wife, Robyn, and hence can now fully indulge her passion for horses, the ones she rides western-style for pleasure or a special one, like Cinnamon, that Alario rides.

Alario dismisses any romantic notion of chemistry, even when it comes to Cinnamon, a tall (7 feet, hoof to head) German-born Holsteiner that he hopes will take him to the prestigious World Cup in Stockholm this year and the summer Olympics in Beijing next year.

“No, it’s not chemistry; you just have to understand each other,” he says, his English softened with the rolling vowels of his home country. “You see that mare over there?” He gestures to a dark bay being ridden by Edgewood’s veteran trainer, Bob Walker. “Bob’s trying to figure out why she’s resisting him. You have to know what the horse is thinking and then think [for instance], ‘Maybe if I use my right leg more, it would be better.’”

A rider’s relationship with a horse, he adds, is built on trust and respect. “Cinnamon’s 10 years old,” he says, shrugging. “At this point, I can’t change his technique, but I can make him nice and soft before we start a course. We have to work on the control. You cannot be the strongest man in the world, right? The horses are stronger than you so you have to have control.”

This insight comes from a lifetime of riding. His father, Oscar Alario, a lawyer who ran an insurance company in the seaside resort town of Mar del Plata, far from Argentina’s equitation center of Buenos Aires, would leave work every afternoon for the Club Hipico Mar Del Plata to teach show jumping to Mariano and other students.

“We’re crazy people for horses,” says Alario, now 29, breaking into a boyish smile as he tells of his father’s obsession for everything gaucho—the iconic cowboy of Argentina. “It’s always been 100 percent horses for me. I’ve never done another sport.”

Image 2:    Horse and rider get ready to start the day.

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