Michael Matz knows all about the anxiety, pressure and excitement that have overtaken the athletes who’ll be competing in the Olympic Games that begin this week.
Been there, done that.
After being a member of three Olympic equestrian teams and carrying the American flag and helping the U.S. team win a silver medal with his ride on Rhum IV in 1996, Matz doesn’t feel a sense of deja vu.
“I just sort of feel that I had my time, I enjoyed it and now it’s somebody else’s turn,” he said. “I have six children, ages ranging from 22 years old to 20 months, and 50 horses. That keeps me busy.”
One of the horses that the 53-year-old Pennsylvanian is training is Kicken Kris, the winner of last year’s Secretariat Stakes at Arlington Park who will try for an encore performance in Saturday’s Arlington Million.
Matz began his thoroughbred training career in the late 1990s when he was in the twilight of his show-jumping career.
“I had gotten a group of people together, we were buying some horses for about four or five years and I sort of managed it for them, putting the horses with different trainers,” he explained. “I always enjoyed the thoroughbreds and I was already training a few along with the show horses. When I got out of riding I could have worked with either show horses or racehorses. I made the decision to go into racing.
“Mr. and Mrs. [F. Eugene] Dixon had two horses with me in the Olympics. They gave me a good start in the thoroughbreds and they’ve stayed with me. Mrs. [Betty] Moran and her son and daughter I used to see at horse shows, and she sent me a couple of thoroughbreds. Mrs. Moran said she’d buy a yearling and we picked out Kicken Kris (for $400,000) at the 2001 September Yearling Sale at Keeneland. I’ve had several graded stakes winners, but Kicken Kris in the Secretariat is our only Grade I winner.”
Excelling after getting off to a relatively late start seems to be second nature for Matz.
“I was never around horses until I was 16,” he said. “My father got me a job in the summer for one of his friends who had a farm. I used to cut grass on the weekends. My father’s friend got two horses for he and his wife to ride. One day his wife wasn’t going to ride and he asked: `Do you know how to ride a horse?’
“I said sure, and one thing led to another.”
The horses took him all over the world. By 1974 at 23, Matz was a member of the U.S. equestrian team that went to Europe, in 1975 he rode in the Pan American Games in Mexico and in 1976 he made his Olympic debut in Montreal. His second Olympic appearance came in 1992 in Barcelona and his last in 1996 in Atlanta.
His best chance for earning a gold medal was in 1980.
“My horse, Jet Run, was ranked No. 1 and he won two gold medals in the Pan-American Games,” said Matz.
Alas, that was the year the Olympic Games were held in the former Soviet Union and the U.S. boycotted the competition because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Although he never earned an Olympic gold medal, Matz nevertheless had a brilliant equestrian career. His show-jumpers earned more than $1.7 million in prize money, he competed in four Pan-American Games, three world championships and multiple World Cup finals, he had at least one Grand Prix victory for 20 straight years and he earned the Mercedes Rider of the Year Award in 1981 and 1984.
Matz also numbers among his show-jumping souvenirs a broken shoulder, broken nose, broken jaw and broken ankle.
But his most harrowing equestrian experience didn’t come during competition. It came on July 1989, when he and his future wife, D.D., were returning from Hawaii where he judged a horse show and gave a clinic. They changed planes in Denver and boarded United Airlines Flight 232 bound for Philadelphia.
The flight carrying 285 passengers and eight crew members crashed outside Sioux City, Iowa, taking the lives of 112 passengers. Along with his wife, Matz escaped uninjured, and he rescued three children.
“I was sitting in the middle right over the wings,” said Matz. “My future wife was six rows in front of me. We couldn’t sit together. There were three children aside me. I think they were 13, 11 and 9. Their parents lived in Wyoming and they were by themselves on their way to Albany to visit their grandmother.
“The plane fell apart in three places. I remember us rolling over and over.”
When the plane stopped rolling, Matz put two of the children in front of him and the other behind him, holding his belt. After they got out through a small opening a few feet wide, Matz told the children to run away from the plane. Then, he began looking for D.D.
“There were cables down and everyone was falling over the cables. I held the cables up so people could get out faster,” he said. “It turned out that D.D. had gotten out ahead of time. She hit her head and I had a twist in my back and a little cut on my leg. The only injury to the kids came when they were running through the cornfield and one cut his eye on one of the stalks.
“You have to give all the credit to the pilot (Al Haynes) and crew. Studies done with simulators show that not too many people could have gotten the plane down the way he did. He told us to assume brace positions as best we could and then he started counting down: `4, 3, 2, 1′ and then we hit the ground.”
Matz downplayed his heroism in rescuing the children. He didn’t mention ABC-TV acknowledged it by naming him “Person of the Week.”
Like the Olympic Games, the plane crash is part of the past and Matz is reluctant to dwell on it. He is living in the present, and his immediate priority is winning the Arlington Million with Kicken Kris.
Since winning last summer’s Secretariat, the chestnut colt has made seven starts, recording two wins, a second and two thirds. After being mildly disappointed when Kicken Kris finished seventh in the Grade I Turf Classic at Churchill Downs on Kentucky Derby day, Matz was very disappointed to see the colt finish ninth in the Grade I Manhattan Handicap on the day of the Belmont. But in his last start July 17, Kicken Kris was an impressive winner of the Grade II Bowling Green Handicap at Belmont Park.
“He won that race looking like the horse he was last year,” Matz said. “I really don’t know what was the problem in those other two. I can give him a good excuse for the race at Churchill because of the storm that came down (making the turf course very soggy). He trained very well for the Manhattan. I don’t know why he ran like he did.
“What I do know is that he’s doing well and he loved the Arlington turf course last year.”
