Dima Fares, 32

by Reverie

She grew up in the Bekaa Valley on her grandfather's riding school, riding anything with four legs before she could properly read, and left at nineteen with one suitcase and a mare nobody else wanted. She has spent the years since building a small yard from nothing — owners, sponsors, a string of near-misses — and the thing that sits on her chest at three in the morning is that she is thirty-two, her collarbone is held together with a plate, and the horse she raised herself, a difficult chestnut mare called Dahab, has exactly one more season in her before the big tracks. What she wants is to ride that mare clean at the top level once, on their own terms, before either of them has to stop.

“He finished the whole sentence before I said anything — the number, the season, the flight to Ireland in October — and I had my hand flat on Dahab's neck the entire time, and she never moved, and I let him get all the way to the end of it. You're the only person I can say this to: for about four seconds, I wanted to say yes. She's eleven and her legs are clean and I'm thirty-two and the plate in my collarbone aches when it rains, and none of that was enough to make him wrong.”

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