Olympic Memories: Brodnax recalls trying to treat Olympics as just another day in the arena

Eric Brodnax ’82 tried to approach the 1988 Olympics like any other competition.

“Obviously, there were significant challenges,” he said.

He and his horse had to fly halfway around the world to Seoul, South Korea, -- and the horse had to be placed in quarantine. He also had to deal with a 13-hour time difference. And North Korea was making terrorist threats.

 Despite that, Brodnax, who now lives in Washington, D.C., and is an executive in the digital travel world, said he wasn’t nervous.

“The Olympic Village was an incredible experience. You get to come and go with athletes from all these other disciplines. You have minor athletes from minor countries, which I would lump myself into, and you have big name superstars. It was a good experience,” he said.

Brodnax competed in the equestrian sport of eventing, a three-day competition with the same horse/rider pair. The first day is dressage, which tests the horse’s obedience and the rider’s ability, consisting of a series of movements at a trot, walk and canter. The second day is a cross-country and endurance contest on a course divided into steeplechase, two road and track sections and the cross country jumping course, which is considered the toughest part of the competition. The final day is show jumping.

He said either cross country or show jumping were his strengths.

“Because equestrian is always the pair of the horse and the rider it’s a little bit of a question of with what horse. But dressage was not my strongest part of competition,” he said.

He was eligible to compete for four different Olympic teams because his father was American, his mother was British, he was born in Puerto Rico and he grew up in the Virgin Islands. He said there was never a doubt he would compete for the Virgin Islands, though, because it is where he had spent most of his life and because his parents had co-founded the national equestrian association there.

He said attending Culver helped prepare him for the Olympics because he got to ride so much.

While at the Olympics he attended a number of other competitions, including boxing, wrestling, swimming and track and field. He managed to get a ticket to the biggest event of those games, the 100-meter dash where Canada’s Ben Johnson beat Carl Lewis of the United States to win the gold. In one of the most famous Olympic scandals, that medal was later taken away because Johnson used muscle-building anabolic steroids.

Brodnax also had breakfast one morning with Greg Louganis, who swept the 3-meter and 10-meter gold medals in back-to-back Olympics.

Brodnax ended up finishing 35^th out of 70 competitors in eventing. He said the best part of the Olympics was the overall experience.

“Just being a part of it. Just the size and the scale and the access to everyone else. Most people who compete in sports of any kind just interact with people within your own sport,” he said.