Tufts graduate Peter Wylde celebrates his spot on the U.S. Equestrian team and the challenges he overcame to get there.

Athens[08.13.04] -- Standing 11th in the world rankings, Peter Wylde is no stranger to victory. His awards span from winning the top competition for riders in New England under the age of 18 in 1981, to winning the Bronze medal at the 2002 World Equestrian Games. But the Tufts graduate considers making the U.S. Olympic Team for the first time this past May his greatest personal accomplishment.

“This has been a lifetime dream, a lifetime goal,” he told The Los Angeles Times. “Making an Olympic team has been the one championship event to elude me.”

Though Wylde is extremely talented, he never took the easy way out to achieve success.

Wylde’s award-winning—and now Olympic-bound—horse, Fein Cera, was a cast-away that one of his colleagues did not want. The horse was temperamental, but Wylde took an interest in her, practicing walking, trotting and cantering before working on jumps. It took awhile, but the end result was a strong bond between the two that has seen them through victory after victory. Fein Cera was even named “Best Horse” at the 2002 World Equestrian Games.

“It was a huge honor to have taken this horse that no one wanted to buy and turn her into the best horse at the World Equestrian Games,” Wylde said in an interview with Tufts Magazine. “I regard that as my best award as a rider, more so than my bronze medal. I take a lot of pride in that achievement.”

Before his days with Fein Cera, Wylde won many prizes while managing stables. The day after he graduated from Tufts, Wylde opened Bondurant, Inc., a training stable in Medfield, Massachusetts (the area where his riding career began). After six years running Bondurant, Wylde spent a year in Switzerland for intensive training, then returned to the United States to run a stable in New York while racing world-class grand prix horses.

Wylde has since returned to Europe in order to improve his skill and the reputation of American riders in the region. He now has a stable in Maastricht, Holland, with 12 horses and an elite group of students. He told The Los Angeles Times that he went abroad “to compete against the best all the time and to get better.”

Last year he won the prestigious Whitney Stone Cup, not only for his illustrious competition record, but also for serving as an ambassador for the sport.

“Peter gave up a very successful and lucrative situation in America to put himself in the center of the sport on the international stage,” Conrad Homfeld - a colleague and pivotal member of the last U.S. team to win the gold at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles - told Tufts Magazine. “He saw that in order to achieve international success he had to be willing to pack up and move his life over there. Other riders don’t have that same kind of dedication and commitment to the sport.”

No one need doubt Wylde’s commitment to an Olympic win.

“We have a superb team of talented and experienced riders who know how to win at the international level and world-class horses capable of winning an Olympic medal,” Frank Chapot, coach of the United States show jumping team, told The Journal News.