Games come into focus for defiant Vicki

LOSING an eye hasn't stopped Vicki Roycroft's campaign for the Beijing Olympics, nor has the equine influenza crisis.

The only thing she is worried about as she bids for a fourth Olympic appearance is what's going on in her horse's head.

At 54, Vicki is the last member of the famed Roycroft clan still competing at elite level. The Roycrofts, Australia's first family of the Olympics, have an unbroken connection with the Games going back to 1960 and family patriarch Bill's heroics in Rome. Since then a Roycroft has been at every Games either as a competitor or coach.

Bill's three sons, Barry, Clarke and Wayne (now Australia's head eventing coach) are all Olympians, and Vicki, who married Wayne, joined the family firm in 1984.

Vicki and Wayne are now divorced, but both remain committed to the sport.

In July, Vicki was quietly going about her business preparing her latest horse, Infatuation, for this year's Olympic showjumping qualifiers, when she began to experience blurred vision in her right eye.

She was competing at the Gold Coast and saw a local doctor who assured her it was a temporary condition. When there was no improvement after she returned home to her property at Mount White, north of Sydney, she sought specialist advice. His diagnosis was devastating. She had a melanoma on the back of the eye.

"It's going to have to come out," he told her.

"I said to him: 'My business is riding horses over fences and I have to have depth perception from a long way out'," she recalled. "But he reassured me that my left eye would compensate, and it has. The only problem that I have is at arm's length, so don't get me to pour you a drink."

The operation to remove her eye was scheduled for October, just as the equine influenza outbreak reached her door.

"It was a pretty good time to be sick because I couldn't ride anyway," she said.

"I spent two months not sitting on a horse and that's a world record for me."

However, 10 days before her surgery Roycroft began wearing an eye patch while riding her horses so she could begin to adjust to her new view of the world.

She didn't get her artificial eye until December, but, in her no-nonsense way, she abandoned the eye patch much sooner.

"It was only cosmetic and I needed a parrot on my shoulder to make that work," Roycroft said.

"I no longer terrorise small children. Well not as much anyway," she announced on her website at the time.

"But the main thing that pleased me was after three days of jumping two horses per day, I didn't miss one distance."

Australia's most successful jumping rider, Roycroft has yet to compete since the surgery but she is not worried that her performance will be impaired.

It is Infatuation who will have to measure up when they compete at the Royal Easter Show this month as a warm-up to next month's national championships at the Sydney International Equestrian Centre.

"I have had no opportunity to test him, so I don't want to cart him off overseas until I know he's competitive," she said.

Roycroft is booked to travel to Europe on April 23 to prepare for two Olympic qualifying events in Germany in June but said she would only go if she had a "fair shot".

"Otherwise I will sell the horse," she said.

"He's 13 or 14, about his peak for a jumper. He's got the quality but he has a difficult brain. He's got that hot thoroughbred nature, and he's a giant. He's 17 hands and I usually like small horses. But I'm better with horses than with people."

Roycroft last competed at the Olympics in 1996, before coaching in 2000 and 2004. She is one of 11 riders in the national elite squad of which only four can win selection.

Other candidates include Europe-based Edwina Alexander and 2004 Olympian Tim Amitrano.

"At the moment I am making up the numbers," Roycroft said.

"But in our game it depends on what you are sitting on and I have got a pretty good horse."

Whether he has the big-occasion temperament to go with his athleticism is something she will find out when they compete in Sydney.

If he excels they will be a hard combination to stop because Roycroft is the one yet to meet a fence she didn't think she could jump.

"I am one of those people who thrives on adversity," she said, with massive understatement.