Salmon has her sights set on Olympic gold

A BRIGHT spring morning in the Dublin mountains and another day closer to Atlanta for Joan Salmon. In the indoor arena at Spruce Lodge riding club she puts Armani through his paces alone. A permanent fixture about the place, nobody takes any notice as she rehearses the dressage routine she will have to perform in the heat of a summer. After all, another rider with competition on her mind, who has the time when there's always work to be done around the stables.

In the arena Salmon has the sound of her own voice for company. Coming at her from speakers on either side the sound helps her to direct her horse from one point in the routine to the next. Come August and Atlanta precision will count for everything if she is to impress the judges sufficiently to take a gold medal, but for now only Emma looks on from the corner of the arena, disinterested, yawning occasionally. Well, how much enthusiasm is it fair to expect from a guide dog?

Salmon won't be in Atlanta for the razzamatazz of the Olympics. Nope, but a few weeks later when the world's media has packed its bags and gone back home, Salmon will arrive in America, one of a 60 strong Irish team for the Paralympics and one of just two from this country to compete in the equestrian arena.

If Olympians build their careers around pushing the boundaries of human limitations, though, Salmon has built her life around doing it. Refusing to accept what for most people would appear to be obvious restrictions, she has come first to cope with the loss of her sight some 10 years ago and now to focus on the possibilities ahead.

It was actually 23 years ago, at the age of 11, that Salmon first sat up on a horse and it's 14 years since she arrived at Spruce Lodge. But some of the intervening years, as she gradually lost her sight as a result of diabetes, were difficult and it took some time before she gained enough confidence to return to the sport.

Her return was delayed by a kidney and pancreas transplant and treated, on occasion, with a lot of scepticism from those who didn't know her so well. But gradually she became a regular at the club once more.

Having built up her confidence over a long period in work outs with Joan Keogh, who runs Spruce Lodge, and measured the length of the arena in terms of her horse Dorian's strides she started to ride alone again. Her independence was boosted from the start by the fact that she could remember what her surroundings looked like and now, nearly eight years later, she still regards herself as, enjoying an edge over some.

"It's such an advantage to me now that I know this place and can visualise it all. You can relate to what is going on around you whereas with people who have never seen, I don't know how they can make up images for things."

A sport based heavily on discipline and precision, dressage does not seem the most obvious pursuit for a competitor deprived of sight, even one with a good memory, hut, with help from those around her. Salmon has devised a system based on callers to help her get by. With the arena divided up into points, each accorded a letter, assistants sit one at each point and call the letter until she reaches them at which time the person at the next point begins to call.

The system has served her well over the past couple of years. At her first major competitive outing, the World Equestrian Championships in 1994, when she and Cork rider Ann Harvey both travelled to Hartbury in England she finished sixth despite riding an unfamiliar horse after her own had become lame in the weeks before the trip. During the event the Austrian competitors asked could her callers, drawn from the students of the National Specialised Equestrian Training Centre, assist them too and the system drew wide praise from other international teams.

This year the training is more intense with the Paralympics now only four months away and Salmon spends several hours at Spruce Lodge every day. Add another 90 minutes each way for the walk between her Clonskeagh home and Kilternan and it's a full time business for the 34 year old Dubliner who spends much of the time she is not training fond raising and trying to sort out accreditation problems for Atlanta.

"We're trying to raise £15,000 to bring over callers and my coach, Niall Quirke, to America and to help with my training," she says. "But they don't want to accredit the callers because a lot of the riders don't use them and so they are not used to riders bringing them."

In fact the week after we speak, with Salmon in America meeting up with representatives of freight delivery firm UPS, who are sponsoring her, Keogh attends a meeting with Irish team officials on her behalf where it is made clear that accreditation is virtually certain to be denied to any Irish callers (local people will be provided) while Quirke's case - Harvey's coach Frank O'Reilly has already been chosen to go - is still being argued with officials in Atlanta.

Most important, aside from the terrible heat and humidity, is the question of settling on a horse, all of which will be provided from a central pool locally. On arrival Salmon will get a chance to try out a few, but a mistake in her initial selection could prove very costly. Salmon needs to compensate for her lack of sight by developing an understanding with her horse through touch and instinct.

"It's a major factor in the whole thing and one of the main things that I've been trying to do is to ride as many different horses as I can. You get very comfortable with a horse that you are used to and last week I was over in England trying a few different ones and I'll try to keep switching around as much as I can until we go.

Whatever tee obstacles Salmon is hopeful that she can bring home a gold medal although much, she admits, will depend on exactly who she ends up competing against and that will not be decided until she gets to America.

"Everyone is assessed by doctors when you get there. It's very difficult because who can say what you can see. I have no perception of light but other people have so we are obviously different. Who is to say that, being blind is the same as having one leg."