Jess Savner rode horses while she was growing up. She set the school record in pole vaulting in college.
She was competing in triathlons when she met Suzie Paxton, an Olympic fencer. Paxton knew that Savner had competed in horse jumping; Savner was clearly an excellent athlete.
That’s where Savner’s quirky, winding road to the Paris Olympic Games took its final turn.
“She heard about this girl who was an equestrian and she was like, ‘She could learn how to do pentathlon if she learned how to fence,’ so she approached me,” Savner said. “She had connections with the New York Athletic Club in Manhattan, which taught me how to fence. That’s where it started.”
Savner will compete for the U.S. in the modern pentathlon, started in the late 1800s by the founder of the modern Olympic Games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin. The event was steeped in military tradition. In 1912, de Coubertin updated the ancient pentathlon with equestrian show jumping, fencing, swimming, running and target shooting. Women’s modern pentathlon was added to the Olympics in 2000.
But Savner, 32, of Bethlehem, will be among the last Olympic athletes to compete in the traditional modern pentathlon after controversy erupted at the last Olympic Games in Tokyo. A German competitor, Annika Schleu, who was in first place, had a horse that did not want to go near the jumps. Schleu used her whip repeatedly to urge the horse forward, but she was eventually disqualified. Her coach was removed from the rest of the Games after she hit the horse with her hand when it backed up into the fence near her.
Everything was televised and after the outcry, the sport’s international governing body opted to remove horse jumping from the modern pentathlon and add an obstacle course race instead. Many of the athletes are unhappy with the change, including gold medalist Joe Choong of Britain, who said last year he will quit the sport rather than compete in an obstacle course.
“Of course, I’m sad,” Savner said. “That’s one of the reasons I love this sport. Because when it’s done correctly, it’s amazing what these girls can do.
“I’ve run into the coolest horses I would have never gotten a chance to ride – I even remember most of their names. I’ve had some amazing rides. My favorite one, his name was Harrison. I’m in a big ring in Poland, jumping huge jumps on this horse I’ve known for 15 minutes. I had the most fun ride of my life. The whole ride I was smiling.”
Savner was the first American pentathlete to qualify for the Olympics at the Pan Am Games last October in Santiago, Chile. The Olympic modern pentathlon will take place Aug. 8-11.
Savner got her plane tickets for Paris the last week in May.
“It still doesn’t feel quite real,” she said. “Everyone has a wild dream when they’re a kid. Every young athlete wants to go to the Olympics. I don’t think it’s going to hit me until I’m on the plane.”
An early start
Savner’s mother was an equestrian and put her daughter on a horse when she was very young.
“I have pictures of me as a two-month-old on a horse,” Savner said.
As she grew older, she competed in show jumping and three-day eventing – dressage, cross country jumping and stadium jumping.
Her riding coach at Another Farm in Woodbury, Sue Peterson, is also Savner’s godmother.
“Oh look, I have goose bumps,” Peterson said when the Olympics were brought up. “She worked very, very, very hard for this. She’s got a good attitude. I’m very proud of her.
“She grew up (riding and eventing) and she has ridden many different horses because that’s how you really learn how to ride.”
As a student at Nonnewaug High School, Savner started competing in track.
“I was a little of a late bloomer,” she said. “I was very athletic, but I wasn’t excelling at anything.
“My coach was just trying to find a place to put me. He knew I was a jumper; I had these really long legs. He was putting me in jumping events, and he was like, ‘Hey, why don’t you go try pole vault,’ like just trying to get rid of me.’”
She laughed.
“I ended up loving it. Pole vault is technical. It was the first time in a sport where I just didn’t pick up the pole and I wasn’t just amazing at it. I was like, ‘This is weird, usually I pick up things quickly.’ Because of that, I had to work really hard to figure it out.”
That helped Savner – who was the Class M champion in the indoor pole vault and Class M runner-up in outdoor pole vault her senior year – down the road.
“I think that translated into the rest of my career,” she said. “I was able to take on sports with a beginner mindset right off the bat. I was able to learn things and appreciate the learning process.”
At Central Connecticut, she pole vaulted 2.99 meters (9 feet, 10 inches) indoors to set the school record in 2012 and 2.9 meters (9 feet, 6 inches) for the outdoor school record in 2011, both of which still stand.
After graduating, she started competing in triathlons until Paxton set her on a different path.
She learned how to fence last and now, it’s her best sport. Last year, after winning the national championship in modern pentathlon, she won the women’s epee division at the Division IA national fencing championships in Arizona in July. Olympians compete at the Division I level; IA is the next level down.
Sandra Marchant, who owns Rogue Fencing Academy in Woodbridge, is one of Savner’s coaches.
“It’s super rare for a pentathlete to be that good (at fencing),” Marchant said. “She’s an excellent athlete and she trains really hard.”
Savner works as a coach at Rogue, but the rest of her time is spent training and driving around the state to different venues. She swims in Cheshire, she has a personal trainer in Simsbury, she fences in New York City and Woodbridge and rides horses in Woodbury.
“I’ve been training for almost a decade in this sport,” Savner said. “Most people who look at my schedule, and say, ‘Oh that’s insane, but it’s normal to me.”
Aiming for Tokyo
Savner started training in 2016 for the Tokyo Games. In 2019, she went to the Pan Am Games to qualify.
In the show jumping event, competitors are randomly assigned a horse at the venue and must get to know the horse during a short warmup session. But horses don’t always act the way they should, and the jumps can be up to four feet high. It helps to be a highly trained equestrian but even that sometimes isn’t enough.
Savner had bad luck with her horse.
“I got disqualified in the ride,” she said. “It was a horse that, in my opinion, had no business being in that ring and jumping those jumps. We had a lot of stops. But at the end of the day, I looked back at that and said worse things could have happened if that horse hadn’t stopped. It is what it is.”
Last October, the horse she drew was perfect.
“I got a beautiful horse who was great, although he ended up disqualifying everybody who rode after me,” Savner said. “I don’t think my family breathed. They knew it was going to come down to that ride, me qualifying. My husband’s face was purple; he didn’t breathe the entire time.”
The last event is the combined running and laser target shooting.
“I went into my last lap kind of knowing where I was – it was really cool because most people don’t know if they qualified until they crossed the finish line,” she said. “They look at their time, they look at their score. Or they get an email.
“I’m a pretty introverted person. You have to be, doing this sport. You don’t have a lot of time to be a very social person. It was very special to me. I knew the second I crossed the finish line, it was going to be chaos – family and interviews and photos – so it was really cool to have this quiet moment running. Like, ‘Hey. This is cool. I made it.’
Savner plans to retire from competition after Paris. Her parents are going to watch; it will be the first time her mother has seen her compete.
“She was kind of back and forth about going to Chile, she thought that might be her last chance,” Savner said. “But she decided not to, because that would have been admitting defeat, that you weren’t going to make Paris.
“She said, ‘I was holding out for the big one.’”
