If you have your wits about you, dear reader, you have already read Laura Petroff’s lovely coverage of the opening ceremony of these World Equestrian Games. (Those five or six readers who have NOT read her insightful presentation, rap yourselves on the knuckles, navigate to the appropriate page, and amend your sinful ways. Got it?). While Ms. Petroff reported upon the fountains which were launched into the sky, she (unlike this wordy writer) spared you the specifics on just HOW those fountains were set a-spurting.

His name is Charles the Great. You may remember him (if anything that Miss Johnson taught you in high school world history remains stuck to your grey matter) as “Charles the Great.” He’s the cat surrounded by the flunkies on foot. That’s him, the guy who is dressed just like me on a high holy day ... except I usually don’t wear my crown (it makes the altar boys REALLY testy, you know).

After her royal highness, Princess Haya (recently elected president of the FEI), and Klaus Pavel of the Aachen organizing committee had finished their speeches, the fellow standing in for Charlemagne tossed a lance into the waters of the dressage/show jumping stadium pool and, presto! the waters leapt into the sky.

Okay, back to horses. Why did the folks who planned the opening ceremony for these fifth World Equestrian Games see fit to stick Charlie into the proceedings (not once, but twice!), and what has Charlemagne got to do with horses in general and with Brentina in particular? I’m so very glad that you asked!

Well, you see, Charlie (Gee, I hope he doesn’t mind my being so familiar . . . he’s been dead for over twelve hundred years [+ A.D. 814], so I suppose he is not likely to hit me upside the head anytime soon) liked his creature comforts. He was the king, after all, and the top dog in the Holy Roman Empire! As a boy who liked his pie a la mode, Charlemagne spent a fair amount of time in the sulphur springs of Aquis-Granum (that’s Aachen to us common folks). As the Romans had done for over seven hundred years, Charles came to Aachen to soak his bunions and whatever else ailed him in the warm waters of the spa.

Here is where the horses come in. As befits a king and a conqueror, Charles the Great needed horses upon which his knights and other worthies might sit themselves down. To get those BIG horses (to accommodate the backsides of those equally BIG nobles) one has to propagate ever-new generations of little horses. It’s called horse breeding. To make a long story short (did I hear one of the wags in the peanut gallery say “too late”?), not only was Aquis-Granum the place where the king hung his chapeau, it was also the place where he arranged for stallions to meet the appropriate girls next door. Foals abounded in Aachen.

Let’s fast-forward those twelve hundred years from Charlemagne to our age. Many things have changed. Hardly any of the folks I asked at the WEG on “Soers Monday” (most of them were native Aacheners . . . this is the day that admission to the grounds is free, and the townsfolk turn out like fleas on an ill-kept hound) had ever heard of the warm water springs that attracted my ancestors, the Celts, to this lovely (if soggy) bit of terrain in the dim past. A second significant change is that a person no longer needs to be of the male sex to obtain standing in high places. (If you have a really good computer monitor /or/ a magnifying glass you may be able to make out the stubble on those not-so-boyish cheeks of the attendants in Charlemagne’s court.)

Our egalitarian age (at least we pretend to be or hope to be egalitarian) makes room for the girls as well as the boys. Come on Debbie McDonald and Brentina! Our two gals looked simply brilliant at the inspection of the dressage competitors on Monday. Any rumors that may have been circulating saying that Brentina was not sound or not fully recovered from some previous aches and pains were laid to rest as the critical eyes of the jury gave her passing grades on her first run-up. By the same token, Debbie is in darned good shape to keep up with her coworker at the trot!

Nearly every woman besides Mrs. McDonald who is given a snowball’s chance in you-know-what of ascending the medals platform next Saturday night has as a team mate a stallion (those are the boy horses, in case your husband is looking over your shoulder). Girl on boy. It’s an attractive idea, I will grant you, but it seems to me to continue the idea of male dominance. Are such competitive teams implying that at least half of the team has to be male if you are to have a chance of emerging victorious?

What our age could really use (other than a few heads of state who took the risk of throwing the lance in person instead of sending every other mother’s son to face the vagaries of war) is a pair of women who win big time in a head-to-head competition with the boys. Debbie McDonald and her team mate, the mare Brentina. Winning it all in a town the boys made famous. What a lovely tale for our age. Wouldn’t you agree?