Wednesday, April 20, 2005 | 9:40 a.m.
Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4088.
Of the many, many things she loves about competitive horse show jumping, the best one, says Georgina Bloomberg, is that nobody has ever asked her about fixing a parking ticket or getting Yankees tickets.
"They're really good about it and they treat me like they would any other (competitor), which is part of the reason I feel so comfortable in the horse show world," said the cute-as-a-button Bloomberg, the youngest daughter of New York City mayor and media mogul Michael Bloomberg.
But don't let her fool you. Bloomy's Girl, as the New York tabloids refer to her, is treated special around the circuit. But it's because of what she does, not who she is.
What she does is ride show horses well. So well, in fact, that at 22, she is the youngest rider to ever qualify for the FEI World Cup Finals, where she will be competing against equestrians from around the globe beginning Thursday at the Thomas & Mack Center.
Bloomberg is also a serious contender to represent the U.S. in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, and if she follows through in making a career of her passion, she could even wind up competing in the 2012 Summer Games that her father is pushing hard to bring to New York City.
Her parents divorced when she was 10, so Bloomberg said she doesn't have the stereotypical father-daughter relationship. She said she sees her dad about once a month -- which is probably about how often she would see him if the family still lived under the same roof.
It's not as if the mayor of New York can shut off his cell phone after 5 p.m.
"I guess I've never been super-close to him," Bloomberg said this week before a training session, "but he's always been very supportive and been a great father however he can. To me, he's still a normal guy, so it has been kind of an eye-opening experience to all of a sudden read about your father in the newspaper every day."
Bloomberg said her father may attend Friday's round but if he does, you probably won't know it.
"It's hard for him to come to certain events because this is something I try very hard to make my own name in," she said. "So when he comes, it's kind of, you know ... "
A bit of a distraction.
Not that she minds it, of course, but there's only so much a father can do once his daughter saddles up. Like cross his fingers and cheer.
"When you go into the horse show ring," Bloomberg says, "you're not going to win because of who your father is."
However, you might win because you've been aiming for this since you were 4 years old.
A self-confessed tomboy, Bloomberg was the only girl on her Little League and hockey teams while growing up in suburban New York. But riding show horses has always been her first love.
Her mother rode as a child in England and her older sister Emma, a Princeton grad who now attends business school at Harvard, took riding lessons.
"My father even says he worked in a barn when he was younger but we're not sure we believe him," chuckled Bloomberg, who doesn't appear to have a pretentious bone in her body. Her aristocratic upbringing notwithstanding, she comes across like a farm girl from Wisconsin.
She even had her tongue pierced once. OK, so maybe you'd take her to be from Milwaukee. But the point is, anybody who spends 15 minutes with Bloomberg would find it difficult not to like her.
She seems more grounded than a pilot with bad eyesight. While her sister apparently has more of a Park Avenue mentality, Georgina prefers the fresh air of the farm in North Salem, about a 90-minute commute from the city. Put it this way: If there was a sibling version of "Green Acres," Emma would be Lisa Douglas and Georgina would be Oliver.
Whereas her sister has an Ivy League education, Georgina attends NYU during the fall, when she's not competing. And unlike most kids with access to a silver spoon, she also knows what it's like to be flat on your back.
In her case, it was literal. Two years ago while riding, she fractured a vertebra in her back that laid her up for six months. Although she said she has had worse falls, this one, which occurred during routine training, showed that judges aren't the only ones oblivious to one's upbringing. Horses don't seem to care, either, and Bloomberg said the spill still gives her pause.
"It's made me a stronger person, more aware of being an athlete. It's one of those things that stays with you," she said, admitting to some trepidation in returning to competition.
But where there once was fear, there are now mostly blue ribbons. Victories at last year's Tavern on the Green Metropolitan Cup and Liberty Cup at the Metropolitan National Horse Show in Manhattan gave her the confidence to compete at the World Cup level.
"We started doing the qualifiers just for the experience of doing them," she said. "But then I started doing really well and we started to realize that I could actually make it. So we started this year with that as our goal.
"It was a goal I wanted to accomplish but if I hadn't, I would have been OK with it. But it was just great to pull through. Now whatever happens here happens. Just making it here is enough for one year."
With that, I wished Bloomy's Girl good luck, and asked her one final question about a sport I feel a little more comfortable in discussing.
Mets or Yankees?
"Yankees," she said without hesitation. "But I also support the Mets."
I guess her old man isn't the only politician in the family.
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