In 1984, Keen carried Hilda Gurney to her second Olympic Games, and by then he was already a legend. Foaled in 1966, the 17.2-hand chestnut Thoroughbred gelding (Money Broker x Mabel Victory) started life on the racetrack in Southern California, where his sheer size made him too large for a starting gate. It cost him any chance at a successful racing career. Rather than see him traded for cattle, Gurney, a West Coast dressage pioneer, purchased him in 1969 for $1,000 when he was 3 years old and set him on a very different path.
Keen was the perfect name for a big Thoroughbred like him. The gelding started his new career with boundless energy and enthusiasm.
“He was really, really hot,” Gurney told Practical Horseman in 2020. “When I got him home and started working with him, all he did was passage. It took two months, and a lot of settling him down, a lot of hours of practice and persistence, to get him to trot. He was full of energy.”
Naturally gifted at dressage, Keen rose through the levels quickly, and by the mid-1970s he was dominating American dressage. At the 1975 Pan American Games in Mexico City, he and Gurney won individual silver and team gold. The following year, at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, the pair placed fourth individually and helped the U.S. win team bronze, the country's first Olympic dressage medal since 1948. Keen kept adding to his resume over the next several years: fourth in the Grand Prix Special at Aachen in 1978, seventh at the World Championships in Goodwood, England, that same year. In 1979, he was largely undefeated in the U.S., and he swept the Grand Prix and Intermediate II at Dressage at Devon. At the 1979 Pan American Games, all five judges placed him first, and he won team and individual gold.
A debilitating condition then sidelined Keen for several years, and few expected him to return to top competition. Nerve tissue running through his spinal column was damaged, causing inflammation of the vertebrae. The tragic injury caused Keen to suffer from paralysis. Veterinarians were certain, at the time, that recovery was unlikely. His future was in question. But he recovered, and at age 18 he qualified for his hometown Olympics, placing second at the FEI North American Championships and winning the West Coast Olympic Selection Trials to earn his spot on the 1984 team.
In front of the Santa Anita crowd, many of his own local fans, Keen once again turned in the strongest result, placing 14th individually. He competed one more year, winning the U.S. National Championship for the sixth time in 1985, before retiring.
Keen died in 1989 at age 23 and was inducted into the USDF Hall of Fame in 1997. He is remembered for five USDF FEI-level titles, two Pan American medals, an Olympic team bronze, and 15 USDF Horse of the Year titles, an extraordinary record for a horse once dismissed as too big to race.