At just 21 years old, Edmund “Tad” Coffin had the surreal experience of standing on the podium at the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympic Games to receive a gold medal, not once, but twice.
Coffin, on his mount Bally Cor, became the first American to win the individual eventing gold medal at the ‘76 Games, and was also a member of the gold-medal winning U.S. team.
Fifty years on, Coffin reflected on his road to the Olympics, and the people who led him there.
Coffin, now 71, grew up on the North Shore of Long Island, N.Y. — which at the time was a hub for talented equestrians — where Michael Plumb, Neal Shapiro, and Bernie Traurig were all his neighbors.
“I had an idyllic opportunity to ride because my parents bought a large property that was a turnkey racehorse recuperation farm,” Coffin recalled. “I started riding in the Pony Club and had the extraordinary opportunity to ride with trainer Raul de Leon from age 12 until I was 18. De Leon grew up riding in Cuba at riding clubs where German instructors who had escaped after World War II taught, so he had a very European education.
De Leon was also a devoted follower of the training methods of legendary U.S. show jumping coach, Bertalan de Némethy. Several times each year de Leon would take his students to the United States Equestrian Team (USET) headquarters in Gladstone, N.J., to watch training sessions.
However, undoubtedly the biggest influence on Coffin’s life and equestrian career was the legendary Jack LeGoff.
"Fellow eventing rider Denny Emerson thought I should try out for the U.S. team, which I had really no intention of doing, it hadn't even crossed my mind!” Coffin said.
At the time, LeGoff held selection trials at the end of the year after the Olympic Games to create a program of young riders who he would then train until the next Olympics. “The first person to go through that cycle was Bruce Davidson, the second was myself, and the third was David O'Connor — so you can see that it created some remarkable results.”
Coffin said one of the keys to LeGoff’s genius was that he would start off with four riders at the beginning of a new four-year cycle. They would ride with him multiple times a day, but riders were swapped out and replaced if they weren’t up to it or if something didn’t go well.
“He was always having people compete for a particular spot on either the team or on a training squad,” Coffin explained. “You were always on the hot seat, you were always competing, and everybody knew that. I think that's one of the things that makes for successful teams. LeGoff would tell us that if you couldn’t handle the stress of his training program then you wouldn’t be able to handle the stress of the Olympic Games, so his goal was to condition us to stress.”
Coffin learned countless lessons from LeGoff that have endured throughout his life, but the most important was to be a great horseman.
“He was an extraordinary horseman,” said Coffin. “His own riding career was remarkable because he was a member of the French cavalry and rode for the Cadre Noir (the national riding academy in France); grew up riding flat and steeplechase races, dressage, and competed in the Olympics for eventing. He also fought in the Algerian War as a cavalry officer, and trained the French national team. It’s not possible to get that kind of education anymore.”
According to Coffin, LeGoff knew horses in a way that very few people did. He could listen to horses and know which ones were going well and which ones weren't, and he could look at a horse and assess their condition without a heart rate monitor.
“He was trying to teach us how to be riders and how to be competitors. They are two different things. You have to learn how to compete, and you have to learn how to ride, so he was trying to split the difference and teach us both,” Coffin explained.
Coffin, like many of LeGoff’s protégés, had very little international experience before the ‘76 Olympics. The rest of the U.S. eventing team that year was made up of Bruce Davidson on Irish Cap, Michael Plumb on Better and Better, and Mary Anne Tauskey on Marcus Aurelius.
“I competed in the Pan American Games in Mexico in 1975. That was my first time competing outside of the country, and then I went to the Olympic Games,” Coffin said. “I think what LeGoff showed is that you don't have to have a lot of experience. You have to have a small amount of positive experience, but mostly you need to ride well. He duplicated that success over and over again.”
Another key skill of LeGoff’s was getting riders to focus on every part of their job, on the horse and off.
"Quite often at the Olympic Games, you see athletes who are not necessarily the best known in their sport, and yet they come out with a gold medal because the level of attention for athletes who are well known is very distracting,” Coffin explained. “I competed in the Games where the Brits were favored to win. They had Princess Anne, Lucinda Prior-Palmer [now Lucinda Green], and Mark Phillips on their team, so all of the media attention was on them. The Americans were not distracted in the same way.”
Great Britain was ultimately eliminated from the team competition after two of their horses were withdrawn following the cross-country phase.
As a relatively unknown 21-year-old, Coffin describes himself as being part of a well-oiled machine at the Games.
“I was doing my job as a rider and focused on the moment, so I don't have a lot of memories of all of the periphery goings on at Bromont because it just wasn't part of my world,” he said. “When people ask what my favorite moment from the 1976 Montreal Games is, it is standing on the podium hearing the national anthem.”
There is an iconic video of Coffin walking into the arena for the show jumping phase with Bally Cor on a loose rein, patting her on the neck, and completely oblivious of the crowds surrounding them.
As the commentators can be heard saying on the video, Coffin displayed “the nervelessness of youth,” due to his cool, calm demeanor.
Part of that confidence came from the connection he had with Bally Cor, who he admits in today’s world, would not be considered to be a special horse.
“She wasn’t a great mover,” he said of the bay mare, who was sired by the steeplechaser Cormac. “LeGoff would say that ‘she moves great at the halt!’”
However, Bally Cor was a very tidy jumper and very neat with her front legs.
“I think what made her special was that she was in the game. She learned her job, she knew it, and then she was all about doing it. She had that focus ... she surprised everybody, and I think it was her heart that did it,” Coffin said of the 1965 Thoroughbred who was owned by Dr. Charles Reid and Harden Crawford, III, then loaned to the USET.
Coffin explained that a lot of the horses they had at the time weren’t standout horses, but they were very good team horses.
“LeGoff stressed all the time that he wanted a team medal. He cared less about individual medals,” Coffin said. “He wanted to stack results to get a team gold, as opposed to having outstanding horses and riders who were in search of personal glory.”
To be a good team member required following instructions and having discipline.
Canadian eventer Rob Stevenson, who trained under LeGoff in the run up to the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games, agreed that you had to be a team player to succeed under the legendary coach.
“The horses were the absolute highest priority. Your own personal needs really didn't matter that much. You rode horses, and that's what you did. You were immersed in it, and you wanted to learn everything that you could,” Stevenson said. “It was about the horse, and it was about your team contribution.”
Coffin returned to Montreal in August 2026 for the Bromont CCI-S Horse Trials, held at the Bromont Olympic Equestrian Park, which is the longest running active Olympic venue in equestrian sport.
Bromont organizer, Sue Ockendon, was thrilled to have Coffin return to the site of the 1976 Olympics to celebrate half a century since the U.S. team's victory.
“It’s a beautifully run event and I would highly recommend all of the American riders who are looking for a cool place to be in August to go up there and compete,” Coffin said.
As for bringing back memories of his Olympic experience at the historic venue, Coffin said: “The hillside with the big Bromont sign is certainly etched in my mind. That was probably all that was familiar because none of the rest of the facility is similar to how it was back then.”
Coffin recommends that all riders read LeGoff’s book, “Horses Came First, Second and Last: My Unapologetic Road to Eventing Gold,” which is available on Amazon.com.