The 1991 American Horse Shows Association Equestrian of the Year, Margie in 1992 was named the Rolex/National Grand Prix League Rider of the Year, repeating that honor in 1993.
She became a co-recipient of the 2012 USEF National Show Jumping Championship, her third national title. In her off-hours, the fun-loving rider, who has a ready roster of jokes plays a mean hand of poker with her horse show friends. Margie lives in Wellington, Florida, with her husband, veterinarian Steve Engle.
My parents were very nervous when I first wanted to ride, not only because of my petite size, but also because they knew I was kind of a daredevil. My father, Irvin, an accountant, and my mother, Mona, a school principal, didn’t know anything about horses, so it took a long time for me to talk them into letting me take riding lessons.
At Gladewinds, the Miami stable where I started riding, someone fell off while jumping and was paralyzed from the neck down. So my parents said I could ride on the flat but they didn’t want me to jump. I finally talked them into letting me jump, but the deal was that I could only ride until I got hurt.
Naturally, the first time I hurt my shoulder, I didn’t want to tell them. It was my fault, because I was goofing around. A friend and I were riding double on a pony. I pushed her and when she fell, her foot swung around and knocked me off, and she landed on top of me. It would turn out I had an impacted fracture of my shoulder, but I kept saying I was fine because I had a lesson that day and I didn’t want to miss it, since I only got one lesson a week.
Even at age five, Margie Goldstein looked at home on a pony and showed signs of emerging as the crowd pleaser she would become during her stellar career.
Still in jodhpurs and paddock boots, a 12-year-old Margie Goldstein showed prowess in the hunters with great form on Gladewinds Angelwings in 1973.
I could move my lower arm but couldn’t move my shoulder. I thought I could will it away. When I got home, my parents kept asking what was wrong with my shoulder. After almost a week, my parents told me, “You have to get an X-ray.” Unfortunately, the doctor who treated me told my parents how dangerous horseback riding is. He said if I had waited much longer, I would have had to have surgery.
Everything I didn’t want him to say, he said, and wrapped me like a mummy so I couldn’t move the shoulder. Growing up with two older brothers, I learned I had to be kind of tough if I wanted to play football or tennis with them, and that attitude carried over into my riding. In hindsight, most of my accidents could have been prevented if I had more of a sense of self-preservation and stayed away from some of the difficult horses.
I didn’t own a horse until I got part of Daydream when I was 25. I did a lot of catch riding, and most of the rides I got—because I wasn’t a big name yet—were the stoppers and rearers…the ones people didn’t want to ride. For me, it was a challenge. The more they told me the horse couldn’t be fixed, the more I wanted to try.
Describing the stallion Royce, Margie Goldstein Engle compared him to “an overgrown puppy dog. He grabs a broom if it’s by his stall and starts sweeping. Everything’s a game for him, even when he’s jumping the jumps.”
Discussing my show jumping aspirations, people told me, “You’re not going to be able to do this. Financially, you don’t have enough backing.”
It’s not like we were poor, but my parents were putting both my brothers through college. (Mark became a doctor and Ed is an actuary.) Show jumping really is a sport for people who have a lot of money. They never thought it was anything you could make a good living from.
Aside from that, technically, I wasn’t built for it—especially for riding big-barreled Warmbloods with my rather short legs. People kept trying to steer me into being a jockey. I did gallop some racehorses, but I didn’t like the atmosphere at the track. They didn’t treat the horses the same way we did. I also didn’t love running around in a big circle. Dorothy and Robert Kramer, who owned Gladewinds and were like second parents, felt “the racetrack is not a good atmosphere for a young lady.”
Growing up, I was part of a group of kids that practically lived at the barn. We slept on hay bales during slumber parties, and we’d have birthday parties for the ponies. Many of us who grew up at the stable are still friendly with the Kramers’ daughter, Robin, and I named my own business after Gladewinds.
I worked there to earn extra rides, starting out by cleaning dog pens at their kennels and moving on to mucking stalls until they gave me a job breaking their ponies. Whichever ponies were the most difficult, those were the ones I wanted to ride. When no one else liked them, I liked them all the more.
Margie Goldstein Engle with American Grand Prix Association founder Gene Mische and one of the 10 coolers she won as AGA Rider of the Year.
I did some equitation, and won the South Florida finals with Alabama, loaned to me by Phil DeVita, Sr. I qualified for the Medal and Maclay finals but never had the horses I could ride in those championships, so I didn’t go.
The trainers at Gladewinds were great. I learned a great deal from Penny Fires and Bibby Farmer. A big influence was Karen Harnden Smith, who also taught there. She was giving a lesson one day to someone who told her, “I can’t do that.” I overheard Karen when she replied, “Take ‘can’t’ out of your vocabulary. If you’re riding, that shouldn’t cross your mind.”
It stuck with me, and I did believe anything was possible. The Kramers gave me projects, horses other people had given up on, which was good for me to learn about getting into horses’ heads and figure out what worked with them. A lot was trial and error. I’ve had to learn to be more careful. When you’re younger, you think you’re invincible. Then you start figuring out that if you get hurt, you’re out for a period of time. I missed quite a few things by getting hurt, but I was bad at saying “No” to people who asked me to ride.
Once I started getting better horses, it made me appreciate them so much more. The dealer who had Daydream saw me riding Puck W, whose head was bigger than my whole body. He figured anyone desperate enough to ride that horse and get him around as well as I did would like to ride some of his horses.
My parents had a hard time watching when they used to come to the horse shows. Actually, my mom would not watch at all, and she nearly bruised my father’s arm, holding him so tight. Once I started riding better horses, she could watch a little more. But when I tried to break the indoor high jump record on Daydream, she asked me, “Why do you have to do those things?”
She did come around, and actually wrote a book about me, No Hurdle Too High, with the proceeds going to the U.S. Equestrian Team.
Riding for the team was always my goal, and I achieved it in 1989 with a double-clear as the anchor rider on Saluut at Toronto’s Royal Winter Fair, where we won the Nations Cup. It’s a special feeling to ride for your country. You get a sense of pride from representing the place where you grew up, and our country is special because it offers everyone amazing opportunities.
Since the United States had such depth in riders and horses, it was a great honor to be selected for a team. I was very proud whenever Chef d’Equipe Frank Chapot used me as the anchor in the Nations Cups. The frosting on top for 1989 was winning the American Grand Prix Association Rider of the Year title.
One of my favorite team experiences was the Rome show in the 1997 Samsung Nations Cup series, where I won the Grand Prix. I rode Hidden Creek’s Laurel, Hidden Creek’s Gypsy, and Hidden Creek’s Alvaretto there.