Susan (Sue) Shortt competed in the team three-day eventing at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games and returned to the Olympics at Athens 2004.

At Sydney she rode Joy Of My Heart as part of the Irish team alongside Patricia Donegan, Nicola Cassidy and Virginia McGrath, finishing 5th – Ireland’s finest Olympic eventing result in decades. Her performance – adding just 0.4 time faults to her dressage score on the cross-country phase – was one of the cleanest Irish rounds of the competition, and Joy Of My Heart was retired to stud on the mare’s return to Ireland.

Born in Kilkenny and raised in a family steeped in equestrian sport – her father Paddy was a jockey who later worked in the USA, her uncle Francis was a champion National Hunt jockey on multiple occasions during the 1960s, another uncle Richard was a champion apprentice when with Jim Bolger’s, and her brother John won the Glenlivet Hurdle at Aintree with Title Dancer and finished third in the Champion Hurdle with Space Trucker – Shortt began riding almost anything with four legs.

A broken leg, collar-bone and ribs during her career were part of the territory. She was a member of the 1993 European Championships eventing team bronze medal-winning Irish squad, but in over 20 years of competition at senior international level she was famously pipped at the post on nine separate occasions without winning an individual international title – including finishes second nine times, one fewer than Andrew Nicholson’s record of eleven runner-up placings. She also competed at the 2002 World Equestrian Games in Jerez, Spain.

After retiring from competition she moved into coaching and management, spending four and a half years in China managing the Yulong team, and later becoming High Performance Team Manager for the Irish Pony Eventing team (2005-2013) and then the Irish Young Rider (Under-21) Eventing team from 2019 onwards, leading the latter to silver at the FEI European Eventing Championships in 2021. Horse Sport Ireland’s Youth Eventing High Performance team also includes Heike Holstein among its coaching panel.