August 4, 2025 
Sisyphus may have been tasked with a mountain and his boulder, but Skylar Wireman had him beat for hardships at the North American Youth Championships.
This weekend, the 20-year-old finally did what Sisyphus couldn’t—pushing the rock over the top of her own show jumping summit while winning double gold medals with Barclino B for Zone 10 in the Gotham North/FEI North American Youth Jumping Championships (NAYC) on Sunday, August 3 in Traverse City, Michigan.
Double-golds in the Young Rider division is a major accomplishment both in its difficulty and—if the careers of fellow double-victors including Lillie Keenan and Olympic silver medalist Karl Cook are any indication—as a predictor of future greatness. But Wireman, who jumped on her first Senior Nations Cup team for the United States earlier this year, has been knocking at that particular door since 2021.
That year, the California-based show jumper was just settling into Traverse City before warm-ups the following day when a severe storm rolled in unexpectedly. “My mom and I were doing night check that night, and we got trapped in our barn—we were the only two people there at the time,” Wireman told The Chronicle of the Horse in 2023.
“There were tornado-type winds, the lights kept going on and off, and all of the horses were freaking out, spinning and screaming in their stalls.”
In hindsight, Wireman might have wished she’d been reading the tea leaves.
The next day, while riding her then-15-year-old Holsteiner gelding Citoki in the warm-up class, Wireman realized he’d landed strangely after jumping the open water. Diagnostics would reveal that the gelding had actually fractured his pelvis in multiple places, a career-threatening injury that required months of intensive rehab.
Fortunately, Citoki would eventually make a full recovery, but that was not the end of Wireman’s NAYC ordeal.
“I did come in as the alternate in 2022, through the Junior section that year, and then in 2023, I qualified leading our Zone 10 trials,” Wireman says. But her participation that year, too, would unfortunately prove to be short-lived. “The month before [Young Riders], I fell off, and got stepped on, and lacerated my liver.”
In actuality, Wireman lacerated her liver in two places, and her kidney as well—the result of a fall during a jump-off class on grass, when the horse she was riding inadvertently stepped on her stomach while wearing studs.
Down but not out, Wireman set her sights on 2024. “Last year, I did get to come. It was the first year I actually got a ribbon, and I was 10th [on] my horse Tornado,” she says of the 11-year-old Swedish Warmblood gelding, who also brought Wireman to her first FEI Jumping World Cup Finals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia the same year.
This season in Traverse City, however, in her last year of age-eligibility, Wireman elected to bring forward a new partner: Barclino B, a 9-year-old Holsteiner gelding who’s been part of her string for just over a year.
“We had only done two 1.40m classes before I got him as an 8-year-old. And now, as a 9-year-old, I have jumped a couple 1.55m 5* classes on him, and he’s really been coming along this year,” Wireman says.
“Every time we ask him to step up a little bit, he kind of rises to the occasion. And this was my first time doing him in a Nations Cup format, and I had to jump two rounds the same day.”
Though she never doubts Barclino’s bravery in the ring, Wireman says she wasn’t sure how he would handle the intensive, back-to-back, championship-style schedule. Fortunately, the gelding once again proved his quality, jumping clear in four rounds of competition and finishing on his first competition score of 1.02—one of only two combinations on the startlist to do so.
The second was silver medalist Alexa Elle Lignelli aboard XO Zadora of Zone 2, who also finished on her Day 1 score of 2.85. Olivia Sweetnam of Zone 4 took bronze with a rail down and a score of 5.54.
In team competition, Wireman’s Zone 10 squad (which also included Emmeline Adamick and Andy’s Boy Bretoniere, Talise Baker-Matsuoka and Levisto Junior A Z, and Ariana Marnell with Jikke-Cara) took the lead over Zone 2 by a single rail down; Zone 4 settled for bronze.
“[These wins mean] a lot to me, because [NAYC] was the first place that I really had the opportunity to ride on a team. Obviously, now, I’ve gotten a little more experience—I did in my first Senior Nations Cup earlier this year,” Wireman explained.
“But I think it’s been a very valuable experience, getting to be on the team and having that pressure, whether it be to lead-off or [ride as] anchor. There’s a different pressure in each situation that you’re in.
“Certainly, if your team depends on the clear round in the end, [and] you’re the anchor rider, it’s a lot of pressure to sit on.”
Though this will be her last showing at Young Riders, Wireman more than got what she came for.
The winner of the 2023 FEI World Cup qualifier in Fort Worth, Texas is looking forward to competing in the FEI Jumping Nations Cup Youth Final in Lier, Belgium in September, and aspires to represent the USA on future Senior teams—and perhaps even in championships, including the Olympic Games—in the years to come.
Wireman credits her Zone 10 Chef d’equip, Mike Endicott, for giving her the phrase that ultimately became her maxim for this event.
“He [told me], ‘Finish what you came here to do,’ so I had those words in my head as I was going in to the first jump,” Wireman reflects. “And then, as I landed off the last jump, it was just the most incredible feeling. Knowing that I had just won my second gold medal of the week.”
