For once, we'd like to talk to you about a recent book, published in March by Normandie Roto Impression. Jean-Maurice Bonneau has just published a book in the Arts Equestres collection from Acts South: On y sera un jour mon grand! 
It's a book of memories, those of one of France's most successful show-jumping trainers.
It's a book not unlike the tone and enthusiasm of another rider who also became a trainer late in life: Jean d'Orgeix (Cheval quand tu nous tiens). We've wanted to look at d'Orgeix's work for some time now - and we will - but we were, to put it bluntly, taken by surprise!
So why this exceptional, unexpected choice, outside the usual practice on the front page of the World Horse Library website? Because it's changing! Because it's news.
Because in 2022, the year of the World Championships, which take place under the aegis of the FEI every four years (show jumping, dressage, acrobatics and para-dressage in Herning, Denmark, and eventing, driving and endurance in Pratoni del Vivaro, Italy), the book responds, in a sort of echo, to what the reader might understand as the “Call of Dublin”. In 1982 French team wins gold medal in jumping. Jean Maurice Bonneau at the age of 23.   
Twenty years later, in 2002, Jean Maurice Bonneau took the French show jumping team “to the top of the world” in Jerez de la Frontera: gold again. And forty years after a fine career serving this sport, as demanding as it is exciting, where man and horse must become one in the face of the obstacles of the course they have chosen to tackle, like a lifetime... He remembers.

The promise is matched by the cover photo. The author is pictured in a suit and tie, smiling discreetly at Pascal Renauldon's camera, alongside actor Jean Rochefort, in a mastic mackintosh, his hair a little tousled and his moustache rolled up in an equally knowing smile.

The cover photo was taken in June 2011, at the Chantilly jumping show. As we know, Jean Rochefort loved horses. So did Jean Maurice Bonneau! 

By chance, the two men met at the end of the seventies and beginning of the eighties “in the competition’s parking lot, a black DS hitched to a van pulled up next to my lorry and I gradually got to know the occupants, Julien and Marie, accompanied by their father, who seemed really passionate about horses. He helps his children by preparing Sidios and Blandice, two magnificent thoroughbreds who are competing in the same events as me”. Coming from his native Vendée, with a CAP in house painting, but driven by a passion for riding, the young man's first life choices (“to choose is to give up”) meant that at the age of twenty-one, through a series of insecure jobs, he started competing in the Paris region. “As I'd never had a television at home and didn't go to the cinema, I didn't know this public figure, but I liked him straight away”. And vice versa. So much so that, in August 1982, when the French national team was about to take part in the World Jumping Show Championship in Dublin, “Jean offered me the chance to go with him and to stay with him. I'd never been on a plane in my life and I still remember that first experience on Aer Lingus with its huge green shamrock. Everything impressed me! The airport, the journey, the Ballsbridge stadium, the hotel, the town... The few words of English I'd learnt at school weren't much help”.

The French team at the time (Gilles Bertran de Balanda, Patrick Caron, Frédéric Cottier and Michel Robert) won the gold medal, “at that very moment I felt Jean's hand on my shoulder and I could hear him saying to me over the din: one day we'll be there, big boy”.

In fact, hundreds of planes, airports, hotels and horse shows later, Jean Maurice Bonneau unfurls a beautiful gallop interspersed with joyful jumps, but also a few falls! 
What makes this book unique is that it retraces - and punctuates - thirty years of the history of this sport – jumping show - and its expansion.  Throughout his career, starting with his role as coach of the French team and fulfilling his mentor's prediction in Jerez in 2002, twenty years after Dublin (gold medals for Reynald Angot, Gilles Bertran de Balanda, Éric Levallois and Éric Navet), Jean Maurice Bonneau, now in his sixties (15 April 1959), analyses the performances of the teams he has been in charge of, as well as their rivals around the world. In compiling the data, he has collected and preserved, he has become something of a sports historian: start lists, results sheets and, above all, course outlines! A mine for riders looking for technical information. 

A successful trainer, he also talks about his method, which can be summed up in an acronym: PTM for Physical, Technical, Mental.
For readers less concerned with the “performance” aspect, he gives a detailed account, season after season, of the human aspect of what should be considered an adventure. We discover what goes on behind the scenes: “smiles, closed faces, tears of joy, tears of sadness, arms raised, backs bent, dreams fulfilled, deep pain, dashed hopes, anguish, hugs, falls, high doses of adrenalin, apnoea, doubts, expectations, disappointments, sleepless nights, arguments... And medals that make you forget everything".
Passion, joys but also a few setbacks, never leave the author's side throughout the almost 400 pages written during the months of confinement linked to the Covid-19 pandemic. It is constantly being shared, which is hardly surprising from a man whose job it is to motivate, pass on and inspire...
Nor should we be surprised by the modesty and caution that Jean Maurice Bonneau has shown throughout the twenty-five chapters. We would have liked to know more about the lives and characters of all the men and women he met along the way; the champions, owners, breeders and elected representatives he met along the way. What were their outlines? Their personalities?
What was his view of horses, beyond what we all knew about the best-known of them? Their origins? Selection and the development of breeding techniques? The trade, that of the major operators...
And what happened behind the scenes? Doping, the jump-off...
And last but not least, if “Momo”, as the riders affectionately call him, has told us all about his career as a trainer, has he told us anything about himself at all?