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PROFILE "I REMEMBER SHOWING UP AT THE WEST PALM BEACH SHOW WITH THIS RATTY, RUSTY TRAILER, AND WE'D WIN. WE WERE NOBODIES." —Anita Petersen ride away, it didn't matter. With a trusty mount, adventure never ceased. But South Africa was far from an idyllic place to live in the 1980s. Tensions over the apartheid were growing stronger every day, and all white males were required to join the army after completing school. "We didn't want to support [the apartheid], so we all came back," Derek says. "They were trying to stop people leaving—there was a big exodus at that time—so the South African government imposed a financial tax on anyone trying to leave so that it was crippling. It was hard for us to get out because we were American citizens, and they weren't going to just let you take your money out. So we started anew with essentially just the shirts on our backs." Derek was 19. His father had gone ahead of the family to Florida to find a 42 W INTER 2013 U N TAC K E D home and source of income, and in the process he'd marched into a horse show office in Tampa and said, "Hey, who's in charge? My kids are coming from Africa, and they ride and are looking for work." "And the man said, 'OK, just have them meet me in Palm Beach on this date.' It was Gene Mische," says Derek. Mische not only gave Derek a job on his Stadium Jumping Inc. ring crew, but also opened his eyes to a level of competition he never knew existed. On the biggest TV he'd ever seen in his life, Mische played Derek tapes of the American Invitational. "I worked the Invitational that year and told the other guys on the jump crew I was going to do it one day," Derek says. "They thought that was pretty funny, as I didn't own a horse, I didn't own boots, I didn't own nothing. I told them I would be in it one day, and I got to do it." The Horse That Started It All But it would take Derek several more years of persistence. Next he got a 9-to5 job in Pinellas Park, Fla., and hated every minute of it. Beyond the drudgery of punching a time clock, the adjustment to living in such a heavily populated area, smack-dab between Tampa and St. Petersburg, was a shock after the relative solitude of South Africa. So when he saw an ad for a working student position at Jean Brinkman's Valhalla Farm in Wellborn, Fla., he jumped at the chance. "They had a big place, around 1,000 acres, and I started designing and building cross-country courses and helping to run events," he says.

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