“He su-u-re can wave his legs.”
“I had never ridden anything like him,” Giovanniello says of the first time she got on Hucks Connection V. “He doesn’t look that intimidating when he’s standing in the cross-ties, and he’s truly safe—but you wouldn’t want to ask him to trot if you didn’t know how to ride. The power that I felt that day was unbelievable.” In the open division, the stallion can reach for even more, for an “nth” degree of overdrive in his top gear. The resulting picture is what old horsemen used to mean when, in dry, sage voices, they would say of a good horse, “He su-u-re can wave his legs.”
In cold, hard facts, Hucks Connection V is one of the best English pleasure contenders in the Arabian breed today. In the U.S. and Canada, he has won five national or national reserve championships in English pleasure and informal combination, the open titles with Vicki Humphrey and the amateur with Lisa Giovanniello. And last year, he threw in a Liberty performance that dazzled the crowd at Scottsdale and netted him the highest score in the history of the show’s Liberty competition. What sets him apart from his contemporaries is that when his talent is added to his Varian heritage and his disposition, he represents extraordinary opportunity as a breeding stallion.
Volume 42, No. 8 | Diamond Hill Ar abians 3