Untacked november-december-2016

The Chronicle of the Horse

THE EQUESTRIAN LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE

Shades of Gray

CAMARGUE A gallery of the photo works of Drew Doggett

BARN BASH

7

Easy-To-Make Holiday Party Treats

THE WRITER RIDES

Pulitzer Winner Jane Smiley’s Life With Horses

STYLISH ASIDE

Sidesaddle’s Big Comeback GRAND LUSITANOS

At Portugal’s National Horse Fair

A SUPPLEMENT TO THE CHRONICLE OF THE HORSE

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016

HOLIDAY Gift Guide Get Inspired For The Season

Photo Credit: Ivey Sumrell

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s t n e t n Co

Untacked The C hronicle of the Horse

VOL. 4, NO. 6

N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 016

DREW DOGGETT PHOTO

50

50 Camargue’s Rugged Rebels

84

60 Jane Smiley, Still Horse

116

Crazy After All These Years

78 Sarah Hansel Is Pushing

The Boundaries Of Possible

84 The Sidesaddle Mystique 96 An Iberian Treasure 106 All At Sea 112 A Chronicle Of Equine Art

ON THE COVER: Drew Doggett Photo

20 NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2016

U N TAC K E D

MARY PHELPS PHOTO

MIDDLEBURG PHOTO

116 Capturing The Spirit

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s t n e t n Co PHOTO COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

Departments 24 Editor’s Letter 26 Contributors 30 Around The Arena 32 Editor’s Picks: StretchTec Shoulder Relief Girth

34

34 Tech Spotlight: Equimagine CT Machine 38 Test Lab: Half Pads 42 The Clothes Horse Gift Guide: Equestrian-Friendly Holiday Gifts 72 Seeing The World With “Life Between The Ears” 124 F eed Room: Holiday Barn Party Treats 128 Book Reviews 130 Charity Spotlight: Angel Heart Farm Best Of Web & Print

136

Parting Ways

PHOTO COURTESY OF ANGEL HEART FARM

134

22 NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2016

130 U N TAC K E D

42

RIDE THE STORM The Caldo Jacket, Olympia Acclaim Breech and Bromont Pro Insulated Boot. Ready to ride, weather or not. ©2016 Ariat International, Inc.

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EDITOR’S LETTER

A Global Tribe This issue of Untacked provides tantalizing glimpses into some of these other worlds. In our cover story (p. 50), South Carolina-based photographer Drew Doggett lets us look through his lens at the free-roaming “white horses of Camargue” and the Brotherhood of the Camargue Horsemen, the French cowboys who share the horses’ harsh, watery landscape. Even if you already know about the Camargue and its equine inhabitants, Doggett’s otherworldly images put a new interpretation on these famous animals and their habitat.

Photographer Bianca McCarty’s images from the Portuguese national festival of the horse in Golegã (p. 96) immerse us in a different place altogether. The festival, which promotes the long history and current breeding industry of the local Iberian horses, is part business, part entertainment and all celebration. The residents give their village over entirely to horses and riders each November, even to the extent of erecting bars at horse height, so horsemen need not dismount to enjoy a drink.

You don’t have to travel overseas to see how horses inspire culture. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley, profiled in this issue on page 60, has ridden for much of her life, and through works like Horse Heaven she has added horses’ voices to American literature. Artist Lisa Marie Bishop (p. 116), also an accomplished rider, has turned her particular view of horses into paintings that celebrate equine energy. On page 112 we explore the National Sporting Library & Museum’s current exhibition of equine art from here and abroad, based on works featured over almost 70 years on The Chronicle of the Horse’s cover. And Christina Keim’s feature about sidesaddle riding (p. 84) examines how some riders are celebrating one of the equestrian world’s oldest cultural traditions and also changing its image: Thanks to the thoroughly modern

24 NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2016

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women who are contesting races, galloping cross-country and jumping puissance walls while riding aside, many today view the sidesaddle less as a symbol of female oppression than a hat tip to the past’s elegant style and an awe-inspiring riding challenge.

The equestrian culture is robust and varied, but even as we learn about the differences—in riding styles, in breeds, in habits—we also usually find something familiar in each group’s interaction with these animals that we share our lives with. The gardians, those cowboys of the Camargue, probably would quickly recognize their American counterparts’ way of doing things; today’s sidesaddle foxhunters doubtless would get an appreciative salute from the earlier generations of women whose accomplishments they celebrate; and those who attend “The Chronicle of the Horse in Art” exhibition at the National Sporting Library & Museum surely feel the same joy in viewing a Munnings or a Troye as the pieces’ first viewers did.

That’s part of the magic of our lives with horses: The equestrian culture is global, infinitely variable and comforting in its shared qualities, allowing us to see horses in new ways, as we renew our love for them over and over again.

—Glenye Cain Oakford

CHRISTOPHER OAKFORD PHOTO

Let a horse into your life, and he’ll carry you into a new culture. That’s one of the great things about the equestrian world. It’s not just a sport, a business or a hobby. It’s a lifestyle, and the nuances of the world’s equestrian cultures are fascinatingly varied.

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CONTRIBUTORS

KELLY COLE PHOTO

In This Issue

Megan Brincks

Drew Doggett

Christina Keim

Bianca McCarty

Kat Netzler

A former staff reporter for The Chronicle of the Horse, Megan now lives with her dog and cat in Midland, Texas, where she works for a local community college. With time spent in almost every kind of saddle over the years, she rides whenever she gets the chance and recently started dipping a toe into the waters of eventing.

In addition to spending time with and riding horses, she enjoys reading, traveling and hiking.

After a career-altering trip to Nepal, Drew Doggett has centered his awardwinning photography and film practice around documenting places and subjects with distinctive histories, narratives and character. His work photographing the freeroaming horses of Camargue, France, featured in this issue, is a continuation of his journey to document wild horses worldwide. Drew’s sense of composition is influenced by growing up in a creative household. His father is an architect and helped Drew develop a sense of line and composition at a young age; that still informs his work today.

When he’s not working (which is rare), Drew spends time with his wife and daughter.

Christina is a self-diagnosed equine addict who has been around or on top of horses for a nearly uninterrupted span of over 30 years, when she was first given riding lessons “just for the summer.” She has enjoyed many disciplines including hunters, equitation, jumpers, dressage, eventing, Pony Club and most recently competitive trail riding.

Christina is based at her Cold Moon Farm in Rochester, N.H., and is currently a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire Equine Program, where she coaches their intercollegiate hunt seat team.

Bianca McCarty is an equine photographer who works with Iberian horses and lives in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.

Her award-winning imagery has appeared in a variety of equine publications, including Baroque Horse, Equine Journal, and Horsemanship China.

Her sense of adventure and her love of Iberian horses have taken her to Portugal and to France on a quest to photograph these majestic and spirited animals. When she’s not behind the camera, Bianca can be found working to further her education in classical dressage or enjoying a mountain bike ride with her husband Sean.

After growing up eventing in the Midwest and attending journalism school at the University of Georgia, Kat spent nine years serving on The Chronicle of the Horse’s editorial staff, first in its Middleburg, Va., main office and then in Chicago. She’s now the director of communications at a youth-focused social change non-profit in Memphis, where she lives with her husband Brett, Fitz the corgi and Burger the pit bull.

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The C hronicle of the Horse

Untacked Volume 4 • Number 6 • November/December 2016

produced and published by The Chronicle of the Horse publisher

KATHERINE BELLISSIMO

president/executive editor

BETH RASIN, brasin@coth.com

with the Chronicle this winter.

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MOLLY SORGE, msorge@coth.com assistant editor

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tidbits from across the industry

Aroundthe Arena way My Faves: Hunter Hollo

At age 18, Hunter Holloway has already had a successful equitation career with top-three finishes in the ASPCA Maclay Final (Ky.), the Washington International Equitation Final (D.C.), the Platinum Performance/USEF Talent Search Final—East (N.J.) and the Pessoa/U.S. Medal Final (Pa.) in the last two years. She also claimed the Ronnie Mutch Equitation Championship at Devon (Pa.) on her versatile mount, Any Given Sunday, who does double duty in the USHJA International Hunter Derbies and grand prix rings as well.

In the hunter ring, Holloway has won numerous championships across the country. At age 12, she won her first grand prix at the Dallas Harvest Horse Show, becoming the youngest rider to win a national-standard grand prix. And, at age 14, Holloway was the youngest rider to be chosen to represent the United States on the Young Rider Nations Cup team at the Hagen CSIO (Germany).

Holloway began riding before she can even remember, with her mother and trainer, Brandie Holloway. At 2 years old, Hunter was walking and trotting around the ring by herself. These days, she’s focused on competing in more World Cup qualifiers and making the best of her final junior year. In the future, she hopes to represent the United States internationally.

Breeches: Le Fash

KIMBERLY LOUSHIN PHOTO

Footwear: Der Dau

30 NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2016

Drink: Water Food: Italian

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On Deck

Mark your calendar with these upcoming important dates.

Book: Paper Towns by John

Green

and boating activities

Guilty pleasure: Sour Patch

Kids

Memory in the saddle: “I have so many amazing memories in the saddle, but the one that still tops them all is winning my first grand prix at age 12. I don’t think that one can ever be replicated.”

PHOTO COURTESY OF EQUUS FILM FESTIVAL

Non-horsey hobby: Fishing

u Nov. 21 The Keeneland Association and Cross Gate Gallery will host the fourth annual Sporting Art Auction in Keeneland’s sale pavilion in Lexington, Ky. This year’s catalog features 175 works, including Sir William Orpen’s oil painting Sergeant Murphy and Things (shown here) and Andy Warhol’s Willie Shoemaker, a silkscreen portrait of the Hall of Fame jockey. Pieces by Edward Troye and John Frederick Herring Sr. will also go under the hammer. View the catalog online at thesportingartauction.com. Want details?

Email info@thesportingartauction.com or call Cross Gate Gallery at (859) 233-3856.

Competition Venue:

International of Omaha Place to shop for non-horsey items: Altar’d State App: Instagram Quality in a person: Honesty Quote: “You only live once

(YOLO)”

Workout exercise: No-stirrup

work

Family activity: Days on the

lake spent wakeboarding and tubing Season: Summer Emoji: The smiley face with

jazz-hands

Celebrity: Jennifer Lawrence

JOSH WALKER PHOTO

Picture in your home: “A

picture of my mom and I coming out of the ring after I was grand small junior hunter champion on Bellini a couple of years ago.”

u Nov. 17-20 The EQUUS Film Festival at the Village East Cinema in New York City brings together a diverse group of filmmakers and storytellers who focus on the horse and equestrianism in human culture. The event also features a pop-up gallery showcasing artists, filmmakers and authors, plus panel discussions and an awards ceremony. Check out equusfilmfestival.net for more information.

PHOTO COURTESY OF KEENELAND/CROSS GATE GALLERY

Movie: Star Wars

u Dec. 2-4 Point your sleigh to Virginia for Christmas in Middleburg, a family tradition in The Chronicle of the Horse’s hometown of Middleburg, Va. The Middleburg Hunt’s parade of horses and hounds is the weekend’s signature event, but you can also have breakfast with Santa, enjoy wine tastings, and get in the holiday spirit with concerts and a tree lighting.

Bring your gift list: Many local shops offer specials and discounts for the weekend festivities. See christmasinmiddleburg.org for more, including a schedule of events.

C H RO N O F H O R S E .CO M

NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2016

31

EDITOR’S PICKS

A Girth For Goldilocks

By SAR A LIESER

W

hen I began learning to ride, we had few options for girths at my barn. There were canvas girths for fat ponies and plain leather tri-fold girths for horses.

While these girths functioned, mostly, I imagine that, for the horse, the experience of wearing such an inflexible contraption was something like cinching up your belt after an over-generous meal and then trying to run a mile.

Today, as with everything equestrian, girths have gone high tech. From stretch to contours to space age materials, you’ll find an overwhelming variety of choice when it comes to methods for affixing your saddle in place.

Total Saddle Fit’s StretchTec Shoulder Relief Girth boasts a number of features designed to enhance performance and comfort as well as make it safe and low maintenance. After three months of using this girth almost every day, I haven’t found a downside.

This short girth is contoured, so the center of the girth is set forward in the horse’s natural girth groove, but the sides are cut back. Once you attach the billets, they’re about two inches farther back than they might otherwise be with a standard girth, and they hang perpendicular to the ground rather than angling forward.

Many horses, including mine, have shoulders that extend well back from the girth groove, especially as the scap32 NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2016

U N TAC K E D

ula rotates once the horse is in motion. You either tighten your traditional girth so much that it can’t slip, which means your saddle is probably interfering with the horse’s shoulder, or you let the saddle slide back to where it wants to rest naturally, leaving you with a girth that’s closer to mid belly rather than the girth groove.

On the StretchTec Shoulder Relief Girth and the older Shoulder Relief model, the contoured shape allows the billets to attach farther back, which keeps the saddle farther away from the shoulder, but the center still rests comfortably in the girth groove. At the same time, the cutback design creates more room for the horse’s elbow, preventing girth galls and providing more freedom of movement.

What the StretchTec girth adds to this innovative shape is a triangular center elastic panel (patent pending). It expands and stretches as your horse breathes. This is more comfortable for the horse and eliminates the gapping in the sternum area that can occur with other girths.

Another new feature is an interchangeable, removable girth liner. You

can buy this girth with either a neoprene or leather liner. It attaches via Velcro®, and you can easily remove it for cleaning or swap it out if you have a horse that prefers a different material.

Every element of this girth is thoughtfully designed.

The keepers are made of one piece of leather that loops through the girth and connects back to itself, which makes them super tough and low profile. It has a double center D-ring with a removable leather strap, so it’s compatible with any and all attachments.

And best of all, my horse just loved it. From the first day I used the StretchTec Shoulder Relief girth, he felt softer, rounder and more comfortable. Now it’s the only short girth I use. It’s made of high-quality English leather and cleans up with little effort in a matter of moments. And, compared to many other high tech girths on the market, it’s affordable, retailing at $179.95 for the neoprene version and $199.95 for the all leather model. (You can buy additional liners separately.)

Go to totalsaddlefit.com for more information or to purchase a girth.

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TECH SPOTLIGHT

Equimagining The Future 4DDI’s robotically controlled CT machine is already changing diagnostic imaging for horses—and it has the potential to affect human medicine as well.

By L ISA SL A DE Photos courtesy of the U N I V ER SI T Y OF PEN NS Y LVA N I A

34 NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2016

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T

he tomography scanner is a useful weapon in a veterinarian’s arsenal: These computerized machines process data from a series of X-rays taken from different angles, then produce cross-sectional images of the body. That can reveal problems that a traditional X-ray won’t.

Up until now, though, the patient—equine or human—has had to lie down inside the ring-shaped scanner. That’s not so difficult for most humans, but it can be complex and expensive for horses, which must be under general anesthesia for a CT scan. That adds risk: The horse might react to the anesthesia or injure himself during recovery.

The company 4DDI Equine is trying to change that. They’ve developed a robotically controlled open CT machine, dubbed

Dr. Dean Richardson of the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center stands with a horse during scanning by the Equimagine CT machine. The Equimagine takes images with the help of robotic arms that swivel around a horse. The process takes about five minutes and allows the horse to remain standing under only moderate sedation.

FALL WINTER 2016/17 #EquilineAmerica

TECH SPOTLIGHT

Dean Richardson and Dr. Barbara Dallap Schaer of the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center prepare a horse for an Equimagine CT Scan. The machine’s open design differs dramatically from that of a traditional ring-shaped scanner. “Instead of having to stuff a horse in a doughnut, you have the freedom of moving the imaging equipment around the patient,” explained Dallap Schaer.

Equimagine, which takes images with the help of robotic arms that swivel around the horse. The process only takes about five minutes and allows the horse to remain standing under only moderate sedation. The veterinarian can evaluate the images quickly, and if there’s a fracture that requires surgical treatment, the horse can undergo anesthesia for that procedure—so there’s no worry about using general anesthesia twice in a short period.

“Instead of having to stuff a horse in a doughnut, you have the freedom of moving the imaging equipment around the patient,” explained Barbara Dallap Schaer, VMD, DACVECC, DACVS, medical director of the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center in Kennett Square, Pa. “You can adjust the size and shape of that pathway. It just gives you so much flexibility. And we think it 36 NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2016

U N TAC K E D

makes it safer for our patients because they don’t have to be anesthetized.”

The New Bolton Center is one of only a few locations that currently have a 4DDI Equimagine machine; another is the Cornell Ruffian Equine Specialists in Ithaca, N.Y. “It’s been pretty amazing for us,” said Tom Yarbrough, DVM, diplomate ACVS, and the clinical director and chief surgeon of Cornell Ruffian Equine Specialists (N.Y.). Yarbrough says the machine has changed the way his team deals with fractures. “We can do a more thorough categorization for how bad the fracture is,” he said. “It allows you better information when it comes to rehabilitation.

“The ability to detect fractures not visible on radiographs is really unbelievable,” added Yarbrough, who called the technology “a game-changer.”

Equimagine’s open design isn’t its

only asset. The machine also features an unusual motion-correction system that means horses don’t have to remain absolutely immobile during the scan. The system involves four gait-analysis cameras positioned above the horse and tiny infrared markers that the horse wears.

“If you didn’t have the motioncorrection component, it would be almost impossible to reconstruct the images in a standing horse that is making subtle movements and breathing,” explained Dallap Schaer. “Having that motion correction is the key that allows you to capture and build or reconstruct the image and also allows the patient that much freedom. Horses sway, breathe and move. They kind of shimmy all around, and the motion-correction is robust enough that we can still acquire the image in those circumstances.”

For now, the clinics are mainly using the Equimagine for imaging horses’ heads and lower limbs. But it could be promising for much larger parts of the body—like the spine, thorax and pelvis— because, unlike with a traditional CT scanner, the body part doesn’t have to fit inside a narrow tube.

“We also want to look at areas that develop repetitive injury, so we can catch problems at an early stage to prevent something catastrophic,” said Dallap Schaer. “The system has been helpful for identifying problems in patients in which we haven’t been able to make a diagnosis with any other modality.”

But aren’t moving robotic arms pretty spooky for a horse? Yarbrough noted that most horses handle them fine, and those animals who take exception to them are blindfolded.

“When you’re dealing with horses, you do have the risk of turning two robots into a jungle gym, but the reality is those of us who deal with horses

know risk is a potential factor with everything we do,” he said. “You can get one up following an anesthetized CT, and the horse breaks its leg in recovery.

There’s no ‘absolutely safe’ with horses.

Every time I put a horse in it, I worry about it, but I say that every time I put a horse in stocks, too.”

Here’s a plus for the horse owner: lower cost. A traditional CT can cost a few thousand dollars, with anesthesia and recovery costs. The Equimagine standing CT costs about 50 percent less.

At the moment, horse owners have only limited access to the Equimagine. But that will change as more veterinary schools and private clinics get their own machines.

In the meantime, the company is still working—in conjunction with

New Bolton and Ruffian Equine Specialists—to refine the quality of the machine’s images. “We’re still tweaking the protocols,” said Dallap Schaer, who noted that New Bolton has done about 45 scans so far. “What happens with any imaging modality is that, as you collect more and more images, you continue to refine protocols. You might change the technique you use to acquire the images, you might change the algorithms that correct the image.

Even in pieces of imaging equipment that are fully productized, you’re constantly upgrading to improve your image quality.

The Equimagine images are pretty comparable [to traditional CT images], but there’s still room for improvement.”

Equimagine’s technology could expand into human medicine next, where

it would be useful for claustrophobic patients who can’t be anesthetized or for children who might otherwise have to be restrained to remain absolutely still during a scan. But for now, it’s the horses who are on the cutting edge of this imaging technology.

“I think the coolest story behind it is the fact that somebody could have made a heck of a lot money going into the petroleum industry—because they want to develop imaging for core samples, to drill for gas and oil,” said Yarbrough. “For this to start in the vet world, that never happens for us.

But we have somebody who saw a challenge in the vet world and wanted to answer that. It’s important for us to understand how lucky we are someone gave us the first swing at this.”

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TEST LAB

In Search Of The Smoothest Ride Horses’ backs weren’t designed to carry humans, so we’re always looking for the newest and best ways to improve their comfort without interfering with our seat aids. We tested six half pads to give you some insight before you open your wallet.

By K IMBERLY LOUSHIN

Lami-Cell Full Shock Absorbing Memory Pad For those on a tighter budget, the Lami-Cell Full Shock Absorbing Memory Pad is a good option.

While I didn’t find it quite as effective as the pricier options, it’s a definite improvement over a plain fleece pad of a similar price point. It’s made of 13-mm gel foam that has similar properties to memory foam. It didn’t compress as much as other pads with memory foam do, which is something I appreciated. Since it’s a dense pad, I was a bit worried about how much it would deaden seat aids, but my horse was incredibly responsive under tack.

The pad is pretty thick, so if your saddle fits, this might not be the pad for you. But it definitely would be useful for horses that are building up muscle and need something to fill the space in a wider tree. It’s not the most flexible model on the market. I could pull the pad up into the saddle channel at the pommel, but it wasn’t flexible enough to do so in the cantle. But I didn’t feel like it had an adverse affect on my horse.

At 21" long, it did show around the edge of my 17.5" saddle but didn’t extend beyond my square pad.

During dusty rides the pad did have a small layer of dirt covering it, but it was easy to wipe away with a damp rag to extend the period between washes. The materials are strong, and the stitching is tight, so I have no concerns about the pad holding up over the years.

The pad is available in black or white at various online retailers for $46.96. RGLamiCell.com.

Acavallo Close Contact Grip System And Memory Foam Half Pad When you pull this pad out of the package you can’t help but notice that it’s really pretty.

It will go from schooling to show ring with no trouble.

Acavallo is known for their gel pads, which absorb shock and provide non-slip properties. But this new pad in their line features a close contact grip system that doesn’t add bulk to the pad while preventing your saddle from sliding backward. As a bonus, the non-slip material features a horse head design.

This pad is made with a thick memory foam, and I was a bit hesitant because my horse prefers a thinner half pad. However, I never felt like it made my saddle too tight.

There’s no memory foam along the spine, which limits the amount of material inside the saddle channel. It did look like the saddle was sitting on top of the horse’s back rather than around it, but that look didn’t translate to how I felt in the tack.

As with all of Acavallo’s half pads, this one is ergonomically designed, and it had the biggest curve along the spine of any pad I tried—perfect for a horse with big withers. Since the pad comes up quite a bit in the middle, I did have concerns about bridging, but when I felt underneath the pads it didn’t create any tight spots.

The pad is machine washable at low temperatures and should be line dried. It’s available in five color combinations and two sizes.

Available at various online retailers for $159. Acavallo.com.

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Sedelogic Half Pad

ThinLine Trifecta Half Pad ThinLine makes some of the most popular pads on the market, and it’s easy to see why. The ThinLine material uses an open cell technology that allows heat and impact to move laterally to disperse the energy.

ThinLine is famous for their golf ball test: If you drop a golf ball on their material, it won’t bounce back. Try the test yourself, and you’ll find the amount of bounce off a ThinLine is significantly less than off other pads, which translates to less impact on the horse’s back.

I particularly noticed a difference while riding without stirrups.

My Thoroughbred often gets quite irritated when I lose my balance slightly and bounce around for a few steps, but he was less grumpy when I was riding in the ThinLine.

As evidenced by its name, the material is thin, so as not to affect saddle fit. I tried the ThinLine Trifecta Half Pad with Sheepskin Rolls, which was made to follow the fashion of a sheepskin pad without the added bulk under the saddle, but still offer the positive effects of a ThinLine pad. Personally, I would rather skip the rolls, since they don’t do anything to affect performance of the pad. I do like the idea of the full sheepskin, as I’ve been known to put a standard ThinLine pad over my sheepskin half pad to enjoy the benefits of both.

The pad comes in two sizes. The medium has 18" between the rolls, and the large has 19.25". If you’re riding in a saddle smaller than 17" I’d caution against getting something with the rolls, because there’s just so much space between the back of the saddle and the end of the pad. The cotton version of this pad does have three sizes, which would be best for smaller saddles.

The main benefit of the Trifecta is the ability to add shims to the front, bridging and rear, something you can’t do with a standard ThinLine.

If you get the pad in white, the ThinLine material does pick up dye from your saddle. It is machine washable in cold water, though, and stains come out well. When you do wash it, be sure to air dry out of direct sunlight.

The pad is available in four colors (black, white, dark brown and natural) and three different styles at various online retailers for $169.99 (cotton), $189.99 (sheepskin rolls) and $264.99 (with full sheepskin). ThinLineGlobal.com.

Made by VitaFloor, this pad doesn’t scream, “Look at me!” at first glance. It’s unassuming in its exterior, but what’s hiding beneath is highly effective. When developing the half pad, VitaFloor did extensive research on the polyester fiber and how it distributed pressure—including putting a pressure sensor on a horse’s back as it jumped while wearing the Sedelogic pad and without. The study found that it absorbs shock up to 50 percent during peak pressure, and there’s a video on their website if you’re interested in more detail.

My Thoroughbred is 20, and as a result I’m always looking for something that keeps him comfortable as his musculature changes with age. From the first ride, I could tell he was happier through his back and moving more freely with the Sedelogic 2 Ply half pad.

A soft cover contains the dense shock-absorbing material, which gives slightly under pressure.

My favorite feature of this pad is its breathability. The three dimensionally woven polyester fibers promote airflow, and even on the hottest and most humid days I could hang it up between rides, and by the time I was ready to saddle my second horse it was dry and ready for another spin.

My co-worker also tried the S-Curve pad, which is designed for horses with a sensitive back or kissing spine. The front of the pad is shaped to allow for greater freedom of the shoulder and features a pressure relief spot where the stirrup bars lie. The main feature is a pressure-distributing thermoplastic layer at the back of the pad, which is moldable with heat. You use a hair dryer to heat the pad for roughly 5 to 10 minutes until it’s soft, then place it under your saddle and sit on it for a few minutes to allow it to mold to the shape of your horse and the weight of the rider for a custom fit.

The thermoplastic layer is quite hard once cooled, and the pad holds a curve even when it’s been removed from the horse, but you can remold the pad as many times as you want. So if you get a new horse or saddle, or your horse’s back changes due to work, you don’t have to run out to get a new pad.

The pad is machine washable in warm water, but if it has the thermoplastic layer you’ll have to remold it. Depending on the pad shape, it comes in three sizes. The largest is designed for a saddle 17.5" and bigger. While it works perfectly for my saddle at 17.5" with just a small amount of fabric showing beneath the pad, it’s too short for something bigger than an 18".

The Sedelogic pads come in white and black and can be found online at VitaFloor.com for $147-$325.

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TESTER’S CHOICE

Invictus Necesse Pad T

his pad earned a gold star from my horse and me. At less than .5" thick, it doesn’t change saddle fit, but the small layer makes a big difference. Flexible enough that it fits nicely in the saddle channel, this pad’s core features D3O technology, which is more commonly found in boots. The technology uses free-flowing molecules that lock together when struck, dissipating when the pressure returns to normal.

On the underside the pad includes a 3D Spacer Fabric designed to transfer heat and moisture away from your horse’s back. After a long cross-country school my horse’s back felt as cool as he would be on a weekday hack.

The top of the pad is made of a microfiber material designed to be non-slip, and it held up to the job—my saddle stayed centered comfortably on my horse’s back. Sized for saddles 16" to 18", I found it fit my 17.5" saddle perfectly with just enough room left for a bigger saddle without a ton of excess material sticking out.

I didn’t have any problems with the pad collecting dirt in a dusty arena, and the material wipes clean easily. If it does get dirty enough to warrant washing, the pad has to be hand washed and line dried. Invictus does warn that in extremely cold temperatures, the pad may get stiff. But within a few minutes on your horse, the pad will return to a pliable state because of the horse’s body heat.

If your horse needs shims, Invictus has the Equality Pad with all of the features of the Necesse but with two pockets on either side for shims. The pad shape fits well under both a dressage saddle and a jump saddle with more forward flaps. It comes in dark gray, chocolate brown and white.

Available at various online retailers for $249.

Invictus-Equestrian.com.

TEST LAB Toklat T3 Matrix Half Pad If you want a pad with a lot of options, the Toklat T3 Matrix Half Pad is just the thing for you. The company offers three insert options, three different bottom linings, and two shapes.

The Pro-Impact insert is the thinnest at just 13 mm thick. It features an open cell foam that’s common in pads offering impact protection, and Toklat recommends it for horses in high-intensity work. The Lo-Impact insert is thicker at 25 mm of low-density viscoelastic foam that moves with the muscle, so it never pinches. However, because of its thickness, it dissipates heat at a slower rate. The final insert is the Ortho-Impact, which at 17 mm combines a medium-density viscoelastic foam with a high-density Poron XRD material to minimize concussion; it is suggested for riders with back problems and horses with deficits in their back muscles.

The good news is, if you find the insert you selected isn’t quite right, you can buy a new one without purchasing a new half pad. For the bottom lining, you can choose from sheepskin, WoolBack or CoolBack.

I tried the ergonomic pad, which is designed to follow the shape of the horse’s shoulder muscles, so it’s straighter and longer than the front of most half pads. It comes in dressage and all-purpose and features a rather long fleece roll, which caused some problems under a saddle with a very forward flap, as it adds extra bulk. The all-purpose model worked just fine with a dressage saddle and a jump saddle with a straighter flap.

Because the billet straps were situated right below the fleece roll, I felt they sat too low.

While it worked for a dressage saddle with a long knee block, on a jump saddle with a short block, it hit below the block and was awkward under the flap. I had no problems with this pad slipping, though, so I felt comfortable enough doing without.

Toklat has a liner designed to go underneath the pad. Most of the pad is quilted, with the top featuring mesh that lines up with the half pad. The liner is supposed to serve as a barrier between the half pad and the horse’s back to keep your half pad cleaner without interfering with its benefits. Plus the mesh has a nice non-slip surface.

I tried the half pad both with a regular pad and with the liner and didn’t notice a huge difference. The mesh is more breathable than your standard pad, so on hot and humid days it kept my horse’s back cooler, and if you choose the sheepskin option, it should give your horse the full benefits of its wicking properties. The liner has slots to slip your billet straps through to keep everything aligned, but the slots were a bit tight, and I found it to be more trouble than it was worth.

Available at various online retailers for $174.95-$324.95, depending on insert and material chosen. Toklat.com.

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THE CLOTHES HORSE

IF WISHES WERE HORSES

SNAKS 5TH AVENCHEW PONY POP TARTS These adorable treats are guaranteed to charm your animal and your Instagram followers in equal measure. Made of flour, molasses, sugar and cinnamon (and a dash of sprinkles, of course), with no artificial sweeteners or preservatives. $12 for a set of six regular-sized treats or for 12 mini versions. snaks5thavenchew.com.

We’d be giving (and getting!) all these equestrian-friendly gifts this holiday season.

By K AT N E T Z LER

CB2 GILDED HORSE We see some obvious resistance, and he’s a little bit behind the vertical, but that’s a nice, active hind leg. Also, it’s super glam. Resin with gold electroplated base, measures 9.75" long by 9.75" high. $49.95. cb2.com.

PENDLETON GLACIER PARK LUGGAGE Shipping out for the winter show season? Celebrate the centennial of the National Park Service at the same time, with new travel gear bearing Pendleton’s iconic National Park wool blanket pattern—Glacier Park stripe—first offered by them in 1916. Duffel backpack, $249.99; adventure bag, $399.99; 27" spinner suitcase, $399.99. Additional sizes and models available. pendleton-usa.com.

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MAKER’S MARK AMERICAN PHAROAH COMMEMORATIVE EDITION The legendary Thoroughbred’s Triple Crown and Breeders’ Cup victories came in 2015, but we’re betting your farrier won’t mind receiving this limited edition of delish Kentucky bourbon a year later. After all, it’s all about that aging process. $74.99. Find your local retailer at makersmark.com.

HORSE OF A DIFFERENT COLOR DIPTYCH A horse rendered in beautiful pastels and printed on gallerywrapped canvas with wood stretcher bars.

Each panel measures 24" x 48". $179.99. worldmarket.com.

ORIGAMI CORGI NECKLACE Yes, they come in other breeds too, you rabid Jack Russell lovers. $20 each. etsy.com/shop/glorikamishop.

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THE CLOTHES HORSE WESTERN CHIEF KIDS HORSE DREAMS LIGHTED RAIN BOOT You don’t always buy the toddlers in your life multicolored ponycovered galoshes, but when you do, you should have the good sense to get the ones with the flashing LED heels.

Available in children’s sizes 8-13. $29.95. zappos.com.

KASK DOGMA STAR LADY HELMET Who needs diamonds or chocolate when you can have them both in helmet form?

The Kask Dogma Star Lady comes with a carpet of Swarovski crystals in brown, black, silver or navy, but it’s more than just a fashion statement: It meets current world safety standards and is ASTM/SEI-certified.

Its patented Fit System offers a removable, flexible brace that cradles the back of the head and neck, providing an even more secure fit.

Available in U.S. sizes 6 1/2 - 7 3/8. Around $1,250. kask.it.

HANDSON GROOMING GLOVES Let’s be honest: Thoughtful as they may be, sometimes those romantic gifts start gathering dust. Show you really know how to satisfy a horse person with a practical stocking stuffer that’ll knock some dust off. $29.99. handsongloves.com.

STABLE + SEA CANDLES Handmade in Sonoma, Calif., these natural soy candles are available in a range of scents inspired by the equestrian lifestyle, including Tack Room, Blue Ribbon, Ponybreath, Flyspray, and the cheekily named Involuntary Dismount. $24 each. stableandsea.com.

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BACK ON TRACK SOCKS Know someone who’s getting cold feet? They’ll thank you all winter long for these practical socks. Constructed of fabric infused with ceramic powder, they reflect natural body heat and create soothing, infrared thermal warmth. Sizes S-L. $30 for one pair; $45 for a double pack. backontrackproducts.com.

WEST ELM FIGURAL BOTTLE STOPPERS & RING DISH They’re small, they’re simple, they’re sophisticated. Set of two bottle stoppers in brass finish, $28; enamel and metal ring dish in brass finish, $59. westelm.com.

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THE CLOTHES HORSE RÖNNER SPORT DIANELLA SHOW SHIRT & CAVALIA COLORS BOOTS Stretchy dry-fit fabric in all-over horse print, available in gray with gingham accents or pink with striped accents.

Sizes 6-16. $199. Flat boots come in honey/ royal blue. Heeled boots come in black/royal blue.

Sizes 37-41. $480 each. ronnerdesign.com.

FURMINATOR HORSE DE-SHEDDING TOOL The Furminator isn’t just for dogs and cats anymore! The equine model is de-shedding magic packed into a 5" edge. $69.99. furminator.com.

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LIFE BETWEEN THE EARS GREETING CARDS Whether it’s a snowy, spruce-lined trail in Norway or a sunny, sandy horizon in Morocco, any scene is best viewed through the ears of a great horse. That’s what inspired Kristine Dahms to create the Life Between The Ears series, which portrays views from the saddle around the world. Dahms donates a portion of the proceeds from card sales to the Equine Land Conservation Resource. $4 per individual card; $25 for a set of 10 (5 different images with 2 cards of each). lifebetweentheears.com.

WORLD EQUESTRIAN CENTER Presents:

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World Equestrian Winter Classic III .... Feb. 15 – Feb. 19, 2017

World Equestrian New Year Show .... Jan. 4 – Jan. 8, 2017

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THE CLOTHES HORSE MANFREDI DETACHABLE COLLAR SHOW JACKETS Billed as “the one jacket with 1,000 looks,” the Manfredi show coat comes in a classic model and an AirFlow model in a range of hues, with an assortment of collars available in every color and texture—from denim to crystal-encrusted to snakeskin. Available in men’s sizes 44R-56L and women’s sizes 36R-46L. Jackets run in the $470 range and collars at around $65. Find your local distributor at manfrediequestrian.com/distributors.php.

LONGINES MASTERS TEES These classy graphic logos by Argentine artist Max Rompo have caught the attention of riders and designers the world over. Available in Los Angeles (white) and Paris (khaki grey); in men’s sizes XS-XXL and women’s XXS-XL. About $39. store. longinesmasters.com.

48 NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2016

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PARLANTI OCALA BOOT Parlanti Passion Tall Boots pack all the perks of customization in an offthe-rack line of field and dress boots. Their detailed online guide shows you how to properly measure and submit your foot size, calf width and calf height to find that perfect fit. $1,000. passioneq.com.

HIHO SILVER PENDANT & CUFFLINKS Exclusive Alex Monroe fox pendant (sterling silver with 22-carat gold plating, with silver-tipped tail) on silver chain, $199. Sterling silver hunting horn or horseshoe cufflinks, $57 a pair. hihosilver.co.uk.

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COVER FEATURE

CAMARGUE’S

Rugged Rebels

In his series “Band of Rebels: White Horses of Camargue,” photographer Drew Doggett documents these graceful animals and their caretakers against the monotone backdrop of their remote habitat in France.

T

Story and photos by DREW DOGGET T

he horses that freely roam the Camargue marshlands in southern France have a mystical quality. Known as the White Horses of Camargue—although, technically, they are gray—their exact origins are unknown. But many believe they’re descended from the horses that lived in the region tens of thousands of years ago and whose bones are deposited thickly around the Paleolithic site of Solutré.

Camargue, a river delta southwest of Arles, is only 360 square miles; it’s bordered on the east and west by two branches of the Rhône and on the south by the

This image helped inform the title of the series: “Band of Rebels.” Despite the odds, these horses have lived in the same manner for years, and they are naturally suited to Camargue’s extreme conditions.

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Mediterranean. But it abounds with remarkable species that have adjusted over time to live in this harsh, wet region. Camargue is humid, so the summers are heavy and the winters bitterly cold; one environmentalist described it as a “watery desert.” But the horses and Camargue’s other inhabitants aren’t troubled by the challenges the conditions pose. The environment seems only to reinforce the resilience of these sturdy horses.

It’s not just the horses and other wildlife that catch the eye here; it’s also the light. Camargue’s natural qualities render the tones of water and land within one end of the

light spectrum, casting an ethereal quality. This brilliant, nuanced contrast with the horses’ coats, and their framing against the minimal backdrop, heightens the animals’ beauty.

There are also textural effects that I wanted to document: Running through the mud, the horses dirtied their pristine coats, but this also created a painterly finish that reminded me of modern art. With their remarkable coloring and defined musculature, the horses seem otherworldly.

A tight-knit group of caretakers, the Brotherhood of the Camargue Horsemen—also known as gardians, or “cowboys of the Riviera”— look after the horses. Since the 1500s, the gardians have preserved their caretaking tradition, although social and economic factors have begun to chip away at this longstanding, noble career.

The gardians also look after the region’s native breed of cattle—also called Camargue—that are known for their black coats and vertical horns. This is one of the only places in southern France where bullfighting is legal, and the region’s 100 or so arenas draw tourists who want to witness la course Camarguaise, the area’s traditional and largely bloodless bullfight, in which the white-clad matador, or raseteur, must grab a ribbon from between a black Camargue bull’s horns.

As Camargue has become an exotic destination for bullfighting and its horses, the gardians now deal with the tourist influx, which only provides regular income during the busy summer season and often leads to permanent effects on the environment. Camargue has faced such disruptions before, sometimes on a large scale: During World War II, for example, Camargue was a military training ground, which adversely and permanently affected the environment.

The gardians’ job can feel isolating. They live in singlestory homes deep in the marshlands, generally with no windows due to the delta’s high winds, and far from major cities. Even so, the cowboys have created and kept their own rituals, like placing bullhorns on their doors to ward off evil spirits or celebrating an annual festival, the Fête des Gardians, on May 1.

The gardians’ relationship with the horses and black bulls is a symbiotic one: The Camargue horses historically have served as the cowboys’ workhorses and help them wrangle the bulls. The long, dynamic connection between the horses and the gardians is based on the trust and respect that the men and the animals have earned in their many years of living alongside each other.

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COVER FEATURE

Gardian Pierre Pages has spent more than 30 years tending to the horses in Camargue.

“With the horses, it’s all about respect,” he told me. “They have to know you, and you have to know them. It’s a codified language: gestures, looks and some words. [But you must] do it kindly, softly, with tenderness.”

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I became interested in exploring the salt water’s effect on the horses’ coats and manes; it created a painterly, textured effect.

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COVER FEATURE

In taking this image, I was drawn to the dichotomy between the horse’s power and musculature and the calm waters.

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The natural tones of the land, water and sky in Camargue, framed against the horses’ pure coloring, created an environment that enhanced their majesty.

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The Camargue horse’s large, expressive eyes are one of their most striking characteristics. As they look at you, they seem to see deeply into your soul. Their defined, muscular makeup and nearly white coloring coupled with the rich coloring of their eyes gives them a fantastical appearance.

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COVER FEATURE

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The horses range freely in Camargue’s marshy delta. The hierarchies and relationships within the herds are apparent in nearly all of the horses’ interactions. I found myself able to identify the leaders quite easily as they galloped through their watery landscape.

WANT MORE? ON THE WEB: To see Drew Doggett’s Camargue images, visit drewdoggett.com/collection/bandrebels-white-horses-camargue/.

ON VIDEO: Get an inside look at gardian Pierre Pages’ life among the horses in the short film Band of Rebels at chronofhorse.com/article/camargue-horses, featuring an original score composed by Oscar and Grammy winner Christopher Ward.

MEET THE ARTIST: Drew Doggett will attend a Nov. 11 reception at the Tryon International Equestrian Center’s Legends Club for a showing of the images and Band of Rebels film. The reception, from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. in Mill Spring, N.C., is open to all. The images will be on display at the Legends Club through mid-December.

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PROFILE

Jane Smiley Still Horse Crazy After All These Years

By JENNIFER B. CALDER

P

Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Jane Smiley opens her laptop to read me a passage from a yet-to-be published book.

We’re chatting over breakfast at the kitchen island of her artfully eclectic home, which lies in the foothills of a mountain overlooking Carmel Valley in Northern California. Ten hours earlier we sat at this same island with her husband, Jack Canning, and chatted over the dinner she prepared for us, complete with a homemade apple pie.

On the walls, a history of her travels are told through art: framed quilts from her years living in Iowa, a print of foxhunters from a shop in London, mixed media pieces from Mexico. Family photos

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PHOTO COURTESY OF JANE SMILEY

After winning a Pulitzer 25 years ago, she celebrated by buying a horse, a decision that enhanced her life and inspired her writing.

decorate the mantel, and on the brick hearth below lean copies of her recently completed trilogy The Last Hundred Years.

A once-functional urinal in the hall bathroom has been reimagined as display for a potted plant, and voodoo dolls of George Bush and Dick Cheney are stuck full of pins in “the altar”—a niche filled with more art and tchotchkes including plaster penises made by her youngest of three children, Axel, 23, when he was young. “I am hoping they are selfportraits,” she deadpans.

Dogs Frieda, Abby and Fallon mill around the kitchen, seeking pats from us.

Fallon, a sprite 13-year-old Jack Russell, was born at Santa Anita Racetrack and

named after jockey Kieren Fallon.

Strikingly tall with shoulder length wispy blond hair, glasses and an open, happy face, Smiley hunches over her computer and in a bemused voice reads the exploits of her latest protagonist, Paras.

Paras is a horse who can talk. She has a purse and lives in Paris and has a new friend, a dog named Frieda, who can also talk. But only in English. The humans in the tale speak only French, and the book is inspired by French literature. I will leave it at that. But I can say the non-speaking Paras is also a protagonist in Smiley’s nonwriting life, living at a ranch a few miles from where we sit.

Horses have appeared in several

KEITH PHILPOTT/GETTY IMAGES PHOTO

Jane Smiley has been a lifelong horse lover, someone who can identify and appreciate the character of each animal.

of Smiley’s books, both fictional and nonfictional, starting with her debut novel Barn Blind in 1982, and just as horses have been interwoven in her writing, they have also been in her life.

Pony Passion

Smiley grew up in St. Louis as the only child of a single mother. Her father was schizophrenic, and her parents divorced when she was a year old. Smiley had little future contact with him afterward, and he died in 1982.

“That side of my family is very crazy,” she dismisses with a shrug of her shoulders.

Smiley’s mother, Frances, was born in

Idaho and raised in Texas and Illinois and worked for various newspapers.

“She was quite dynamic for her day and age,” explains Jane. “She was determined to have a career so she joined the [Women’s Army Corps] and went into the Army for four years. She worked for the Army newspaper and lived in Paris. It was pretty glamorous.”

She would meet Jane’s father, James Smiley, also in the Army, during this stint and parlayed her experience into a career at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.

“She was the woman’s page editor and covered fashion but also got to interview people, like Katherine Hepburn,” Jane says.

“She’d put on a couple of fashion shows

every year and got to travel to New York.

“We lived in this dump, but they put her up at places like the Waldorf,” she says, chuckling before adding, “And she dressed perfectly.”

Midway between the small, modest house she shared with her mother and her grandparents’ house a few blocks away was a place that offered pony rides.

“It was about as big as this living room,” Jane says, gesturing behind us.

“With six or seven ponies in standing stalls at the far end of this little maze. So they’d sit you on the pony, strap you in, and you’d trot through the maze three or four times. I screamed to go to the pony rides all the time, and because it was right

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PROFILE

PHOTO COURTESY OF JANE SMILEY

there on the corner, she could The Mind Of A Novelist not not drive past it.”

A spring break trip to London Jane was hooked, as she during her senior year of high would later write in in her school cemented this desire.

2004 nonfiction book, A Year “When I came home, At The Races: Reflections On for my senior paper, I wrote Horses, Humans, Love, Money about my trip to England. I And Luck: “Fascination with enjoyed writing, so I decided horses predated every other to just keep at it,” she says. single thing I knew. Before “My mother always had I was a mother, before I was the typewriter out, and a writer, before I knew the her aspiration was to be a facts of life, before I was a novelist. She wrote a couple schoolgirl, before I learned to of books, but I just don’t read, I wanted a horse.” know if she had the mind of Pony rides sufficed for a a novelist. Maybe she was while, and then her mother too trained as a reporter? I took a business trip to New don’t know, but I knew that York where she met a man, a writer was a good thing to also staying at the Waldorf be. So when I got to college and also from St. Louis. at Vassar [N.Y.], I took They married as Jane creative writing.” was entering sixth grade and Over Christmas of her the family moved to a fancy sophomore year, Jane visited suburb. Her mother would Yale University (Conn.), have two more children which was considering when Jane was 12 and 14, going co-ed. but her stepfather passed Jane Smiley’s first horse, an off-the-track Thoroughbred called “I went down to check away from a heart attack Rivertown Gal, died from a fall out foxhunting when Jane was a it out and see if I should apply. seven years after their wedding. teenager.

On the Friday of my week there Meanwhile, Jane had the I saw a guy on the cover of the opportunity to take riding Yale Daily News with a basketball in his lessons. “I took saddle seat because When Jane turned 14, she finally got hands,” she says. “And he was darling! He there was a barn maybe 2 miles from her own horse, a 7-year-old, off-the-track was really cute. So I found out where he our house. I did that until eighth grade Thoroughbred named Rivertown Gal. But lived and knocked on his door. He turned when a friend told me I should join on a Thanksgiving hunt with Bridlespur out to be just the way you think. He was Pony Club, so she coached me and I Hunt Club, Rivertown Gal fell over a jump a nice looking, smart, intellectual, athletic joined. But my mother wouldn’t buy me and had to be euthanized two days later. boy who never had a date in his life. So any outfits for my first Pony Club rally. I “We had just jumped a fence, and this was like the best thing that ever had to wear my saddle seat show outfit,” it was muddy, and she just slipped and happened to him.” she says laughing. “The judge didn’t hold broke her stifle. I was in 10th grade. It She didn’t transfer to Yale but ended it against me.” was very sad. I feel it was really sad,” up marrying the taller-than-her basketball Her school, rather than the typical Jane says quietly. player John Whiston in 1970 before her hermit crabs or guinea pigs, had a pony She continued to ride during her last senior year. After graduating in 1971, they with a committee of students who two years of high school, but another hitchhiked around Europe, Jane writing alternated caring for it. passion was emerging: writing.

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and Whiston lugging her portable typewriter in his backpack.

When they returned to the States, they settled in Iowa City, where Whiston had been accepted for postgraduate work. Jane decided to study medieval literature. She received her Ph.D. in 1978 following a stint in Iceland on a Fulbright scholarship to study the sagas and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1976, but by this time, her first marriage had ended.

“We were together about 2 ½ years, and it was pretty clear we were moving in different directions. He was a basketball-playing-Marxist-medievalhistorian from Casper, Wyoming, who went to high school with Dick Cheney,” she says laughing. “He is unique!”

The two remains friends to this day.

Upon her return to Iowa City from Iceland she decided to write a novel. “I knew I wanted to write this book about Greenland [her well-received novel The Greenlanders, inspired by the Icelandic sagas, was published in 1988], but I also knew I had to practice.”

Jane thought back to a show barn where she’d worked five years earlier.

“I thought, ‘OK, here is a good selfcontained subject for a book,’ ” she says.

The result was her first published novel, Barn Blind, a family tragedy of an ambitious horsewoman. By the time it was published in 1980, she was remarried to William Silag, a history professor.

They had two daughters, Phoebe, now 37, and Lucy, 34.

Barbara Grossman, who has been a friend of Jane’s since they were in their 20s and at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, found her career in publishing and edited Barn Blind.

“I am not a horse girl, but it’s a very perfect little novel,” she says, “and when you think of it as a first novel, it’s

Winning A Pulitzer

When Jane Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres, she was four months pregnant with her son Axel.

“So while it was exciting, it was more like a glancing blow,” she says. “Michael Cunningham and I shared our experiences on this because when he won, he suddenly got all these invitations to go here, there and everywhere, and I got them too, but I didn’t take them because I was pregnant. So I stayed home and received lot of flowers.”

Did it give her a sense of validation? “The book I felt validated about was The Greenlanders because it got great reviews when it came out and was a semi-big deal even though it didn’t win any prizes,” she says. “That book said to me: A) I can do whatever I want, and B) I’ve arrived. To get the Pulitzer was a great and cool thing, but it didn’t feel like I was being yanked up out of nowhere. I remember saying that when you get the Pulitzer you go from having been a ‘wannabe’ to a ‘has been’ because in some ways you aren’t cool anymore. The establishment has kind of given you the stamp of approval, and so you’re not one of those cool writers living in the Village.”

extraordinary. It was a lot of fun to work on, and she got great reviews.”

From the beginning, she was drawn to Jane as a friend. “I was just smitten,” she says. “I was completely smitten. I grew up in that East Coast bubble, and there I was, in the middle of Iowa, in the middle of the United States feeling very foreign for the first time in my life in my own country, and she seemed like the most unusual creature I’d met out there yet, so I reached out to her, and we became best buddies.”

Tick Tock

Great reviews eventually evolved into the ultimate prize for writing when, in 1992, Jane won a Pulitzer for A Thousand Acres.

(The family tragedy inspired by King Lear was also made into a film starring Jessica Lange and Michelle Pfeiffer.)

Although she hadn’t owned a horse or ridden since high school, Jane, then 43, celebrated by buying one near her second home in Northern Wisconsin. (Her primary home at the time was in Ames, Iowa.)

“My son was 9 months old or so, and I was driving around in the woods looking for a house that sold children’s toys that were, allegedly, fancy,” she says. “I came upon this stable and asked the couple who owned it if they gave lessons. The woman said yes, and at that exact moment Axel’s toe touched the electric fence and, ‘AHHHHHH!’ ” Jane lets out a howl.

When she showed up the next day for her lesson a new horse had just arrived.

“There was a giant, great big white horse who had just come in,” she says. “He looked at me and started whinnying to me. I said, ‘I’ll take him.’ ” She named him Tick Tock, for the ticking of biological clocks, nicknamed him “Mr. T,” and evented with him.

This did more than reignite a passion for riding; it also inspired her work.

“His registered name was Terson.

I sent off to the Jockey Club for his pedigree. They sent me pages and pages of his racing records. He had been born in Germany, raced in France, raced on

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CHRISTINE & TED TCHIR/PHOTO, DBA HORSE STUDIO

PROFILE

After winning a Pulitzer Prize, Jane Smiley rewarded herself by purchasing Tick Tock, or “Mr. T,” with whom she evented—and who inspired her next novel.

the East Coast, raced on the West Coast, raced in Chicago,” she says, smacking her hand on the island with each statement.

“That was the inspiration for Horse Heaven [published in 2000]. I saw all the places he had been and thought, ‘This horse is more sophisticated than I am!’ ” she confesses laughing.

Room To Roam

Jane has always envisioned an unusually ambitious overview for her career. She’s not one to pick a genre 64 NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2016

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and a voice and stick with it.

“She is the hardest working writer I have ever worked with, bar none,” says Grossman. “Not only do publishers want an author who can deliver a book every 18 months, but they want—because it’s what their readers want—a book just like the last one. The push you always get is to repeat the success of the past, but she was never interested in that. I mean, Jane knew, when she was writing her first novel, what the next 10 major novels she was writing were going to be. She talked

about it all the time. Not one of them has been like the one before.

“She is unusual,” she adds. “And it’s really challenging. It’s challenging for her readers, it’s challenging for her publishers, but there was never a choice for Jane.

She’s not good at limiting. Jane needs a lot of room to roam, and she’s had an extraordinary run of it.”

For Jane, writing in various genres was less a self-imposed challenge and more for fun. “It’s just curiosity and liking to read,” she says. “I love to read, and the books I

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PROFILE

JENNIFER B. CALDER PHOTO

read make me think, bit, and wanted to ‘Hmmm…what return. They chose would I do?’ ” Carmel Valley for the In addition to an horse culture. astonishing oeuvre “We came to with books written look around, and in every major genre every place we as well as several walked into, the nonfiction works grocery store, the bar, (see sidebar), she’s they were talking contributed countless about horses so I articles to The New said, ‘OK! This is the York Times, The New place,’ ” she says.

Yorker, Harpers, She bought a The Guardian, The mare by Big Spruce Huffington Post, Vogue that same year on and on and on, as well Valentine’s Day. as a children’s book.

“When they “I decided I pulled her out she was going to write had a beautiful trot, a tragedy, comedy, and when we took romance, epic, her back to her stall, Jane Smiley’s fourth husband, real estate developer Jack Canning, inspired her novel Good Faith. and so I did all those,” she turned and put her head she says. “Then I got all right on my shoulder. So the paperwork on Mr. how could I resist, right?” she From Observer To T and saw all the places he’d been says with a chuckle.

Participant and thought, ‘Wow! This is really She bred this new broodmare, Mr. T also shares the blame for Jane’s interesting, and nobody has really Biosymmetree, and named the resulting foray into breeding and racing her own written about horse racing in about 30 colt Jackie. Thus Jane found herself horses when he dumped her over a jump, years.’ Then I was driving down the road entering the world of horse racing in and she broke her leg. listening to NPR, and some guy used 1999. A track veterinarian she had She was divorced from her second the expression ‘spit the bit.’ I thought, consulted during the writing of her book husband and married to her third, Steve between that and the paperwork for Mr. introduced her to trainer Eddie Gregson Mortensen, with whom she had Axel.

T there was a horse racing novel that at Santa Anita.

“I was ensconced in my bed in Ames needed to be written, so he really was Jane would keep her horses with him for a really long time and was reading the inspiration for Horse Heaven.” and his assistant trainer, Alexis Barba.

Blood-Horse. Axel must have been about 2 In that book, Jane combined the When Gregson committed suicide, years old,” she says. “I was reading about various genres.

Barba took over his barn, and the two the stallion, Big Spruce. I actually went “I decided that every horse at the track became friends. Jane kept a small string to see him at one point when I was in was going to represent a particular literary of homebreds with her over the years and Kentucky, doing an amble around horse genre, so there will be a comic horse, a documented this in A Year At The Races. farms. He was too old to breed by that tragic horse, an epic horse, a romantic Of Jane as an owner, Barba shares, point, but he was beautiful.” horse, but also a realistic horse and a meta“Oh she was the absolute best! She’s a Life intervened, and the family moved fictional horse,” she says with a laugh. little bit more of a ‘horse identifier,’ just to California in 1996. Mortensen was And Mr. T has a cameo as a track like in her books. Her interest in the from Iowa, had lived in California for a pony. psychology of a horse is her greatest 66 NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2016

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Jane Smiley’s Oeuvre

Fiction:

• Early Warning • Some Luck • Private Life • Ten Days In The Hills • Good Faith • Horse Heaven • The All-True Travels And Adventures Of Lidie Newton • Moo • A Thousand Acres • Ordinary Love And Good Will • The Greenlanders • The Age Of Grief • Duplicate Keys • At Paradise Gate • Barn Blind

Nonfiction:

• The Man Who Invented The Computer • Thirteen Ways Of Looking At The Novel • A Year At The Races • Charles Dickens • Catskill Crafts

For Young Adults: • • • • •

Gee Whiz Pie In The Sky True Blue A Good Horse The Georges And The Jewels

Children’s Books: • Twenty Yawns

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strength. She just sits back and watches their every move and really gets into the horse’s head.”

Jane wants to know her horses, learning their personalities and quirks.

She approaches horses as a novelist and delights in using animal communicators to fill in the gaps, although, she confesses, “I kept using them, not because I necessarily believed it, but because everything was so funny! Like Mr. T is trilingual and understood German, French and English. But he would also say things like he wanted 25 pounds of carrots a day.”

It’s unclear in which language he asked.

Be Flexible

Although Jane once owned more than 19 horses (“I stopped counting. I was terrified to count,” she confesses) sprinkled between the track, breeding shed, riding barn and in retirement, she is now down to four. She’s no longer in the racing business and stopped competing a few years ago.

After Jackie’s time at the track (a mere three days as he sustained a small injury), he and Jane had some success in the show ring.

“I stopped jumping him though because he was spooky. When he spooks, he drops down and away and would drop me fast. I decided I was too old, and he was too quick for me, and I just couldn’t risk it, so I stopped jumping,” she says.

Jackie, now retired at almost 20, lives nearby. Her older mare, Kiss Me, is on loan to a family member in Tennessee as a broodmare, but she still rides her former race horses Paras (whose registered name is Perestroika, the change in vowels in her nickname is a nod to Barba, whose maiden name is Paras) who is 11, and Ned Page, 9.

“My younger horse Ned still shows 68 NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2016

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PHOTO COURTESY OF JANE SMILEY

PROFILE

Jane Smiley’s husband Jack Canning shares a snuggle with Jane’s foal Hornblower in 1998.

but with his trainer. I decided that the ones with talent had suffered enough from my desire to show them” she jokes. “And so I thought I’d give this one a chance to actually be ridden by someone who knew what they were doing.”

And trainer Sam Reid-Scanlan does.

Her grandfather, P.D. Reid, won the Maryland Hunt Cup in 1953 aboard Third Army.

You can most often find Jane riding Paras, often with dressage trainer and friend Ellen Eckstein.

“Her greatest strength as a horsewoman,” says Eckstein, “is her ability to understand the individuality of each of her horses. She is very creative. Each horse has a different program. She tries to place her horses where they will excel and

lead happy and productive lives. She’s very open-minded. She is a horse lover through and through.”

Eckstein and Jane ride with natural horsemanship guru Ray Berta, described

by Jane as a “zen cowboy.” Jane found a way to share his methods with a larger audience through her young adult series, The Georges And The Jewels.

“He’s why I wanted to write the Abby books [the main character is a 14-yearold girl named Abby] because I wanted someone to talk about the way training should be done,” she says.

On whether her two passions share any similarities Jane pauses thoughtfully before answering. “I am not at all nervous about writing. I’m not, and I don’t know why that is, and I never have been.

PHOTO COURTESY OF JANE SMILEY

Jane Smiley’s son Axel gives her first homebred, Jackie, a kiss on the nose in this photo from 1997.

“But,” she confesses, “I am nervous about riding even though I don’t do anything dangerous anymore, but the thing they share—and what I have learned from writing and riding—is to be flexible.

To just wait and see what happens.”

Rising Above The Bullshit

While her professional life and horse addiction continued unabated over the years, her personal life hit another bump when Mortensen left her for their dental hygienist when Axel was 4.

Was she devastated?

“I was. I was,” she repeats.

“But I had a horse at the same time as Mr. T who had an injury, and there was not cross-ventilation, so I needed a

window put in,” she says.

Enter Canning, her fourth husband.

“There weren’t even any other boyfriends!” she admits, laughing, of her multiple trips down the aisle. “If you like me enough to date me, let’s just get married!”

They were together for more than 13 years before tying the knot in 2010 for legal reasons. “We decided we’ll try it, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll go back to living in sin,” she jokes.

Canning, a former real estate developer with two adult children and three amicable divorces of his own, became inspiration for another novel, Good Faith, about the deregulation of the housing market.

“Jane loves men,” says Grossman.

“She probably loves men more than any woman I know and always wanted one around. All these relationships were really solid relationships and continue to be really solid relationships because she rises above the bullshit that everyone else sinks into. She doesn’t have a vindictive or unhappy bone in her body.

She’s got that weird, kind of Midwestern equanimity. None of her relationships were bad until they ended and weren’t even that bad as they ended.”

Need more proof? In The Golden Age trilogy, she writes: “This trilogy is dedicated to John Whiston, Bill Silag, Steve Mortensen and Jack Canning with many thanks for decades of patience, laughter, insight, information, and assistance.”

Jane adds, “I think I saw, on Facebook or something, a question about, ‘What is your real age?’ The age when you actually stop developing? And I have to say that girl,” and she points to a black-and-white framed photo on the fireplace mantel of herself with Rivertown Gal at the age of 14.

“I got my first horse, I was 6'1" and sort of came into my real self, and I really never changed. I continued to want dogs, horses and a boyfriend. That’s all!” she jokes laughing. “My kids may be sorry to hear that!”

Never Deny The Mundane Jane is now a grandmother to Phoebe’s daughter, Veronica, 18 months.

Phoebe and her husband live outside of Washington, D.C., and she works at the Brookings Institute. Lucy is also married and works in publishing in New York City, with only Axel being closer to home in Los Angeles.

On motherhood she shares, “It was never something I sought or didn’t seek.

I just thought it was totally natural.

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PROFILE

PHOTO COURTESY OF JANE SMILEY

Everyone I knew mundane,’ ” she adds. “ had kids. There were ‘They won’t know what kids everywhere. I is important.’ That was enjoyed it, although really good advice: Don’t it was frustrating in sweat the small stuff.” some ways. I have just None of her children started working on shared her passion for another nonfiction book horses, although Axel called Five Mothers, had a pony for a while. and it’s about my “I remember when I great-grandmother, won the Pulitzer, I said my grandmother, to my daughter, ‘What my mother, me and do you want?’ and she my daughter and the said, ‘I want a Chanel evolution of what it suit.’ She was 6,” she means to be a mother.” says, and we both laugh.

Jane considers herself “She said, ‘What fortunate to have raised do you want?’ and I her children, for at least said, ‘I want a horse.’ a chunk of their lives, in So we should have been Iowa. flipped,” says Jane.

“One of the parts We’re still sitting at of it being a land-grant the kitchen island as the college was they had a sun begins to burn off the As Jane Smiley writes in A Year At The Races, “Fascination big child developmental early morning fog when with horses predated every other single thing I knew. Before I was a school and a fabulous daycare,” she she looks up from reading Paras mother, before I was a writer, before I knew the facts of life, before I was a schoolgirl, before I learned to read, I wanted a horse.” says. “The girls would go to the In Paris and gasps, “Oh shit!” and daycare, we’d go to the grocery snaps her laptop closed. We’re late store across the street and walk to meet Scanlon at the barn. home. It was totally easy, and they liked the Grossman particularly recalls two We travel the few miles to Holman daycare because they were all up to date on great pieces of childrearing advice Ranch, where the nonfictional Paras lives the best methods because of the college.” from Jane. “One was, ‘Never overpraise with Jackie and Ned. Grossman bore witness to all this: children.’ She felt we East Coasters were Horses and writing—the same world “She was my first intimate encounter with always throwing ourselves on the ground Jane Smiley has inhabited since she was a a kind of Midwestern, WASP kind of and writhing in ecstasy every time the child—continues. motherhood. I was a nice Jewish girl from kids crayoned the right color in the right “I like it. I don’t do anything else,” Philadelphia, and she is the furthest thing square,” she says. she says of her prolific career, as she sends from a Jewish mother you will encounter.

“The other was, ‘Never deny them Paras around the ring at a trot. “I go ride a She has an almost Apollonian approach to the mundane,’ which was in reference horse for an hour and a half, and I write.” child raising, which is: She makes them, to doing that classic grocery store thing Watching her horse move in circles breastfeeds them and sends them out into when the kid keeps screaming for a around us she adds with a laugh, “Paras, the world. She’s not a hoverer, she’s not a candy bar. Jane would simply pick the like all curious females, is complex. I worrier and, unlike most of the parents of candy bar up and shove it in the kid’s keep saying that we’ll be in the Olympics my parents’ generation and our generation, mouth,” she recalls laughing. together when she is 25 and I am 80, and she’s not invested in her children in what “I would just stare at her, and she’d they don’t make me sit the trot. I get a they reflect back on her.” say, ‘Barbara, never deny them the special dispensation for old age.”

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LIFE BETWEEN THE EARS Seeing The World With

“Life Between The Ears” Contributors to the “Life Between The Ears” social media accounts transport us to the world’s most interesting and beautiful places—all viewed from the saddle.

EMMA WHITE/@TRAVELS_ON_HORSEBACK PHOTO

MEKNES, MOROCCO Emma White lives in London and rides weekly but doesn’t own a horse. She’s a visual effects artist in the movie industry; she’s worked on films such as Mission Impossible and Wonder Woman. Once or twice a year, she treats herself to an equestrian vacation.

“My equestrian escapes are my antidote to working long hours on a computer all day long,” she said. “I always try to go on a different ride each time.”

So far, White has been on rides in the United Kingdom, Greece, Spain, Jordan, Morocco, Brazil, Mexico, Botswana, South Africa, Italy, Portugal, Bulgaria and the United States.

This photo was taken on a ride from Meknes to Fez in Morocco.

“The horse in the photograph is an Arabian-Barb called Ramlia owned by the stables in Meknes,” White said.

“She was my horse for the week of the trail ride. She was so sure-footed, with amazing stamina.”

The ride encompassed Roman ruins, fruit and olive groves, and the Dead Valley desert. “I go somewhere new each time. Each memory is so special, as I may never visit that place again!” White said.

Meknes is one of four Imperial cities of Morocco—Morocco’s four historical capital cities, which also include Fez, Marrakesh and Rabat— and was founded in the 11th century.

It’s considered the agricultural capital of Morocco, producing olives, peaches, nectarines, prunes, apples, potatoes, onions and garlic. It’s also home to many dairy farms.

AMY MARCH SMITH/@AMYMARCHSMITH PHOTO

MENORCA, SPAIN Amy March Smith lives in Farnborough, Hampshire, England, and took this photo while enjoying a guided ride on holiday in Menorca, Spain. She balanced her iPad, backpack and reins to get this shot of the coastline of the island in the Mediterranean Sea. Menorca actually has its own breed of horses, the Menorquín, which are predominantly black. They are a centerpiece of the June festival Festes de Sant Joan, honoring John the Baptist.

At home in England, Smith recently graduated from high school and is working as an apprentice at a riding school and livery yard. “I hope to learn all about the ‘horsey world,’ as my parents are non-horsey, so it has always been a struggle to get involved with horses and convince them to let me have lessons,” Smith said. “I have been riding for seven years, since I was 9 years old. I hope to have a career with horses in the future!” She also has a passion for photography.

Smith currently half-leases Tommy, a 6-year-old New Forest gelding who was rescued from slaughter. “When I first rode Tom, he instantly took a disliking to me and proceeded to run out of the school to try to chuck me off!” Smith said. “The following days, he did the same. Again and again, I got on, and I ended up on the floor. I don’t know why I didn’t stop, but I’m so glad I stuck with him.”

After his ulcers were discovered and treated, Tommy reformed into a solid citizen for Smith.

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UMA MENCIA/@UMA1104 PHOTO

LIFE BETWEEN THE EARS

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FRANCESCA BELON/@FRANCB07 PHOTO

AREQUIPA, PERU Francesca Cavallero Belon is a veterinary student in Arequipa, Peru. She also breeds Peruvian horses, Lusitanos and Quarter Horses. Here she was trail riding on Bella, a Quarter Horse-Arabian cross.

The photo was taken at an oasis in the desert outside Arequipa, which is Peru’s second most populous city.

The Andes Mountains border Arequipa to the north and the east, while the southern and western edges of the city are ringed by foothills.

MONGOLIAN STEPPES Originally from the Basque Country of northern Spain, Uma Mencia is now pursuing her master’s in Arab studies at Georgetown University (D.C.). She’s a professional endurance rider who has ridden with the Al Aryam Endurance Team out of Dubai since 2008.

In 2015, Mencia completed the Mongol Derby, a 1,000-kilometer race across the Mongolian steppes that is billed as the longest, toughest horse race in the world. She rode 28 horses during the race, covering 18 to 25 miles on each segment. “All I know about this horse are the kilometers we spent together across the steppes and all the things he made me feel,” she said.

Mencia has ridden mostly Arabian horses, but for the Mongol Derby she was mounted on native Mongolian horses. “I was greatly surprised by the strength, endurance and bravery of these little—in stature only—horses,” Mencia said. “They are constantly aware of their surroundings, looking for the best terrain, making sure they do not step in holes, and in general are very generous ponies.

“This picture was taken in the middle of the Mongolian steppe,” she continued. “It was the third day of the race, and we were about to reach the Urtu (the camp) where we were going to spend the night to continue our journey, hosted by a Mongolian family who would take care of us and our horses. I will never forget their hospitality. I am still deeply moved by the experience, and I often find myself thinking of the time when I will have the opportunity to go back to Mongolia to keep learning from their culture of horsemanship.

“A note on the terrain,” she added. “As you can see in the picture, the terrain is quite bumpy. It was quite tricky indeed to navigate, for it was deceiving. While it may look like beautiful green grass from far away, it is very irregular, and it required a slow pace, for the horses would stumble easily while trying to cross it. Apparently, this is something that happens when a place that would usually be filled with water dries. The mud solidifies, and grass grows on it, resulting in these inconvenient yet beautiful shapes.”

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MARYAM AL-MAHMOUD PHOTO

ZEKREET BEACH, QATAR Maryam Al-Mahmoud is a surgeon living and working in Zekreet, Qatar. She’s ridden for 22 years and originally dreamed of breeding Arabian show horses.

This photo was taken between the ears of Vivaldi, a Swedish Warmblood mare she’s owned for a year. “Qatar is surrounded by beautiful sea on three borders, and Zekreet is one of the most beautiful locations,” Al-Mahmoud said. “This beach is close to our stables. It was the first ride out to the sea for Vivaldi and me. She loved the water and even chased away a flock of flamingos.

“I believe in love at first sight,” Al-Mahmoud continued. “I still remember when I first laid eyes on my Vivaldi. She is a one-person horse; that is what I love most about her. She has healed my broken heart. She has changed me to the point that I’m now hooked on warmbloods and traveled to Germany to buy another warmblood. I plan to compete her and the new horse in show jumping.”

Al-Mahmoud also owns two Arabian stallions that compete in hand and under saddle.

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T.E. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA TRAIL, JORDAN Kim Bergman is an avid polo player who plays from December to March in Indio, Calif., then trailers her mounts home to Vashon Island, Wash., for a few months of rest.

This photo was taken during a month-long trip Bergman took to Egypt and Jordan. She was fascinated by the horses of Egypt.

“The horses, all of them Arabian, are incredibly versatile and even-tempered despite nothing being gelded, and everyone eating freshly picked alfalfa,” said Bergman.

“On the flip side, the majority of working animals I saw would probably have a body condition score close to 3, as would their owners. They [horses, donkeys, camels] are an integral part of the socioeconomic system in Egypt.”

After 10 days in Egypt, Bergman went to Jordan, where horses are seen much less. “Horses take a lot of food and water—luxury items in the desert,” Bergman said.

She and her group rode mules to see some monuments and temples, and when they traveled to Wadi Rum, a valley carved into a granite and sandstone landscape, they leased horses from a professional outfitter.

“Fortunately, my husband was reading Lawrence In Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly And The Making Of The Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson, so being sidetracked into the moonscape of Wadi Rum wasn’t a hard sell to the non-equestrian,” Bergman said. “We slapped on our rental bike helmets and surged ahead, me undoubtedly more eager than he.

Our Bedouin guide, Mohammad, rode what you might expect from a Middle Eastern Arabian endurance horse: a lean, leggy, gorgeous gray mare who was in constant motion, even at a standstill.”

Wadi Rum is also known as the Valley of the Moon.

T.E. Lawrence was a British colonial officer who passed through the area multiple times during the Arab Revolt of 1917-18.

“I had a handsome gray, [translated as] Silver Wind, who was willing to keep up with Mohammad on his slippery mare,” Bergman said, “but he was well schooled enough to hold back and even walk at my husband’s pace. A quiet horse on vacations also allows you to drop the reins and take some pictures. I did get my moment to gallop through the Jordanian desert when my husband’s horse was held in check, so all was not lost. Hi-ho, Silver!”

KIM BERGMAN PHOTO

LIFE BETWEEN THE EARS

RICK DAHMS PHOTOS

Sharing Life Between The Ears

Since 2008, Life Between The Ears founder Kristine Dahms has posted stunning photos shot by riders in all corners of the world with one hand on the reins and the other on the shutter. Dahms mines photos with the hashtag #lifebetweentheears, contacts the original poster of the image, then features the photo, complete with educational details about the place that’s portrayed.

Life Between The Ears photos appear on a LBTE Facebook page, an Instagram feed, a dedicated website (lifebetweentheears.com), a Twitter feed and a Pinterest page (all under lifebetweentheears account names).

Dahms—who lives in Vashon, Wash., with her Welsh Cob, mini horse, pygmy goats, two dogs and two cats—rides dressage and takes quite a few photos herself on the picturesque Vashon-Maury Island.

Dahms has taken some of the Life Between The Ears images from cyberspace to print, creating three lines of greeting cards with selected photos from her social media pages. A portion of the proceeds from the card sales goes to the Equine Land Conservation Resource (elcr.org). Cards are available at lifebetweentheears.com/retail.

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FEATURE

Sarah Hansel

Is Pushing The Boundaries Of Possible From cross-country riding to cross-continental ultramarathons, she’s testing her limits and learning to enjoy the journey.

By SAR A LIESER

I

magine you’re running up a mountain. You’re soaking wet from a torrential downpour. You can’t see more than a few feet in front of you because you’re so high up you are actually inside the clouds. The wind is howling, and the temperature has dropped. Lightning is striking all around you. There’s no shelter, so all you can do is continue through this exposed mountain pasture, trying to outrun the storm.

Sound like a nightmare or a scene from some kind of survival adventure action film?

If you’re eventer and exercise rider Sarah Hansel, it’s just what you had to do to finish the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc.

This 105-mile endurance race is one of the most difficult in Europe and takes runners through the Alps in France, Italy and Switzerland for an elevation gain of about 33,000 feet. There’s a lottery to enter, and as many as 2,500 people start. The winning time was 22 hours this year, but about 60 percent of the 1,468 finishers took 40 hours or longer to complete it. The race has a cut-off of 46.5 hours.

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Hansel has ridden through the fourstar level, and she keeps a horse or two of her own to compete, but as a professional, she mostly does exercise riding and baby training these days.

“I’ve been doing a lot of young horses, the first 30 days or 60 days or 90 days with them, just getting them broke,” she said.

“Every day they’re learning something, and they’re progressing. There’s a lot of instant gratification with it.”

What would entice a 34-year-old horse trainer from Aiken, S.C., to undertake this madness?

Her fascination with running started in Australia in 2011. Hansel and her husband, race horse farm manager and younghorse trainer Pierce Buckingham, had moved there for six months to work for Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s Darley Thoroughbred operation.

“I normally would ride at the track, and then I would have a zillion other horses all day to ride, and I’d get home and be exhausted and go to bed,” said Hansel.

But in Australia she had more free time, so she and Buckingham went for a

MAINDRUPHOTO.COM PHOTO

Professional rider Sarah Hansel completed the Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc, one of the most difficult endurance runs in Europe, in just over 36 hours, putting her in 11th place for her age group.

sightseeing run on a trail along the cliffs next to the Great Ocean Road near Melbourne. “We ran about 19 kilometers (almost 12 miles), but I’d never run more than 4 miles in my life,” said Hansel.

“You could look back across the cliffs and see where we started. I thought that was the coolest thing in the world that you could see a couple miles away. It blew my mind that we had run that far. We got all excited, and two weeks after we got back we entered a half-marathon trail race.”

That trail race happened to also feature a 50k and a 50-miler. “I was like, ‘People run 50 miles? That’s so crazy,’ ” said Hansel. “And then I was like, ‘I’m going to come back and do it next year!’ ” She did, in fact, finish the 50k in 2012 and the 50-miler the following year at the North Face Endurance Challenge in Pine Mountain, Ga. “I had no idea people even ran more than marathons ever,” she said.

But Hansel is someone who likes to aim for the edge of her limits. So when she stumbled upon Internet video footage of Spanish endurance running

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“It changed what I perceived as possible for humans.”

— Sarah Hansel

PHOTO COURTESY OF SARAH HANSEL

superstar Kilian Jornet breaking the record at UTMB, she became obsessed.

“I’d never heard of a 100-mile race,” she said. “I was still wrapping my head around a 50k. I sat there for six hours and watched this guy run in the mountains. It blew my mind. It changed what I perceived as possible for humans.”

She immediately made UTMB her goal. But the facts that she has a full-time job riding horses and lives in Aiken, which is not known for its elevation, meant she had to get creative with her training.

“I did a lot of Stairmaster, which was god-awful,” she joked. “I would climb 4,500 steps, so 450 flights a day. And then I’d do the elliptical a little bit. I was working so much that I didn’t have a lot of time to go run.”

On the weekends, she’d finish riding by mid-morning on Saturday and then hop in her car with dogs Hailey and Gordy and drive four hours to the Black Mountains in North Carolina. There she would repeatedly run vertical Ks, which are trail runs with 1,000 meters of altitude gain. “I’d do repeats all weekend, which is really boring, but it’s pretty up there,” she said.

She admitted that most people probably do more preparatory work before attempting this kind of race. “That’s kind of what I can do with my schedule,” Hansel said. “I’m on my feet all day, so I think that helps, and being out in the heat and all that all day probably helps rather than sitting in the AC.” She ran three 100-mile races to qualify for UTMB: the Headlands Hundred (Calif.) and Pinhoti 100 (Ala.) in 2014 and then the Tahoe Rim Trail (Nev.) in 2015.

She left for Europe a few weeks early and invested in a Run the Alps tour, which let her preview the course over six days and provided her with accommodations, maps and emergency information.

“I’d never been over there, and I didn’t

The 105-mile Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc takes runners through the Alps in Switzerland, Italy and France.

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know how to organize everything or where the hospitals were or how everything worked,” she explained.

Race day began at 6 p.m. on Aug. 26 with a massive crowd at the start. “They play this amazing song [Vangelis’ ‘Conquest Of Paradise’],” Hansel said. “All the guys around me started crying. The spectators were crying. It was like we were being sent off to war.”

The runners stayed on roads for miles before hitting single-track trails. “We were running in the dark,” said Hansel. “You come into the first couple towns, and the entire town is out. There were probably 30,000 people out, cheering us on, ringing cowbells, blowing noisemakers and screaming for us.”

When she’d done the Alps tour, there was one turn she never found. During the race, she discovered why when the other runners took a left straight up a mountain. “The reason I hadn’t been able to find it was that it wasn’t a trail,” Hansel said. “We just bushwacked through the mud and rocks and snow, straight up through this mountain pass and straight down. I wasn’t prepared for that. I got a little frustrated.

“But in retrospect it was really cool,” she continued. “We did it in the middle of the night. All the stars were out.

They call them the pyramids—there were these huge rock slabs that look like pyramids on either side of you.”

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BARRY BORNSTEIN PHOTOGRAPHY PHOTO

Sarah Hansel gallops race horses and starts baby horses in Aiken, S.C.

the storm and the second night. “I’ve never been out for two nights,” she said.

“If I get less than eight hours of sleep I get grumpy.”

But she turned those difficulties into advantages. “People were dropping out

“It was like we were being sent off to war.”

— Sarah Hansel

like flies,” Hansel said. “They either waited out the storm or got to the second night and didn’t want to do it anymore. I just kept going and let other people make mistakes and fall behind me.”

While many of the runners around Hansel were sponsored and sported high-end mountaineering gear, she ran in a $30 pair of Montrails and $10 shorts and a t-shirt. She carried Lärabar energy bars with her and planned to eat at the aid stations along the way, but when she discovered they were serving conventional Continental fare such as bread, cheese and sausage, she decided to take a pass, subsisting on oranges and soup for most of the race.

“I kind of got to the point where my body didn’t want to eat anything,” Hansel said. “I could get liquid calories in,

BARRY KOSTER PHOTOGRAPHY PHOTO

An eventer through the advanced level, Sarah Hansel has learned to temper her ambitions when it comes to competing her horses. “Now I’m more focused on what the horse needs right then,” she said.

but I just didn’t want anything, so that was kind of hard.”

She listened to podcasts to pass the time, but even that proved tricky. “I was too tired to change my iPod, to press the button to go to a different podcast, so I listened to Joe Rogan do a podcast where he just talked to himself the whole time about aliens,” Hansel said. “I listened to it five times in a row because I just couldn’t get myself to get out the iPod and change it.

That’s what got me through the race. Joe Rogan going on about aliens.”

She finished in 36:08:51, which put her in 262nd overall and 11th in her age group.

Since 2012, Hansel has finished 20 endurance races longer than 30 miles as well as many shorter trail runs. She’s done well in most of them, but that doesn’t mean she’s planning to hang up her spurs anytime

soon and turn professional runner.

“The trail running for me—I like to win, and I’ve won a couple of races—but when things aren’t perfect you can still love it just by finding the little things to love and finding the beauty out there,” said Hansel.

That message has transferred to her riding, or maybe she learned it there in the first place. In 2008, she had to euthanize her horse The Quiet Man after a crash at the Rolex Kentucky Three-Day Event.

“Losing ‘Mikey’ definitely sort of broke my heart for the eventing,” she said.

The next two horses she got didn’t end up working out as upper-level mounts— one had a breathing problem, and the other preferred show jumping.

“I got them both to intermediate, and it was like forcing a square peg into a round hole,” Hansel said. “I finally got to a

point where I realized this isn’t what these horses want to do. I had to step back and do what was right for them.”

She blames herself for Mikey’s accident. “He went out there to please me,” she said. “It was complete selfishness that I asked him to do that. They’ll give and they’ll give and they’ll give. It has to be more about them and less about me. Less about my ambitions and more about what is actually right for them.”

In endurance running, she’s found a way to satisfy the crazy competitor inside her and yet also appreciate the moment.

“I used to be so go, go, go with the horses and trying to get them up the levels. Now I’m more focused on what the horse needs right then and what’s best,” she said. “Appreciating where they are at that moment and watching them learn as opposed to barging ahead.

“It’s the same with the trail running.

You can plow through a race and try to win it, but the best parts of it are…” she trails off and then tries to explain.

“When I was trying to get up the Col des Pyramides and bitching at the rocks and bitching at the mud, and feeling like this isn’t even a friggin’ trail—then I had to stop for a second and look up at the stars and look at the pyramids next to me and the string of lights from people’s headlamps below me,” she continued. “This is really friggin’ cool.

You need to just appreciate the awesome little things and the beauty around you. It’s the same with the horses.”

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FEATURE

The

Sidesaddle Mystique

The beauty and challenges of this centuries-old riding style still resonate with some modern riders.

MIDDLEBURG PHOTO

By CHRISTINA KEIM

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In the days when preserving a woman’s modesty was of the highest priority, straddling a horse was about the most unbecoming thing she could do. For centuries, riding sidesaddle was the norm for many female equestrians, although women weren’t always happy about it. As one equestrienne who had tried the man’s “cross-seat” style wrote wistfully to The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News in 1880: “Oh, no woman would ever be twisted and packed on to a sidesaddle again if she could help it, after once enjoying the ease and freedom, as well as complete control of her horse, which a man’s seat gives!”

But, in recent years, quite a number of thoroughly modern women are opting to ride aside. Maybe it’s the “Downton Abbey” effect. The wildly popular British television series about an aristocratic English family negotiating social change from the Edwardian era into the 1920s brought the formal beauty of sidesaddle into many American living rooms with thrilling sidesaddle hunting and racing scenes. Longtime sidesaddle riders say interest does seem to have increased since the show. And the style’s devoted practitioners are determined to preserve this old-school discipline’s elegance—without the gender politics—for future generations.

Some women rebelled against the sidesaddle as a form of oppression a century ago, but the old-school riding style is enjoying a resurgence today, as riders of all ages, like these with Ireland’s Meath Hunt, become inspired to keep the tradition alive.

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What To Wear?

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he attire of a sidesaddle rider is perhaps one of the most appealing aspects of the riding style. For riders interested in showing at the most elite competitions, a high level of detail is required in attending to dress and tack.

Rhonda Watts-Hettinger, an American Sidesaddle Association and American Riding Instructors Association certified instructor from Wilton, N.H., says that in the United States, a sidesaddle rider wears the same thing she would wear to ride astride from the waist up. For the lower half, traditional riding pants are appropriate, so long as they are of a conservative color.

“You then will add a sidesaddle apron over them,” says Watts-Hettinger. “Try to pick riding pants that match the color of your apron. For example, light breeches in dressage under a dark apron look quite suggestive.”

The sidesaddle apron (also called a skirt) has evolved throughout the centuries; initially, women sat on their voluminous skirts. This was uncomfortable, but, more importantly, it posed a significant safety risk should the rider fall. A modern sidesaddle apron looks like a full skirt while the rider is mounted, but the back side is cut off so that the rider is actually sitting on her breeches. Most skirts are made out of a heavy material like wool and are meant to coordinate with the rest of the rider’s ensemble.

Foxhunting attire is perhaps the most common; a well-appointed rider will be either appropriately formal or informal, including choker or stock tie. Formal attire is the most exacting and requires attention to details such as the color of the gloves, the vest and style of headgear. These standards also apply to arena-based hunt seat performance. A dressage rider would wear a dark blue or black short coat for fourth level and below; for the Fédération Equestre Internationale levels, a shadbelly worn over an apron is appropriate.

Riders in other disciplines, such as western or saddleseat, will also wear the same attire above the waist as they would to ride astride, but they would also wear a matching apron.

For schooling, many riders opt to wear regular breeches and forego the skirt. While some riders wear traditional tall boots, it is also acceptable to wear paddock boots. However, for certain types of show turnout, only tall boots are appropriate.

Sidesaddle’s overall look and appointments today—as illustrated here by a rider at a Potomac Hunt (Md.) meet last year—are much the same as they were in our great-greatgrandmothers’ days, and that’s part of its appeal, say modern sidesaddle devotees.

Sidesaddle riding dates back to at least the Middle Ages, though there are also depictions on Greek vases and Celtic stones of women being led while sitting aside. Advancements in riding technique, saddle construction and clothing design all meant that women could ride securely, even at speed or over fences, and thereby participate in most equestrian activities. Riding aside was the dominant manner in which women rode horses for nearly 400 years.

Fast forward to the early 20th century and the growth of the women’s liberation movement, which cast the sidesaddle as just one more way in which women were being oppressed. More and more women began donning jodhpurs or riding trousers, leaving leaping horns and riding skirts behind. Even Lady Mary Crawley, a prominent character in “Downton Abbey,” remarks, “I am dying to ride astride!” in one episode that also shows her riding sidesaddle in a point-to-point race.

Thanks to a dedicated and passionate cadre of modern women, the art and style of sidesaddle is still alive and well today. Numerous regional groups across the country provide a network of support for sidesaddle equestriennes who do everything from pleasure riding,

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“I am trying to show [that] what the ladies did years ago was amazing, and if we can only be half as brave and as good as them and what they achieved, they would be happy,” says renowned Irish rider Susan Oakes, shown here winning the inaugural Mrs. Miles Valentine Memorial Side Saddle Race at the Cheshire Hunt Point-to-Point (Pa.) earlier this year.

foxhunting, parades and historical reenactments to competition in dressage, eventing, hunters, western pleasure, saddleseat and even barrel racing, all with both knees to the left of their horses’ withers.

So what is it about riding aside that appeals to the modern, emancipated woman? “Riding sidesaddle is so beautiful,” said Maggie Johnston, who first began riding aside 10 years ago and now is the vice-president of the Side Saddle Chase Foundation. “[Women] worked so hard, so now we can have the choice of how we ride.”

Something Old, Something New

The sidesaddle community, though widely distributed, is tightly knit. With nearly 400 members, the U.S.based International Side Saddle Organization is perhaps the largest group of its type in the country. Charlotte Kneeland, who established the foundation in the late 1970s, was well educated on the culture and “ladylike” aspects of the discipline. According to current ISSO President Shelly Liggett, today’s members are now more oriented towards getting out and riding and less focused on being a “proper lady.”

But many modern riders still consider the sidesaddle

Mary Musheno, the highest-placed American rider in the new three-race Ladies’ Side Saddle Chase steeplechase series this year, is one of a new generation of riders taking up the challenge of riding aside.

style a particularly elegant and refined way to ride a horse, and they enjoy the dress as much as the challenge of riding aside. The correct attire or riding habit varies depending on the sport, but certain core principles remain consistent (see sidebar). Costumes run the gamut and can be as elaborate and creative as the rider’s imagination.

“There are quite a few of us who really like to dress up,” said Rhonda Watts-Hettinger, who has been riding sidesaddle since her 4-H days.

“Every 4-H show ended with a costume class,” said Watts-Hettinger. “I rode a little white Connemara, and with the aid of my grandmother’s old wedding dress, I became the ‘fine lady on a white horse.’ I started by just hooking my knee over an English saddle. Then we got a catalogue sidesaddle to make it more authentic.”

Maggie Herlensky, president of the 200-member American Sidesaddle Association, an umbrella group for local organizations, said ASA members are looking for a slice of Americana. But the “Downton Abbey” effect is also contributing to an increase in interest in riding aside. “We definitely get people who say they saw sidesaddle on the show, and now they want to try it,” said Herlensky, Bainbridge, Ohio.

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Winning Medals And Dares

LOIS D’ANNUNZIO PHOTO

While groups like ISSO and ASA provide some formal structure to the sidesaddle community, their At 15, Anne Moss walked into a Pony Club used tack members are a diverse group, and they have varying sale and saw her first sidesaddle habit. She had never seen motivations for choosing to ride aside. Some riders one before, never even seen anyone riding aside—but in compete, while others do not. Some riders only ride that instant, she knew she had to have it and had to try aside at particular events or outings, while for others sidesaddle riding. it’s their preferred style of riding. Many are lifelong “I begged my mom to buy it,” said Moss, who lives horsewomen who have been successful in their near Coatesville, Pa. “It came from out of the blue. I disciplines and who now seek a new challenge. desperately wanted to go “In a lot of cases, we are foxhunting aside.” not as young as we used to be,” Moss has done that and so Liggett, Branchburg, N.J., much more. A U.S. Equestrian acknowledges. “Sometimes Federation “r” dressage judge, we need to learn to take it Moss is one of just three riders down a notch.” to earn her U.S. Dressage While sidesaddle is Federation bronze medal riding typically considered a lady’s aside and is the only rider to discipline, each group does have received a silver medal have a few male members, doing so. But Moss didn’t many of whom do occasionally set out to be a sidesaddle ride aside. “After World War trendsetter. She had evented, I, many men came home foxhunted, and shown through missing a limb,” said Wattssecond-level dressage when Hettinger, the author of a friend mentioned that only several books about sidesaddle one person had ever gotten riding. “Riding aside meant a USDF bronze medal while that they could still function riding aside. on horseback and find work.”

“I didn’t even know what Today, there are riders that meant, but I thought, (both male and female) who ‘How hard can that be?’ ” Moss find sidesaddle easier on their said with a laugh. “You take joints or as a compensation all the principles of riding and for other debilitating injuries; “Even if you are just riding in modern sidesaddle apply them here. But it is a real some saddles are even attire, there is something about it that makes you challenge. It is definitely not designed to allow a rider to feel elegant,” says Rhonda Watts-Hettinger, shown taking a 4' log wall on Isaac at the New England Hunts’ easier than riding astride.” sit “offside,” with their legs on Championship Hunter Trials. “I think people do miss that in Moss said that she had the right instead of the morethe modern day.” to teach her horses to do the usual left. required movements with only What unites sidesaddle the use of the left leg, the right riders is a desire to try seat bone and a sturdy cane held on the right side. She had something new and different; to enjoy the pageantry to learn to use enough left leg to direct the horse without and elegance of a bygone era; and, often, to prove the doing so much that they went off their line. “You really Annie Oakley spirit that many sidesaddle riders have have to develop stability in the right seat bone,” said Moss. toward their ride-astride companions: “Anything you “Learning to use the right seat bone and keeping the right can do, I can do better!”

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Generations of female foxhunters have proven their ability to negotiate difficult country while riding aside, as Amory McMahon demonstrates on a day out with the Meath Hunt in Ireland.

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FEATURE “It got to the point of people saying, ‘I bet you couldn’t …’ So we would go try it.”

shoulder and elbow back appeals to modern becomes very important. riders, because it’s both And then there is the challenging and elegant. finesse in the timing of “Sidesaddle is like many the cane aid. You have to other hobbies, where learn to use it when you you try it once, and would use your right leg.” you either shrug your –Rhonda Watts-Hettinger Tempi changes were shoulders and walk away, a particular test. “You or you try it and you must train the horse to listen to your weight and the cane can’t get enough,” said Moss. “People seem to be either more than the leg,” said Moss. “Ultimately, I would raise one or the other—if you are into sidesaddle, you love it.” and lighten the inside rein to do the tempis. It became Moss and her husband also are avid historical reabout giving micro-aids.” enactment enthusiasts. “It really takes you back in time After she earned her bronze, it was the sidesaddle when you are in your habit and up on a sidesaddle, riding community that really encouraged Moss to continue around these historic estates,” said Moss. pushing and complete the requirements for the silver.

But the re-enactments are also about educating. War Today, she’s working towards her new goal: attaining re-enactments, for example, may feature educational her USDF gold medal aside. “I haven’t trained a horse lectures or demonstrations between the battles, and there yet,” said Moss. “People don’t really want to Moss often performs sidesaddle demonstrations in the lend you their established Grand Prix horse to go ride interludes and discusses sidesaddle history with the help sidesaddle.” of two or three other riders.

Moss, who also still foxhunts, believes sidesaddle Watts-Hettinger, an ASA and American Riding

An Unusual Aside: The Male Rider

A

s author and foxhunter Rita Mae Brown once said, “If the world were a logical place, men would ride sidesaddle.” But while many do consider sidesaddle exclusively a lady’s art, men have been known to try, and even become proficient at, riding aside.

During the Victorian era, it was considered fashionable for women to ride—but that didn’t mean they enjoyed it recreationally or had time to school their horses. Many cultured ladies were only taught to walk and canter—and only to the right—because these were the easiest skills to master. That left more serious schooling to someone else, and the job of keeping horses tuned up and well behaved for their genteel riders usually fell to the (male) grooms. There’s evidence that some grooms would ride aside with legs on the near, or left, side, as the female rider would, but also on the right side in order to help keep the horses even.

Many soldiers returned from World War I with missing limbs and other lower limb injuries. Sidesaddle enthusiasts maintain that some of these men were taught to ride aside upon their return, allowing them to continue to find work that required horsemanship skills. E.V.A. Christy, who wrote the 1932 book Cross Saddle and Side Saddle: Modern Riding for Men and Women, was an officially appointed military riding instructor during World War I who is credited with

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teaching amputees to ride aside.

Sidesaddle found a niche during World War II as well, when men rode aside as they laid field telephone cable, unwinding the cable from a drum off the back of a galloping horse. Riding aside meant their limbs were kept clear from the rapidly unspooling cable.

Today, men most frequently ride aside in a demonstration or “for fun” capacity. There are several male certified sidesaddle instructors and many a supportive partner who has been dragged into the sidesaddle fold. Perhaps the most famous recent example of a male sidesaddle rider, albeit temporarily, was 2016 U.S. Olympic eventing team member Boyd Martin, who gave aside a try in April when Irish sidesaddle rider Susan Oakes taught a clinic at his Windurra Farm in Cochranville, Pa. “I can promise you, from a professional rider’s point of view, that it’s nowhere as easy as it looks,” Martin said.

“It was the weirdest thing trying to figure out how to make your horse go straight and turn left and turn right,” he added. “I personally witnessed some sidesaddle riding when I was in England, and the ladies were jumping 4' hedges in sidesaddle. I thought it was impressive, but knowing what I know now, I may be even more blown away that they could do it.”

Instructors Association certified instructor, has done nearly every kind of riding in a sidesaddle, often on a dare.

“It got to the point of people saying, ‘I bet you couldn’t …’ ” said Watts-Hettinger. “So we would go try it.”

While riding sidesaddle, Watts-Hettinger has competed in hunters and jumpers, through training level eventing and fourth-level dressage, unsanctioned reining (the National Reining Horse Association rules don’t permit sidesaddle), competitive trail riding and even mounted shooting. She’s also foxhunted extensively and won the New England Field Hunter Championship, and she’s even ridden in three presidential inaugural parades.

“My current horse climbed Mt. Washington [in New Hampshire] sidesaddle [with me] wearing period attire,” said Watts-Hettinger.

Watts-Hettinger believes elegance is sidesaddle’s biggest appeal. “Modern-day life sort of lacks this,” Watts-Hettinger explains. “Even if you are just riding in modern sidesaddle attire, there is something about it that makes you feel elegant. I think people do miss that in the modern day.”

The Thrill Of The ’Chase

Johnston still remembers vividly the first time she saw a woman riding sidesaddle. “We were hacking in after a hunt,” she said. “Out of seemingly nowhere, a woman riding aside on a tall, leggy Thoroughbred mare with four white socks appeared. She trotted up to a fallen tree, [jumped it and] then cantered away afterwards. It simply took my breath away, and I knew I had to do it.”

That was more than 10 years ago, and Johnston’s passion for riding aside remains strong—and infectious. In 2013, she saw a Facebook post from the internationally renowned Irish sidesaddle rider Susan Oakes, who is perhaps best known for jumping 6'8" while riding sidesaddle. Oakes wanted to set a world record for the largest gathering of women riding aside, and her Facebook post was an open invitation for women from all over the globe to travel to Dublin for a special foxhunt. For Johnston, it was a must-do event.

In the end, 62 women from nine countries participated in the hunt, most on borrowed horses that Oakes arranged. The riders faced dramatic weather conditions including snow, sleet and ice, but they hunted for hours. It

PHOTO COURTESY OF SUSAN OAKES

Irish rider Susan Oakes set a world record sidesaddle jump when she and her stallion SIEC Atlas cleared this 6'8" puissance wall on Oct. 24, 2013, at the Equestrian Sports Training Facility near Dublin.

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“Sidesaddle riding is a very beautiful and elegant art form.”

–Susan Oakes another important sporting heritage by bringing steeplechasing to a wider audience.

“I see the challenges faced by racing,” said Johnston. “We lost another race this year, and we are losing land. Everyone who is involved with the sport knows it is a problem, but they talk to each other. We need to draw in outside When this photograph was taken in 1902 of George von Lengerke Meyer and his daughters Julia and Alice, society would have been scandalized by a woman in the hunting field riding astride. people to support racing, hunting and land preservation.” was the third year Oakes had organized such a ride, and it Johnston and Zebrovious approached the Virginia Pointhad the largest turnout. “I did it to show that women from to-Point Association, proposing to hold a ladies’ sidesaddle all walks of life and all different countries could come race at the Loudoun Hunt Point-to-Point, which takes place together to promote a sport we all love,” said Oakes. at the historic Oatlands Plantation in Leesburg, Va. It took “Sidesaddle riding is a very beautiful and elegant art some convincing, but eventually Johnston won approval for form,” Oakes continued. “Ladies back in the early 1900s an exhibition race—but only if all riders wore safety vests and hunted, raced and show jumped side saddle, then it went out demonstrated their competency prior to the race. of fashion when ladies started riding astride. I am trying to Entries flooded in for that first half-mile race in show [that] what the ladies did years ago was amazing, and 2015, and organizers split the crowded field of riders into if we can only be half as brave and as good as them and what jumping and non-jumping groups. The public responded, they achieved, they would be happy. I honor all the ladies too: More than 7,000 spectators came out to watch the that broke the mold back in the day. They set the boundaries, races that day—nearly double the usual attendance at the and now I’ll try to break them.” venue—and the crowd grew to 10,000 for this year’s meet.

The Irish hunt that Oakes arranged gave Johnston an It was exactly what Johnston had hoped to accomplish, opportunity to get to know about a race called the Dianas of and she credits sidesaddle-inspired nostalgia for drawing the Chase, a sidesaddle steeplechase over Grand Nationalthe bumper attendance. sized fences in Leicestershire, England. Oakes won the race’s “People want to look back,” said Johnston. “We have inaugural edition in 2013. found something which is actually quite old to bring appeal Inspired, Johnston and fellow sidesaddle enthusiast to the sports of steeplechasing and hunting. Riding sidesaddle Devon Zebrovious returned to the United States, determined is something which is uniquely feminine; it attracts interest. to start a sidesaddle steeplechase race in Johnston’s hometown People are truly fascinated, and it is a great opportunity to of Middleburg, Va. Johnston saw such an event not just as an engage new people with our sports. ” opportunity to promote sidesaddle riding, but also to preserve The sidesaddle community was ecstatic with this quick 92 NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2016

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2016 ESP HOLIDAY SERIES

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FEATURE success. This year, when the Cheshire Foxhounds (Pa.) Point-to-Point and the High Hope Steeplechase (Ky.) added sidesaddle races to their cards, Johnston and Zebrovious worked to make the events a three-race series for a new “Triple Crown” in racing: a multi-state series of ladies’ side saddle races, held over distances ranging from 1 ⅛ miles to 2 miles and featuring a variety of fences. The Cheshire Pointto-Point in Unionville, Pa., launched the series in March, and then the competitors took their sidesaddles to the Loudoun Hunt Point-to-Point in April and finally to the High Hope Steeplechase at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington. The newly created Side Saddle Chase Foundation supported the series by taking charge of safety and best practices, handling public relations for sponsors and conducting educational events for riders interested in racing or hunting aside.

Riders, many with foxhunting backgrounds, subscribed enthusiastically, pushing the races’ average field size to a healthy 15. They came –Hannah from all over the East Coast and abroad— and the winner of all three races was Ireland’s Oakes.

The U.S.-based women who rode in all three races were competing for a particular honor: the year’s High Point Award, won by Mary Musheno of Chester County, Pa., who received it formally during a ceremony at the National Sporting Library & Museum in Middleburg in August.

Increasing interest in sidesaddle wasn’t Johnston’s main objective, but that has been a happy side-effect, so to speak, of the series. She sees this stylish discipline as more than just a fashion statement.

“This year, we had a little girl who was riding sidesaddle through the crowd with her grandmother,” said Johnston.

“People will come to the races and then maybe want to take lessons and keep riding. Maybe they then want to get a farm.

We need more people to know about the need for open space and to value the activities you can do with it.”

Johnston said that from taking their initial performance assessments, to learning how to line up to start, to practicing in between races, the sidesaddle competitors became a tight-knit group.

“This was a community of riders working together,” said Johnston. “Our riders are athletes, and their horses are stunning. It is a lot of work, and I am so proud of them.”

The Next Generation

The core of the sidesaddle community is comprised of middle-aged or “slightly older” women who are looking for something new and fun to do with their horses, said the ASA’s Herlensky. “Sidesaddle riders are people who have ridden a long time, and they are running out of new things to do,” she noted.

But some among the younger demographic are turning their attention to this vintage riding style. That group includes 20-year-old Hannah Perkins of Waverly, Ohio, one of the bright young things in modern sidesaddle.

Perkins started riding with Herlensky at age 8, and by 10, she was doing everything a youngster could do with a horse, but in a sidesaddle.

“I started barrel racing, and I love to jump,” said Perkins, adding that her tendency to make jumps out of anything handy, like folding Perkins chairs, “scared my mom half to death.”

Perkins, an active member of 4-H, said it hasn’t always been easy gaining acceptance for her choice to ride aside, particularly when it comes to barrel racing. “Some organizations stipulate that the rider must have one leg on each side, because kids were messing around, hooking their leg over the horn [on a western saddle] and getting hurt,” said Perkins. “It took us probably two years to convince my old fairgrounds to let me do it.”

Now, Perkins says, other competitors don’t like to see her coming in her sidesaddle—not because of safety concerns, but because they know that she’s a fast, fierce rider who can beat their times. Perkins has earned her reputation for fearlessness away from the barrels, too: She often takes new sidesaddle horses on their first outings.

“I guess I am less breakable,” quipped Perkins. “I have only fallen off once riding aside. I wasn’t holding on and was waiting for someone else to cross some water. My horse bucked three times, and I landed on my feet next to him. I have had friends try to pull me off. I think my horse would fall over before I fell off.”

Perkins, who is a certified instructor through ASA, enjoys working with riders who are new to the sport and seeing their faces as they try sidesaddle for the first time.

“People will say that they feel safer.”

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“People will say that they feel safer,” she said.

That delight—and the surprising sense of security—can encourage new sidesaddle enthusiasts and help keep this gorgeous holdover from history vibrant and thriving in a new era. And Perkins is doing her bit to show off sidesaddle’s beauty and versatility: In addition to barrel racing and showing sidesaddle, she also makes frequent appearances in parades and at events such as Equine Affaire, often in splendid Renaissance costume. Still, she’d like to see more early education and opportunities for those inclined to ride aside.

“We need to put sidesaddle in 4-H,” she said. “We need to get people to try it.”

Riding Into A New Era

Its popularity might be on the rise, but at least for now, sidesaddle remains a niche discipline, which creates some challenges. A vanishingly small number of saddlers manufacture high-quality sidesaddles, because the market is so limited. Many riders use antique sidesaddles, but these were almost always custom pieces designed to fit a

particular horse and rider from ages past. That makes saddlefitting a problem: Modern horses tend to be much broader and rounder than the horses these saddles were built for.

Moreover, most saddle fitters today have little experience in properly assessing or adjusting the fit of a sidesaddle. ASAcertified instructors receive saddle-fit training as a part of their preparation, but quality instruction isn’t available in many parts of the country.

But these are only light headwinds for most dedicated sidesaddle riders, who are determined to keep at the sport and help it grow. Will “Downton Abbey” aficionados stick around to swell the sidesaddle ranks permanently? That remains to be seen. In the interim, those who are already enthusiastic about the style will continue to secure their balancing straps, hook a knee over their leaping horns and keep finding ways to keep their beautiful tribute to the past relevant in the modern equestrian world. Will new devotees still be galloping aside in the next century? “Don’t count it out,” says Herlensky.

“Sidesaddle riders really will do anything,” she said.

“They work to promote it, and they do it well.”

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GLOBAL CULTURE

An Iberian Treasure Portugal’s national horse fair in Golegã started in the 1700s, and this grand Iberian tradition is helping the region’s equestrian culture—and demand for Portugal’s Lusitano horses—thrive.

Story and photos by BIANCA MCCART Y

E

very November, the week of the Nov. 11 celebration of St. Martin’s

Day, the quiet Portuguese village of Golegã transforms into a buzzing hub of festivities dedicated to the Lusitano, Portugal’s

beloved breed—and one believed to be perhaps the world’s oldest

saddle-horse breed. And the 10-day Feira Nacional do Caval, or National Horse

Fair, in the heart of Portugal’s Lusitano breeding country isn’t just a tourist attraction. It’s also about preserving this ancient Iberian breed as a slice of

Portuguese heritage—and about marketing the country’s best-known equine product to potential breeders and buyers from around the globe.

The Portuguese people refer to the Lusitano as the nation’s “living treasure.”

Of the 5,000 recorded Lusitano breeding mares worldwide, half are located in

Lusitano horses like these are the kings of Portugal’s annual horse fair in the village of Golegã, known as Portugal’s “Capital of the Horse.” The 10-day festival is both a tourist attraction and an important shop window for Portugal’s Lusitano breeding business, and it features “horse bars” like this one, where horsemen can meet to enjoy their drinks without needing to dismount.

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During the Feira Nacional do Cavalo in Golegã, Portugal, breeders and sellers display their horses in cassetas, wooden cottages decorated to promote particular breeders or farms.

Portugal, and at Golegã, the breed is the star of the fair. They compete in hand and under saddle in show jumping, dressage, driving and working equitation; breeders also showcase them in parades and bullfighting exhibitions.

Golegã may be small (this medieval town’s population is about 6,000 today), but it deserves the title it proudly claims— “Capital of the Horse”—because of its deep connection to the Lusitano. Golegã is located about a 1 ½-hour drive northeast from Lisbon, along a scenic route past olive and cork plantations, and it offers 98 NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2016

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visitors many charms. Its colorful houses surround narrow cobblestone streets, which give one the strong impression of having traveled back to an earlier century.

And Golegã is nestled among some of Portugal’s most prestigious stud farms.

That makes it the perfect venue for the fair, which has been held there annually since the 1700s. It began as an equestrian version of St. Martin’s feast day, or São Martinho.

But it’s not just the locals who gather in town to show off their horses: Lusitano breeders and horse lovers travel from all over the country, filling the town to present their valuable stallions.

Golegã’s central square becomes a large dressage ring, surrounded by the manga, a track where horsemen and women in traditional Portuguese costumes show off these gentle, athletic horses, day and

night and often shoulder to shoulder.

The display is impressive. The Lusitanos carry their riders in ornate handmade leather tack. The Portuguese bridles are black, brown or tan and often adorned with embellished gold or silver buckles, giving them a baroque quality that reflects the Lusitano’s heritage. The riders sit secure in their deep Portuguese equitation saddles, many handmade from the same materials that have been used for centuries. Traditionally, their seats are made of suede and leather decorated with metal studs, though there have been some technical innovations over the years, such as using sturdy but flexible marine plywood for the tree. Behind the saddle and connected through a crupper sits the chairel, a piece of animal hide, draped over the horse’s back to protect the rider’s clothes from the horse’s sweat and dust. The

Competitions and demonstrations during the Feira Nacional do Cavalo in Golegã, Portugal, show off Lusitanos’ suitability for different disciplines, including ranch work and dressage with such riders as Pedro Torres, seen here on Portuguese working equitation champion Oxidado.

broad-chested horses’ leather breastplates glitter with metal ornaments. Appearance is everything, displaying the riders’ pride and status as they move elegantly along the manga.

The riders themselves dress in traditional Portuguese riding costume, Traje Português de Equitação, a vital element in the country’s heritage. Once considered formal riding attire, it is now a sign of commitment to heritage and to the Lusitano horse. Until the 1950s, in Portugal it was considered inappropriate for women to sit astride their horses. It wasn’t until then and the advent of culottes—the wide, feminine version of male trousers that give the impression of a long skirt draped over the rider’s legs—in Portuguese riding attire that women could wave farewell to the side-saddle. Today, Golegã’s elegant riders, male and female,

wear waistcoats with blouses underneath and cropped tailcoats on top, everything decorated with extravagant embroidery and buttons. Their straight-cut pants end just above the ankle to allow one to see the riders’ handmade leather boots, often decorated with leather tassels. On their heads, the riders wear broad-brimmed hats in colors matching the rest of their costumes.

As night falls, the horsemen pack the narrow streets and alleyways and socialize at horse bars, riding directly up to elevated bars to order their drinks. As much showmen as they are riders, the equestrians ostentatiously receive their glasses of liquor with one hand while holding their reins in the other, demonstrating their horses’ good and reliable natures. The courtyards are transformed into temporary discotheques. Riders, carriages and spectators crowd the streets, and the smoke from

roasting chestnuts hangs in the air, giving the alleyways a mysterious gloom. And everywhere, there is that staccato sound of prancing hooves on stone.

Night performances are especially extravagant. Flamenco dancers add their own beat alongside the equine performances. Riders show off their skills with the garrocha, a 12-foot pole that vaqueiros—Portuguese livestock herders—traditionally have used to move and sort their stock while mounted. One particular highlight each year is Luis Valença, billed as the “greatest living practitioner of classical dressage,” who performs with his daughters. After the official exhibitions conclude, the crowd and horsemen spill back into the streets and horse bars.

Meanwhile, the main square where the riding ring sits hosts a variety of stands: Fair-goers sample the local delicatessen, while craftsmen display their artistry until late at night, and sculptors, painters and illustrators show off and sell their work.

Culture And Commerce The rich scene is a nod to Portuguese cultural history, but it’s also the shop window to the nation’s Lusitano horse business. During the fair, the most popular and established breeders display their stallions and advertise their stud farms in cassetas, wooden cottages located

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Golegã’s central town square becomes a riding ring during the Feira Nacional do Cavalo, where horsemen showcase their animals’ training and tractability in spectacular productions like this one involving garrochas, the 12foot poles that vaqueiros— Portuguese livestock herders—traditionally used to sort their stock while mounted.

The Feira Nacional do Cavalo promotes Portugal’s Iberian equestrian culture as well as its breeds. Riders wear traditional attire, and the Lusitano horses show off ornate handmade tack.

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Golegã’s cobblestone streets ring with hoofbeats day and night during the Portuguese national horse fair, the Feira Nacional do Cavalo. Some of Portugal’s most important Lusitano breeding farms are in the countryside around the town of 6,000.

around the riding ring. The cassetas are decorated in tapestries and with specific colors denoting particular breeders or farms. While horses are on display in each cottage, visitors have a chance to chat, learn about each horse’s qualities, sample delicious cheese, and sip the earthy local wine, often from the breeder’s own vineyards.

“Preserving the Lusitano breed and all events related to it, such as the Feira Nacional do Cavalo at Golegã during São Martinho on Nov. 11, are obviously essential to promote the Lusitano horse and the Portuguese equestrian culture,” said commercial breeder Luís Pidwell, who founded the stud farm Coudelaria Santa Margarida with his wife Piedade in 1983; today, the farm is one of Portugal’s most famous Lusitano sources.

“During this event, we can showcase all the outstanding characteristics of our breed, investing simultaneously in our cultural and commercial factors,” Pidwell continued. “The big influx of visitors to this fair, mainly foreigners from all over the world, allows us to understand and confirm the worldwide interest in the Lusitano breed.”

Originally called Feira de São Martinho, the fair began in the early 1700s as a way to promote the trade of agricultural products raised on the famously fertile land surrounding Golegã. By the 1770s, the area had established itself as an equine center, and the “Fair of St. Martin” was taking on a more equestrian theme, a development encouraged by the Marquês C H RO N O F H O R S E .CO M

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GLOBAL CULTURE “The Lusitano horse is truly important for Portugal and our national identity because its traits are unique.”

—Luís Pidwell

de Pombal. Pombal, who served as Portugal’s prime minister from 1750 to 1777, was determined to strengthen Portugal’s economy and spurred the country’s Lusitano breeders to use the Golegã fair to show off their produce through competitions and displays.

Modern-day Lusitano producers around Golegã have continued that marketing tradition and expanded it, thanks to efforts like Lusitano World. Founded in 2014, Lusitano World “created awareness in the national market for the need of investment in good image to promote your equine business,” said founder and CEO Filipa Jácome, and today the company works with Portugal’s farms to promote the Lusitano breed worldwide through media and marketing.

And Pidwell believes the Lusitano is worthy of enthusiasm. “Our breed has a strong, old origin, contributing to the genesis and evolution of other modern breeds,” he said. “That gives our Lusitano horse an ancient legitimacy that, combined with the unusual traits of excellent behavior and docility, currently represent value for improving other breeds.”

An Iberian Classic The name Lusitano descends from Lusitania, the Roman name for the Iberian Peninsula, shared today by the nations of Portugal, Spain and Andorra, as well as the British territory of Gibraltar. Horses have long occupied the peninsula— Iberian cave paintings showing horses date back to around 20,000 or 30,000 B.C.— and some historians believe horses from

Lusitanos are prized for their intelligence, athleticism, trainability and gentleness—a set of traits that proponents say has made them popular for everything from cavalry to dressage to family companion.

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the region may have been under saddle as long ago as 4,000 B.C. The Iberian horses were esteemed as war chargers—some of Hannibal’s notable victories came on the hooves of his fearsome Iberian cavalry, and William the Conqueror rode into the Battle of Hastings in 1066 on a horse he received from the King of Spain— but their talent for war contrasts with these horses’ longstanding reputation for gentleness. At Golegã, that trait is very much on display during the festival in the stallions’ peaceable behavior with their riders (and with each other).

A number of breeds can be classed as “Iberian horses”; the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization rec-

ognizes 20 breeds from Spain and four from Portugal. Among those four Portuguese breeds (Lusitano, Sorraio, Garrano and Ponei da Terceira), the Lusitanos are the most numerous. Portugal’s Lusitano and Spain’s Andalusian shared studbooks until the late 1960s, but these two Iberian breeds had been recognized by many as distinct, and they were bred for different traits, for centuries. The Andalusian or PRE (Pura Raza Española) had been bred for objectives like beauty, conformation and gaits, while the Lusitano had been bred more for functionality, specifically for bullfighting and livestock herding.

Lusitanos still are regarded by many as the classic Iberian war horse, powerful but

The modern Lusitano horse is sought after for its agility and athletic ability and the courage to move towards dangerous obstacles—and all of those characteristics are on display during the Golegã festival’s many demonstrations, like this nighttime routine with torches.

docile. For the Portuguese, they’re also a powerful symbol of their nation’s heritage.

“The Lusitano horse is truly important for Portugal and our national identity because its traits are unique,” said Pidwell.

“It is impossible to confuse a Lusitano horse with any other equine breed in the world.”

And what a symbol they are. As the oft-quoted Sylvia Loch, a classical dressage trainer and founder of the Lusitano

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The Feira Nacional do Cavalo is more than just a beautiful spectacle. It’s also a marketplace where potential Lusitano producers and buyers can meet and conduct business. To attract attention to their animals, horsemen ride around the manga, a dirt track around the town’s central square, giving the public a good view of the horses.

Breed Society of Great Britain, put it, “To look at, they are noble rather than pretty with aristocracy written all over their fine, slightly hawked, long faces.

They develop a powerful neck and shoulder, which makes them look extremely majestic in front. The quarters are not large, but the loins are wide and strong and the hocks long and wiry, giving them the power to bounce forcefully forwards with masterful impulsion”—impulsion that, combined with maneuverability, 104 NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2016

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makes them useful for everything from cavalry maneuvers to dressage to bullfighting, Lusitano proponents say.

Lusitanos are no longer used in cavalry charges, of course, but some bloodlines are still considered good for bullfighting. Dr. Ruy d’Andrade, who founded the Portuguese farm Coudelaria D’Andrade— referred to by some as Portugal’s “defender of the national horse”—once described the Lusitano as “brave with the bulls, burning if provoked and calm if not excited, fast in the race and rapid on turns and with good step, sensible to the spur, submissive with good mouth.” Those same traits have made the Lusitano popular in other endeavors, too, including dressage and cattle work. Coudelaria D’Andrade’s

breeding, incidentally, forms one of four key Lusitano bloodlines that trace back to the Portuguese stud book’s six foundation horses; the other basic bloodlines were developed by the Veiga farm and two breeding establishments now operated by the Portuguese government, Coudelaria Alter Real and Coudelaria Nacional.

King D João V founded Coudelaria Alter Real in 1748, and the Lusitanos from its line are best known as the famous bay horses who perform at the Portuguese School of Equestrian Art in Queluz, near Lisbon. The younger but still venerable Veiga farm, established more than 180 years ago and still an active breeding program, produced the Veiga line, whose horses are known for the convex facial

Lusitanos like these are still regarded by many as the classic Iberian war horse, powerful but docile. For the Portuguese, they’re also a powerful symbol of their nation’s heritage.

“You can really talk with a Lusitano. These horses will always be ready to listen to you.”

—Filipa Jácome profile often called the “Veiga head.” And the Coudelaria Nacional, founded in the late 19th century, now works with the Coudelaria Alter Real and the Portuguese School of Equestrian Art to produce taller horses well suited for dressage and driving.

The modern Lusitano horse is known and respected for its agility, athletic ability and courage to move toward dangerous obstacles. They’re admired for their classic beauty—abundant manes, thick tails, natural high stepping gaits and powerful

and compact conformation with strong haunches—but they’re most prized for their intelligence, sensitivity and strong bond with humans.

“Lusitanos are brave, true fighters, but also team players looking to understand and please their rider,” said Lusitano World’s Jácome. “You can really talk with a Lusitano. These horses will always be ready to listen to you.”

Golegã’s fair, meanwhile, is helping the world hear more from Lusitano breeders

who extol the particular virtues of this Portuguese national symbol. And that’s good for both business and culture.

“The Feira Nacional do Cavalo is essential to the Portuguese heritage,” said Jácome, who founded Lusitano World during the 2014 Golegã fair and will celebrate the organization’s anniversary at this year’s fair, Nov. 4-13. “The smell, the sounds, the feeling and images you retain—it all is there year after year, untouchable! You meet so many people and talk about Lusitano horses—eternal talks all night long, with chestnuts in your hand and an abafadinho (a sweet Portuguese wine) in the other. And, of course, there’s the fact that you never know when you will end up on a horse’s back.”

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TRAVEL

All At Sea Caribbean vacation or intensive equestrian learning experience?

Sporthorse Cruise lets you do both.

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By K IMBERLY LOUSHIN

Who doesn’t love the invigorating feel of a tropical breeze or the pleasure of viewing a relaxing ocean scene over the rim of a cocktail glass, complete with a festive paper umbrella?

But if you’re one of those horse people whose thoughts turn to the barn even when you’re on holiday, meet your perfect vacation compromise: Sporthorse Cruise.

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HOLLAND AMERICAN LINE PHOTO

Sporthorse Cruise currently offers a Caribbean itinerary with ports such as Half Moon Cay, Bahamas (pictured); Grand Turk, Turks and Caicos; and San Juan, Puerto Rico. In August 2017, they will be adding an Alaskan cruise.

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The Caribbean cruise—which is part of a larger experience hosted by the Holland America Line—offers a seven-day excursion that includes two days of optional educational seminars on a variety of topics related to sport horse breeding, training and competing. The cruise is the brainchild of Alice Knox, a dressage rider who worked on the Holland America Line for 10 years.

“One day at work while I was watching passengers get on one of our ships, there was a group on board with some guest speakers, and the light bulb went off over my head,” Knox said. “I thought, ‘Why don’t we do this with horse people? With equestrians?’ ” Knox bounced the idea off a number of horse industry professionals, including some Olympians, and in 2009 the first cruise took to the waves under the title Dressage Cruise.

Responding to patrons’ requests for more disciplines, Knox changed the name to Sporthorse Cruise two years later.

Past speakers have included Olympic dressage rider Steffen Peters and dressage breeder and trainer Willy Arts. For the last few years, Christian Schacht—a veterinarian who is based in Germany and is also a Fédération Equestre Internationale show jumping judge, German dressage judge and sport horse breeder—has been on board, along with dressage coach and competitor Jeremy Steinberg, the U.S. Equestrian Federation National Dressage Youth Coach from 2010 to 2014.

The seminars are pitched at a level that will appeal to amateurs and professionals. Seminar participants number about 30 per cruise, generally range in age from 40 to 60, and come from around the United States. Knox estimates that about 70 percent are involved in dressage, while 30 percent are interested in the jumpers. And each group learns from the other, says Knox.

“The disciplines right now seem to be so specialized that there’s not a lot of crossover—at least not in the United States,” she said. “A lot of the dressage people don’t want to watch jumpers, and the jumpers don’t necessarily watch dressage. During our dressage seminars some of the jumper people are like, ‘I didn’t know that. I could use that on my horse.’ When we talk jumpers, the dressage people say, ‘I never knew that’s how they designed a course.’ It’s a really nice education for everybody, because we learn a lot from each other.”

While some cruise-goers are professionals who are deeply entrenched in their particular sport, most are adult amateurs who love to learn.

“The one thing that I really appreciated about going on that cruise was that there wasn’t a definition,” said Denise Cox, who went on her first cruise in 2016 with her friend Lynn Shinkle; both are western dressage riders from Callahan, Fla. “No one came across as if they were a higher-echelon rider. We all were 108 NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2016

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TRAVEL

from different walks of life. We had a farrier, and there was a veterinarian in the group. When we started out we were strangers, and by the end of the week we were all friends.”

“I have a wonderfully terrific group of ladies who come back every year,” said Knox. “I would say it’s about 60 percent are repeats coming back. That means it’s like a reunion when they see each other again. They won’t see each other the rest of the year, because they come from all parts of the country. So it turns out to be a nice reunion, and everybody gets caught up with the horses.”

Knox currently hosts a single Caribbean cruise per year, which departs from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in late January or early February. This year’s early-season itinerary calls for stops at San Juan, Puerto Rico; Half Moon Cay in the Bahamas; Grand Turk in Turks and Caicos; and Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Knox plans to add a second cruise from the West Coast to Alaska in August of 2017.

Non-Horsey Family? No Problem

Because the Sporthorse Cruise takes place on a regular Holland America ship—each of which averages 2,000 passengers—nonhorsey family members can come along for the ride and find

PHOTO COURTESY OF SPORTHORSE CRUISE

Guest speaker Dr. Christian Schacht (pictured) said that while he and fellow speaker Jeremy Steinberg often have a set lesson plan, their lectures change based on participant interest.

PHOTO COURTESY OF SPORTHORSE CRUISE

Sporthorse Cruise hosts four seminars over two days during the seven-day ocean journey, covering everything from sport horse conformation to equestrian history. The current lecturers are former USEF National Dressage Youth Coach Jeremy Steinberg (shown) and FEI judge, veterinarian and sport horse breeder Dr. Christian Schacht.

If you really need a horse fix, you can often find riding tours on the cruise’s shore excursions.

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Time To Talk

The two Sporthorse Cruise seminar days run from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. with short breaks between each 45-minute session and a longer lunch break. Attendance is optional, so feel free to enjoy a late breakfast on your stateroom’s private verandah or some guiltfree pampering at the spa.

That’s if you can drag yourself away from the seminars, of course.

Knox strives to keep to a schedule, but she admits the timetable can be fluid, depending on attendees’ interest in particular topics.

“Our guest speakers love to talk, and once the open discussion begins, one thing leads to another,” said Knox. “And that’s really one of the main benefits of this cruise. It’s in a relaxed setting, and people get to sit and ask questions and not feel rushed.”

“We have time to talk,” agreed Schacht, who has been a speaker on the Sporthorse Cruise for five years. “You give a clinic and then people ask you for five minutes, but then the next person is sitting on the horse and waiting while you give a lecture.

Here, you have time to say, ‘Let’s have another glass of wine. Let’s discuss it.’ It’s great being on a ship and talking about horses!”

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plenty of fun while the equestrians are mulling over everything from oxers to piaffes.

Cindy Rogers, a dressage rider from Portsmouth, R.I., who’s planning to go on her fourth cruise in 2017, brought her brother and his wife on previous trips. “They’re not even horse people, and they had a blast,” she said. “They did things on their own during the day—they didn’t go to the seminars—but dinnertime came, and we talked about other things. It wasn’t always just horses. It was just like a group of friends getting together.”

On days at port, cruise guests have time on their own to do whatever they please. While Knox doesn’t do any planned equestrian excursions, many guests team up to explore the area, and there are often trail rides nearby for those who need an additional horsey fix.

On seminar days, Knox hosts evenings by the pool with wine, which gives guests a good opportunity to talk about what they learned. On evenings after a day in port, there’s an informal gathering on the back deck.

“It’s all optional,” said Knox. “It’s all up to how much people want to socialize with us. A few people bring their husbands, and they want to spend time with their families. Or the gals that are coming by themselves, they want to hang by the pool with us.”

If your party attire has been playing second fiddle all year to your jeans and boots, now’s your chance: Sporthorse Cruise also offers fancier Welcome Aboard and Farewell cocktail parties.

“The back-and-forth between the guest speakers, that to me was great,” said Shinkle. “If I had to pick a highlight, I’d say that. Jeremy would tell you something, and you’re like, ‘Yeah, I never thought about it that way,’ and Christian would say, ‘Yes, I agree with you but…’ They are two very different people with good opinions.”

Your brain may be packed full of knowledge from on-board seminars, but what about your horse back home? What about your trouble with canter departs? Or what about that burning question you’ve had about bloodlines?

You can hash out those issues in a one-on-one consultation with the presenters at no extra cost. Guests who sign up for a time slot can choose whether to open their discussion to other participants or keep it a private session.

Sporthorse Cruise lets guests keep learning about horses without sacrificing the relaxation and beautiful vistas of a traditional Caribbean cruise.

“By the time we do private consultations we’ve all been on board for at least three days, and we’ve spent a fair amount of time with each other so that everyone is fairly relaxed with one another,” said Knox. “Everyone has gotten to become wellacquainted with each other, so many don’t mind [others] looking over their shoulder so they can learn.”

Shinkle and Cox shared their consultation, which involved the instructors’ feedback on videos of their dressage tests, and Cox added that Steinberg quickly allayed her worries about showing a lower-level test.

“We never felt like we weren’t on the same level as the other riders,” she said. “It was more, ‘We’re here; we want to learn—show us.’ ”

PHOTO COURTESY OF SPORTHORSE CRUISE

In addition to seminars, guests can receive private consultations with the guest speakers, including discussing videos of their own rides.

Get The Details Cruise prices range from $824 to $2,309 per person for double occupancy. Traveling solo? Single fares are available and start at $1,318.

Visit sporthorsecruise.com for more, including reservation information, cruise itinerary, and a recommended reading list for the seminars.

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THE HORSE IN ART A CHRONICLE OF

EQUINE ART A new National Sporting Library and Museum art exhibition brings together works featured over seven decades on The Chronicle of the Horse’s cover.

By GLENYE CAIN OAKFORD

T

he Chronicle of the Horse and the National Sporting Library and Museum are next-door neighbors in Middleburg, Va., and their histories have been closely entwined since the National Sporting Library opened in 1954. Two of the library’s founders were Chronicle owner George Ohrstrom Sr. and the magazine’s editor, Alexander Mackay-Smith, after all, and at various times the two institutions have shared board members, staff and office space.

So it’s no surprise that there’s crosspollination between these two sporting fixtures—and this time it’s to the benefit of sporting art lovers. When the Chronicle celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2012, the milestone sparked inspiration at the NSLM that’s now bearing fruit in the

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form of a new exhibition, “The Chronicle of the Horse in Art,” which runs from Aug. 26 to March 26.

From 1945 to 2012, the Chronicle cover each week featured equine-themed artwork, and this exhibition—drawing works from the NSLM’s own holdings and private collections as well as those of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Yale Center for British Art (Conn.), Genesee Country Village and Museum (N.Y.) and other institutions—brings more than 40 of those works together.

It’s a rare opportunity to see pieces by sporting masters like George Stubbs, Sir Alfred Munnings, Edward Troye, Ben Marshall and John Ferneley Sr. But this show also highlights more contemporary artists—Booth Malone, Sandra Forbush, Jan Lukens, Kathleen Friedenberg and

The Chronicle of the Horse showcased equinethemed art, like the George Stubbs painting Shark With His Trainer Price, on its cover from 1945 until 2012.

others—who open fresh views on familiar and beloved sporting subjects.

The exhibition presents a broad sweep of history, from John Quigley’s 18th century portrait of the Godolphin Arabian to Lukens’ 2005 tribute to Olympic show jumper Royal Kaliber. And these British, American and Continental works are both very much of their era and also timeless, honoring not just sport but the sporting lifestyle and its history.

“You can see over time, from the 1940s to the present, how the trends changed in terms of what they focused on,” Claudia Pfeiffer, the NSLM’s George L. Ohrstrom Jr. curator of art, said of the Chronicle’s successive editors. “There’s a lot of British

VIRGINIA MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, RICHMOND. PAUL MELLON COLLECTION/KATHERINE WETZEL PHOTO

work through the decades. Here and there you see some contemporary artists, and that developed more in the ’90s, where there’s a very strong representation of contemporary American sporting art.”

Chronicle readers originally saw many of these cover pieces photographed in black and white, Pfeiffer added. “That really unified these works in a kind of magical way,” she said. “They take on a timeless characteristic in black and white.

When you see them in color, they start to sit within the genre and time when they were created.”

A case in point: a 29" by 36" portrait of the race horse Mongo by Jean Bowman (1917-1994) that appeared on the Nov. 13, 1964, cover. Marion duPont Scott, owner of Montpelier Farm in Virginia, commissioned the piece to honor her champion turf horse Mongo, who is shown with jockey Charles Burr in

Shark With His Trainer Price is one of two paintings by George Stubbs (1724-1806) that the National Sporting Library and Museum has included in its exhibition “The Chronicle of the Horse in Art,” marking the first time the museum has shown Stubbs. This 1794 painting, which appeared on The Chronicle of the Horse’s May 7, 1965, cover, is on loan from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Paul Mellon Collection.

the saddle at Maryland’s Laurel race course, where they won the prestigious Washington, D.C., International in 1963.

“She had a traditional style but very

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Jean Bowman’s 1964 work Mongo on the Turf at Laurel Racetrack, Maryland, with Charles Burr Up appeared on the Nov. 13, 1964, cover of The Chronicle of the Horse.

Jacqueline B. Mars gave the painting to the National Sporting Library and Museum, and it now features in the museum’s exhibition “The Chronicle of the Horse in Art.”

much a 20th century style that was verging on photorealistic,” Pfeiffer said of Bowman. “When you look at her works in black and white and small, they blend a lot more. In color, they take on the full look of her painting style. She has very bright and vibrant colors, very fresh-looking colors with nice contrasts.”

From the beginning, Pfeiffer pointed out, the Chronicle’s covers celebrated female sporting artists like Bowman.

“About 40 percent of the covers were female artists,” she noted. “There were a few featured more often than once in the Kathy and Hal Kamine commissioned the Jan Lukens painting Chris and Roy, which appeared on the May 6, 2005, Chronicle cover.

The piece depicts the Kamines’ show jumper Royal Kaliber, who died after winning team gold and individual silver at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, and his rider Chris Kappler.

earlier days, then later there was a much wider representation of female artists.”

The covers didn’t only reflect art trends. They sometimes spotlighted art directly related to the headlines. The May 6, 2005, cover—the Lukens painting Chris and Roy that owners Kathy and Hal Kamine commissioned of their U.S. show jumper Royal Kaliber and his rider Chris Kappler—paid tribute to the horse, who died after winning team gold and individual silver at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens.

“In sporting art in general, there are often many connections to the time period, because often the people commissioning the works are doing what a photograph does now: capturing the essence of a moment,” Pfeiffer said. “The art form itself is a sporting painting, and at the same time

it’s commemorating a particular horse.”

In 2012, The Chronicle of the Horse began running news- or feature-related images on its cover instead of artwork, but the weekly magazine and Untacked still proudly play a vital role in showcasing sporting art.

“Art has always been an integral part of the Chronicle, with coverage of sport that extends beyond the arena into the equestrian culture, lifestyle and personality,” said Chronicle president and executive editor Beth Rasin. “The format of Untacked allows us to explore and expand the Chronicle’s long history with art, yet we still have maintained a connection in our flagship publication with the Art Gallery in each issue.”

For more details or to plan your visit to the exhibition, visit nsl.org.

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PROFILE

Spirit

CAPTURING THE

Artist Lisa Marie Bishop competes in the exacting sport of dressage, but at the easel she paints outside traditional lines.

By LAUR A LEMON

Artwork Courtesy of

A

COLIN BISHOP PHOTO

LISA MAR IE BISHOP

As is her habit, Lisa Marie Bishop woke up on this particular May morning in the sleepy hour between 3 and 4 a.m. and got to work in her home art studio in Iowa City, Iowa. She turned her Pandora Internet radio on to the Hook movie soundtrack. She’d been studying

international dressage rider Carl Hester’s training and show rides, and she could no longer ignore the inspiration she felt when she watched him and his longtime mount, the Olympic gold medal winner Uthopia.

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Artist Lisa Marie Bishop, shown here with Dr. Suzanne Cassel’s and Dr. Fayyaz Sutterwala’s 6-year-old Dutch Warmblood Exelant, has enjoyed success with her riding and her art despite having Stargardt disease, a condition that causes progressive vision loss.

Artist Lisa Marie Bishop’s Harmony, a 24" x 30" acrylic on canvas, was inspired by the partnership between British dressage rider Carl Hester and the champion stallion Uthopia, who won team gold at the London Olympic Games in 2012.

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PROFILE worked, Bishop sought to capture the bliss she felt when Hester and Uthopia danced across the dressage ring. Each trumpet blast and every singing legato of the woodwinds influenced Bishop’s brushstrokes as her hands moved across the canvas. Focusing on the bond between horse and rider, she let everything else slip away. In the painting that emerged, the horses’ legs were out of focus, the rider’s identity unimportant. The hard realistic outlines had drifted into a murky

background. But the most important thing—the connection between the rider’s hands and the horse’s mouth— took center stage.

The result: a painting called Harmony.

Emotion overrules the representational in Bishop’s art. She strives to portray the vibrant essence, rather than the mere outline, of her equine subjects. Sometimes hooves aren’t depicted, eyes aren’t clearly articulated, and ears are reduced to simple curves. But what is there, quite clearly, is the horse.

COLIN BISHOP PHOTO

“Every time I see him ride, I feel like he and the horse are sharing their joy of what they do with us,” said Bishop. “His riding and training is so honest. I had to create a piece of art to honor that.”

The connection she saw between Hester and Uthopia was such an inspiration to Bishop—a dressage rider herself—that she didn’t merely want to paint; she felt compelled to paint.

Now, with the song “Flight To Neverland” accompanying her as she

“I wake up thinking about horses and go to bed the same way,” says Lisa Marie Bishop, shown here in 2015 with her Dutch Warmblood mare Thumbellina and the mare’s second foal, the Florianus II filly Kasarah.

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XPRESS FOTO PHOTO

“She’s got this sixth-sense intuition of capturing the spirit,” said Tracey Hanger, who commissioned the Bishop painting Beloved Pat, A War Horse for the Fort Sam Houston Veterinary Clinic in San Antonio.

People who know that Bishop has Stargardt disease, a form of macular degeneration that causes progressive vision loss, might assume the condition prompted her to choose an abstract form of expression. But Bishop, 47, points out that from her earliest days—both as an artist and as a rider—she’s always been working in the abstract: Her interest is in the feel of a horse, its motion and its effect on the people around it. Her deteriorating eyesight hasn’t changed that.

“When [people] see a canter pirouette, I see a canter pirouette differently,” said Bishop. “I see maybe the years of work going into that canter pirouette and that horse being submissive, or maybe it just got right on the edge of being a little

naughty—more that personality than just the movement.”

A former hunter/jumper rider and eventer, Bishop turned to dressage in 2011; she earned a U.S. Dressage Federation silver medal three years later.

And although her mornings begin in the studio, she still spends time in the barn every day with the young warmbloods she’s training. Those two strands of her life—horses and art—are tightly intertwined, and each world informs the other. Her work with dressage trainer Michael Barisone, for example, provides artistic as well as equestrian inspiration.

“The way he talks about horses will get me kind of happy about going home and doing a sketch,” Bishop said.

“My passion for horses spills into my painting,” Bishop once wrote in an artist’s statement to accompany her work. “I don’t paint the horse; I paint the energy and power I feel when I’m around them. I close my eyes and listen to the hoofbeats.

I wake up thinking about horses and go to bed the same way.”

Determined To Ride

Growing up in East Aurora, N.Y., with four siblings, Bishop showed a vivid imagination and an early obsession with horses. “[My mom] swears I would ride the vacuum cleaner and say the word ‘horse,’ ” Bishop said. “I was infatuated. I had a neighbor who had a horse, and I would run outside and close my eyes, because she’d come down the street, and you could hear the ‘clip-clop, clip-clop.’ I would close my eyes and pretend I was riding the horse.”

Bishop pored over library books, reading anything that pertained to horses and learning about posting and diagonals even before she began her first lessons.

She finally started formal instruction at age 12, paying for lessons with money she earned by helping her mother. When summer rolled around, Bishop worked all day at Doris Clark’s Fox Run Farm in East Aurora to earn free lessons. She took any opportunity to ride.

“I would go to the hunter shows and actually stand there with a saddle hoping to catch ride,” said Bishop. “I would ride anything. I didn’t care. And usually that’s what I got: I got the horses that were difficult. I got the horses that were dirty stoppers and bucked a lot or were very green or very young.”

She briefly attended Buffalo State University (N.Y.) to study mass media, but the horses kept pulling her away. She Lisa Marie Bishop bought Beetle Bailey, seen here competing with Bishop at the 2007 Otter Creek Horse Trials in Wisconsin, off of a trailer that was taking him to a slaughterhouse.

“There will never be another horse in my life like this horse,” she said of “Red,” whom she competed through intermediate before her fading eyesight caused her to stop jumping.

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PROFILE

left school to become a hunter/jumper rider and trainer at Breckenridge Farm in Angola, N.Y. In 1993, after a year of marriage (she has since divorced) and the birth of her son Colin, Lisa put her riding career on hold to concentrate on family life. But she still kept her eye on horses, literally, by taking up equine photography.

What began as a hobby eventually became a new business, Artistic Animal.

“I remember even thinking, ‘I’m doing photography because I would never be able to paint,’ ” Lisa said with a laugh.

Working with film in the dark room, Bishop tried to find a balance between her artistic instincts and her clients’ desires.

“I’ll never forget that feeling when you’re going through the rolls of film, and then there was the shot,” she said. “You just sit there and go, ‘Oh, my God, I got it. Oh, thank goodness.’ And sometimes that shot wasn’t exactly what the client wanted. You know, you always had to do what they needed for magazines. But I was already artistic about trying to figure those things out. I just wanted to capture a different side of the horse.”

The $800 Horse Of A Lifetime

Lisa was diagnosed with Stargardt disease at age 24. But she refused to let the disorder define her, even as it imposed a time limit on her riding.

“I wanted to do as much as I possibly could before I lost my eyesight,” she said.

“And it’s a slow progressive disease, so I was able to accomplish as much I could before it was time to call it quits.”

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MARY PHELPS PHOTO

Lisa Marie Bishop switched full time to dressage in 2011 after her declining eyesight prompted her to stop eventing.

Three years later, she earned her U.S. Dressage Federation silver medal with Dr. Suzanne Cassel’s and Dr. Fayyaz Sutterwala’s Percheron-Thoroughbred cross Graphite.

Opportunity arrived in an unlikely form: a 5-year-old chestnut Thoroughbred named Beetle Bailey. He was standing on a stock trailer, awaiting his final ride to a slaughterhouse, when Lisa spotted him.

“I was teaching some lessons, and this trailer pulls up. They were dropping off a pony at this farm,” she recalled.

But after the driver unloaded the pony, the horse left inside her trailer caught Lisa’s eye, and she asked about him.

“She goes, ‘Oh, my gosh—this rogue.

Nobody can do anything with it. It’s already broken somebody’s arm. It bucks people off,’ ” Lisa remembered. “And I

go, ‘Oh, he sounds fantastic!’ You know, just kind of laughing. I said, ‘What are you doing with it?’ She said, ‘I’m taking it to the kill pen.’ I go, ‘You mean you’re taking it to the auction?’ She goes, ‘Nope.

Skipping the auction. Going right to the kill pen.’ ” Colin, then 5, had headed over to the trailer to get a better look at the horse.

“Colin’s like, ‘Hey boy.’ And the horse snorts, but low, like, ‘Huh,’ ” said Lisa.

“All you could see was his eye. And I walk up, and I go, ‘What are you doing?’

He says, ‘Mommy, this is your horse.’ ” In the end, Lisa wrote an $800 check on the spot for the horse. Nicknamed

Lisa Marie Bishop’s artwork isn’t strictly representational and focuses instead on a horse’s energy and the emotion it inspires in the viewer, as in this 24" x 30" acrylic on canvas, Power, owned

by Jill Wedeles Caile.

“I just wanted to capture a different side of the horse.”

–LISA MARIE BISHOP

“Red,” Beetle Bailey came with some quirks. “This horse was probably very abused and scared of people—definitely scared of men,” Lisa said. “Trust was a huge thing with this horse.”

But he soon became part of the family, even joining Colin’s reading lessons.

“Colin was learning how to read, and Red was learning how to trust,” Lisa said.

“So we would sit on a round bale in the middle of the pasture, and Colin would read, and Red would come over and eat the round bale and listen to Colin.”

With Red, Lisa embarked on a new adventure: three-day eventing. They earned the U.S. Eventing Association

bronze medal at the preliminary level, and Red was named the 2007 Intermediate Mid-America Combined Training Association Horse of the Year. Lisa kept him until his death in 2010 at age 17.

“There was a real bond with me and this horse,” she said. “I can’t describe it.

There will never be another horse in my life like this horse.

“I was just in the middle of getting some places, and I knew I only had a short amount of time before I couldn’t event anymore,” she continued. “So everything was with this horse. It wasn’t going to be any other horse. It was going to be the two of us getting as far as we could.”

One Door Closes, Two Doors Open

Around 2011, Lisa’s declining eyesight prompted her to stop eventing. “I didn’t want somebody to come up and say, ‘Hey, listen, we’ve got to pull you off course,’ ” she said. “I wanted it to be my decision and at the right time.”

So with the help of Dr. Suzanne Cassel, Dr. Fayyaz Sutterwala and their PercheronThoroughbred cross, Lisa turned to dressage.

“I loved [Graphite] as if he was mine, and for some odd reason, he gave me everything he had and got me as far as he could take me,” said Lisa, who earned

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“It’s this evolving energy that’s just flowing and moving.”

–JILLIAN KIRKPATRICK

Lisa Marie Bishop’s son Colin once theorized that her abstract painting style—as in this 16" x 20" acrylic on canvas entitled The Future and owned by Natalie Neppl—reflects how Lisa sees with Stargardt disease. “He goes, ‘Well, you don’t have any faces or sometimes the horse’s leg is missing,’ ” Lisa said. “I didn’t even think of that.”

her USDF silver medal in 2014 aboard Graphite. “He came to me at a time when I had to decide to stop jumping competitively, when I was at a crossroads about how to continue an equestrian career, and he rose to the occasion.

“Without them I’d be nowhere. I owe my second chance at a competitive career to these two,” Lisa said of Cassel and Sutterwala, the husband-and-wife team who lead the Sutterwala and Cassel Lab at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

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It wasn’t just Lisa’s equestrian discipline that changed five years ago; a new urge to paint also began tugging at her.

“All of a sudden, something said, ‘Go do this,’ ” Lisa said. “So I ran to the store and got stuff and just started teaching myself how to paint.

“I thought what might be fun, and why it might be different, is not really knowing how to do it and just kind of making it up as I went along,” she continued.

As in her photography, Lisa focuses on the personality and power of her

subjects. “It would be very similar to how I wanted to do the creative shots in my photography—the way I wanted to do that soft focus, the romantic idea, the energy of the horse,” she explained.

Those who follow her work say the result is art that delivers a potent mix of vitality and emotion.

“It’s powerful in its minimalism,” said Lisa Dickman, the owner of Pocahontas Pines Stables in Virginia and breeder of one of Bishop’s young Dutch Warmbloods, Headline. “The soul coming out in the

“Even the hardest lessons were lessons that I needed to have.”

–LISA MARIE BISHOP

Willing, a 5' x 6' acrylic/oil on canvas, took artist Lisa Marie Bishop six months to finish and is one of her larger works.

artwork, you can feel the presence of it.”

“It’s this evolving energy that’s just flowing and moving,” said dressage competitor Jillian Kirkpatrick of Flanders, N.J., who also trains with Barisone. “By her doing that sort of little bit abstract look to her paintings, it’s not a stagnant picture. I feel like the animal is moving, because it’s not all finished up and complete. It’s progressing.”

Colin once theorized that Lisa’s eyesight does influence her abstract painting style.

“He goes, ‘You paint what you really see,’ ”

Lisa recalled. “And I say, ‘What do you mean?’ He goes, ‘Well, you don’t have any faces, or sometimes the horse’s leg is missing.’ I didn’t even think of that.”

Lisa no longer coaches, but she still plans to compete the young horses currently in her care—Cassel and Sutterwala’s 6-year-old Dutch Warmblood, her own 4-year-old Headline, and Colin’s 4-yearold Dovahkiin—at Northern Lights Farm in Mount Vernon, Iowa.

“I wouldn’t give up any second of what I’ve gone through to be the horse person that I am now,” Lisa said. “Even the hardest lessons were lessons that I needed to have.

“But what scares me,” she continued, “I think, is not achieving what I’ve always wanted to. And that is to be in the international ring.”

Few would bet against her.

“Too often we don’t follow our dreams,” said Dickman. “We don’t buy that horse, and we don’t paint that painting because we talk ourselves out of it, or we don’t want to take the risk.

And she does. I just find that to be really phenomenal and inspiring, especially given the challenges she faces on a daily basis. She’s saying, ‘I refuse. I’m going to do my dream. I’m going to do this.’ We should all learn a little bit from that.”

The equestrian events at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro inspired Lisa Marie Bishop to paint Rio, a 24" x 30" acrylic on canvas now owned

by Katie Karsen.

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FEED ROOM Deck The Stalls What better way to celebrate the holidays than with a barn party?

Gather your horsey friends and spread some cheer with these recipes, which put an equine flair on some of the most popular holiday flavors.

By KIMBERLY LOUSHIN AND HALEY WEISS Photos by KIMBERLY LOUSHIN

APPLE OATMEAL BARS

A simple but delicious twist on your favorite apple pie filling.

INGREDIENTS: For the filling 3 small apples, peeled and diced 2 tsp. vanilla extract 3 tbsp. granulated sugar ¼ cup water ½ tbsp. cinnamon ½ tsp. nutmeg

For the crust 3 cups rolled oats cup flour 1 ½ tsp. salt 1 stick of butter 1 cup packed brown sugar 1 tbsp. cinnamon

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease an 8-inch square baking pan or casserole dish and set aside.

2. Combine apples, vanilla extract, sugar, water, cinnamon and nutmeg in a small pot over low heat. Cover and cook for approximately 20 minutes until apples are tender.

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3. Combine oats, flour, salt and cinnamon in a large bowl.

4. In a small saucepan, combine butter and brown sugar. Heat to a boil and cook for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Immediately pour into oat mixture and stir until the oats are evenly coated.

5. Pour roughly half the oat mixture into baking dish, pressing the oats to make an even bottom layer. Spread apple mixture evenly over oats and then top with remaining oat mixture and press.

6. Bake for 30 minutes, until the top is browned. Remove and let cool before cutting into squares.

PEPPERMINT PUPPY CHOW

It’s not really for the dogs—but this grab-and-go snack will appeal to the kid in you!

INGREDIENTS: 9 cups Chex cereal or similar generic brand 2 cups white chocolate 4 tbsp. butter

1 ½ cups powdered sugar ½ tsp. peppermint extract 6 crushed candy canes

1. Melt chocolate and butter in the microwave in a microwave-safe bowl.

This works best if you microwave for 45 seconds, stir and then repeat until the chocolate is melted. Be careful not to overheat the chocolate, as it will become too thick to pour.

2. Add peppermint extract to chocolate mixture and stir.

3. Pour melted chocolate mixture over the cereal and mix until thoroughly covered.

4. Pour powdered sugar and crushed candy canes (a blender works well for this) into a large plastic bag, add chocolate-coated cereal, and shake until coated. Store in an airtight container.

EGGNOG CHEESECAKE BARS

There’s nothing “bah, humbug” about this eggnog. Here, the traditional holiday drink puts a new spin on cheesecake.

INGREDIENTS: For the crust 2 ½ cups graham cracker crumbs ½ cup melted butter

For the cheesecake layer 2 packages (8 oz. each) cream cheese ¾ cup sugar 2 large eggs 2 tsp. rum extract ¼ tsp. nutmeg

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

2. Using a food processor, pulse graham crackers until they become fine crumbs. Add in melted butter and mix until coated evenly.

3. Press crumb mixture into a 13" by 9" glass baking dish so that it covers the bottom of the pan evenly.

4. In a separate bowl, use the whisk attachment on a mixer to beat cream cheese, eggs, sugar, rum extract and nutmeg until smooth.

5. Pour cheesecake filling over the crust and smooth the top.

6. Bake for 35 minutes. Remove from oven and allow to cool completely.

Once it has cooled, cover with foil and refrigerate for four hours or overnight.

Cut into squares.

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FEED ROOM

SPIKED PEPPERMINT HOT CHOCOLATE A winter favorite with a warming party kick.

INGREDIENTS: ¼ cup unsweetened cocoa powder ½ cup sugar cup hot water

tsp. salt 4 cups milk 6 oz. peppermint schnapps

1. In a medium saucepan, combine cocoa powder, sugar, water and salt.

2. Over medium heat, stir until the mixture boils. Once it’s boiling, cook for one minute, stirring constantly.

3. Stir in milk and heat without boiling.

4. Remove from heat and add peppermint schnapps. Yields five servings.

5. Serve with a peppermint stick and whipped cream.

CARROT CAKE COOKIES

All the yum of carrot cake and cream cheese, but in a hand-held form. You can’t stop with just one.

INGREDIENTS: For the cookies 3 cups oatmeal ¾ cup shredded carrots 2 sticks unsalted butter 1 cup lightly packed brown sugar 1 cup sugar 2 large eggs 2 tsp. vanilla extract 1 ½ cups flour 1 tsp. baking powder 1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

2. Mix butter, brown sugar and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, mixing the first in thoroughly before adding the second one. Then add vanilla.

3. In a separate bowl combine flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt.

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Add dry ingredients to butter mixture.

4. Add oats and carrots and mix until combined.

5. Using a tablespoon, drop dough onto greased cookie sheet and flatten slightly. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes, until slightly browned, and allow to cool on a baking rack.

1 tsp. cinnamon 1 tsp. salt

For the filling 4 oz. cream cheese, softened 6 tbsp. butter, softened 1 pinch of salt ½ tsp. vanilla 1 cup powdered sugar

6. While the cookies are cooling, use an electric mixer to whip cream cheese, butter and salt together until smooth.

Add vanilla and powdered sugar, and mix until smooth.

7. Create a sandwich of two cookies with cream cheese mixture as filling.

APPLE CIDER FLOAT

This adults-only drink goes perfectly with your sweet tooth and can be served warm or cold.

INGREDIENTS: 2 cups apple cider 1.5 oz. whipped cream vodka (or, for a stronger kick, try Fireball cinnamon whiskey) A dash of cinnamon 2 scoops vanilla ice cream Mix cider and alcohol with cinnamon. Pour over two scoops of ice cream in a glass or mug.

HAM AND BRIE PINWHEELS

Desserts aren’t the only stars of a holiday party. This recipe makes a rich and savory counterpoint to the sweets on your menu.

INGREDIENTS: 1 sheet puff pastry (thawed) 9 slices of ham 4 oz. of brie cheese, at room temperature

2 green onions, sliced

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

2. Roll out a sheet of puff pastry and spread brie across as thick or as thin as desired.

3. Sprinkle with green onions and top with ham.

4. Starting with the short side of the pastry, roll it up. Cut roll into ½-inch slices and place cut side down on parchment paper on a baking sheet.

5. Bake for 15 minutes and serve warm.

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BOOK REVIEW Here Comes Exterminator!

The Longshot Horse, The Great War, And The Making Of An American Hero

which he was the only starter), had more stakes victories than his contemporaries Man o’ War and Secretariat combined, and appeared in Vanity Fair—has been resurrected for a new generation.

McGraw does a masterful job educating the reader on the nuances of horse racing during the early part of the 20th century. On the wane during those early decades, the sport was revived in part by remount efforts to bolster the American cavalry. Famous race horse owners of the time donated both current and retired runners to the war effort along with stallions and broodmares. The admiration for these Thoroughbred “soldiers” spilled over into an appreciation for the sport in general, and a day at the track became a patriotic endeavor that ushered in the Golden Age of Racing.

The Derby of 1918, while a more somber event than in years past, reflected this sense of patriotism, with 10 percent of the track’s gross revenue during the Kentucky Derby race meeting donated to the Red Cross. As American troops were slogging out victories on the battlefield,

Exterminator’s upset win in the Derby helped to shatter the belief that American horses couldn’t prevail over those with a European pedigree and invigorated a sense of national pride.

Against this informative historical context, McGraw fleshes out the key players surrounding Exterminator. Owned by new-money millionaire Willis Sharpe Kilmer and trained for the majority of his career by salt-of-the-earth trainer Henry McDaniel, Exterminator traveled to tracks around the country and Mexico as he tried to surpass the earnings record held by Man o’ War—a journey the reader joins through McGraw’s research and writing.

Here Comes Exterminator! is an enlightening look into a fascinating period in racing’s history and is a great read for any fan of the sport.

—Jennifer B. Calder

British Horseracing Authority who is sent to the United States to uncover a “mole” in

BY FELIX FRANCIS the fictitious Federal Anti-Corruption in ave you Sports Agency. ever wanted Just days before the Kentucky Derby, to go he’s present when a raid on a trainer’s barn undercover in a major results in a death. To get to the bottom Thoroughbred racing of things, he goes undercover as an Irish stable? Get hired as groom, attending the Preakness Stakes a groom, then find and the Belmont Stakes with the Derbyout firsthand what winning trainer, all while sidestepping barn really goes on behind politics and enduring the lack of privacy the scenes? If so, and primitive living conditions for stable then you should go hands on the backside. along for the ride Was the Derby’s winning trainer with Jeff Hinkley, an investigator for the involved in the sudden sickness of his top

two rivals just before the race? And was it coincidence that a favored horse in the Preakness also became ill?

Felix Francis delivers his fifth mystery in the same vein as the famous books written by his late father, who was also a famous British steeplechase jockey and filled his stories with realistic horse-related settings and details. Anyone who enjoys the fast pace of the Dick Francis thrillers will want to follow the latest tale of suspense set in the world of racing, with its change of setting from the United Kingdom to the United States. It’s available in October, just in time for holiday gift giving.

–Beth Rasin

By ELIZ A MCGRAW

W

hen a gangly 30-1 longshot crossed the wire first in the 1918 Kentucky Derby, he elevated the American Thoroughbred to patriotic hero for a country embroiled in World War I. For all but the most ardent racing fans, the name Exterminator brings but a flicker of recognition. Thanks to Eliza McGraw’s meticulously researched new book, however, the story of this champion gelding—who won 50 races in 100 starts (including one exhibition race in

Triple Crown

H

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Landrum Gateway to the Blue Ridge

EATS. ANTIQUES. BOUTIQUES. #LoveLandrum www.cityoflandrumsc.com www.facebook.com/cityoflandrum

8 antique stores, 7 restaurants, 12 boutiques, 21 specialty shops

O N L Y

1

L A N D R U M

SC Exit 1 off I-26 | 15 Minutes from the Tryon International Equestrian Center 15 Minutes from Spartanburg | 30 Minutes from Asheville | 1 Hour from Greenville | 1 Hour from Charlotte

CHARITY SPOTLIGHT A CLOSER LOOK AT:

Angel Heart Farm Nashville-based Angel Heart Farm brings the joy of horses to children affected by cancer and to their families.

By MEGAN BRINCKS Photos Courtesy of ANGEL HEART FARM

Loafers Lodge Katarina, shown with 7-year-old Sophie, is one of 10 horses in the Angel Heart Farm program.

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W

hen Tracy Kujawa was diagnosed with cancer the first time, she drove straight to the barn, lay down in her mare’s stall and cried.

“She got me through everything,” Kujawa said of her gray Arabian mare, Khuryia, whom she competed in breed shows at the time. “She’s just a joy to me. I was showing when I got sick, and she took care of me.”

Kujawa’s dad bought her first pony the day she was born, so it was natural that she turned to horses over and over during painful moments. She lost many family members to cancer, and when she was diagnosed a second time with breast cancer, she seriously considered starting a program to help children with cancer and other serious illnesses.

“In my second bout [of cancer], I had a dream that I was teaching kids how to ride,” she said. “I woke up at 2 in the morning, jumped on the computer and looked to see if there were any programs working with kids and horses.”

She had volunteered for years at organizations for children with various mental and physical challenges and had always thought about things she would want to do if she had her own program.

“I didn’t know anything about having a nonprofit,” she said. “I had no clue how to do this, where I was going to get horses, where I was going to have a barn.”

A long-time stylist in the music industry, Kujawa knew running her own nonprofit was a huge leap. But after she spoke with social workers at Nashville-area hospitals specializing in children’s care, including St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and Vanderbilt University Medical Center,

she knew there was a need. On Oct. 1, 2000, Angel Heart Farm was officially created, and Kujawa was off and running.

In 16 years, Angel Heart Farm has served more than 250 families by exposing them to horses in a therapeutic environment.

“It’s one family at a time. Some kids don’t want to ride, and that’s fine.

Sometimes the siblings want to ride,” Kujawa explained.

Angel Heart Farm is unique in that it’s an experience for the whole family.

“We really pay just as much attention to the child who’s not sick or the mother as the child who’s sick. I just think it’s vitally important,” Kujawa said. “The siblings really get pushed aside, and it has nothing to do with anything other than the parent’s focus goes 100 percent to the child who’s sick.”

On top of that one-on-one customized experience, families who come to Angel Heart are welcome forever—once the child is healthy again, they can still spend time riding or just visiting the horses as long as they want.

Savannah, 7, with Clovercroft Rocky Too, or “Rocky,” a Welsh pony that country music star Alan Jackson donated to Angel Heart Farm.

“Childhood cancer is on the rise, which is horrendous to me. Men’s cancer and women’s cancer are on the decline, but childhood cancer is on the rise,” said Kujawa, adding that one of her biggest goals is to raise awareness about childhood cancer. She does that by doing community outreach and educational seminars with the horses in addition to teaching families at the farm.

“Kids are so open and heartwarming and honest. I think adults whine a lot when they’re sick,” she said.

Some of the children become deeply attached to individual horses, and Kujawa is very particular about which horses she keeps in her program. Currently, Angel Heart Farm has 10 horses on about 30 acres at a leased property outside Nashville; three of those horses are owned by Kujawa.

“They’re treated like show horses—

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Christian, 13, in the saddle on TA Fellini, better known as “Felix.” Christian’s little sister Angel (right) also participates in the Angel Heart Farm program, which is open to all family members.

they’re really quite spoiled,” she said with a laugh. “The biggest thing people say to me [when they see pictures of the horses] is, ‘Are those horses in a magazine, or are those your horses? They don’t look like therapy horses.’ Well, what are therapy horses supposed to look like?”

Kindness is Kujawa’s top requirement for an Angel Heart horse. She exclusively looks for Polish Arabians and Welsh ponies for her program because that’s what she’s ridden and worked with her whole life, so she’s most familiar with the breeds.

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all over the country looking for ponies.

One of her clients as a stylist at the time was country music star Alan Jackson, whose daughters used to ride and show.

“I looked at 50 ponies, didn’t find anything I liked, and spent a ton of money on travel,” Kujawa said. When she told Jackson she’d be leaving the music industry to start Angel Heart, he immediately offered his daughters’ ponies to her.

“He said, ‘Oh, well, I have ponies.

Go get them!’ ” she explained. “I hadn’t found anything I liked, and these little guys were 10 miles from my farm.”

Jackson’s Welsh pony Rocky is still with Angel Heart, although a Shetland he donated has since died.

Although Kujawa will put up with different quirks and dynamic personality traits—one pony, Loafers Lodge Katarina, was sold from a show barn because she wasn’t happy as a show pony, but will happily be ridden at home as much as needed—she is extremely picky about health, background, personality and even looks.

“I want to look into their eyes and see a soul. That’s a huge thing. I see horses that are just blank. Mine are all really quirky,” she said, laughing. “I want my horses extremely healthy and happy.

That’s super important. I want to look at their vet records and talk to their farriers.

I ask a lot of questions.”

Kujawa’s attention to detail carries over to other areas of Angel Heart—the barn is decorated with homey details, and she extensively interviews and trains volunteers. Every detail of the horses’ care is ultimately up to her, from when she comes to the barn at 6 a.m. until she leaves at night.

She also gets to know all her students and their families on a personal level and helps them develop as riders. The children in the program show at horse shows as they are able. This fall, Rocky and Katarina—who was named the 2016 Welsh Pony of the Year by Welsh Pony & Cob Society members—attended the American National Welsh Pony & Cob Show (Okla.) with riders from Angel Heart Farm.

Although being a one-woman show has some benefits, it also meant that when Kujawa relapsed in 2015 and began her fourth cancer battle, the organization had to pause, as well. She spent a year going through treatment, and the horses went on extended vacation from therapy duties. Now back as strong as ever, Angel Heart is in the process of a capital campaign to raise money for a farm of its own.

“It’s not rocket science to change a child’s life,” Kujawa said. “We tell our kids there’s no cancer at the barn, and they believe it.”

>>

LEARN MORE: Visit the Angel Heart Farm website at angelheartfarm.net.

>>

GET IN TOUCH: Contact Tracy Kujawa at angelheartfarm@gmail.com or (615) 566-4976.

>>

GET INVOLVED: Angel Heart Farm is currently raising funds to buy a property of its own.

Donations may be made through the website. The program also has openings for volunteers to help with barn chores, grooming horses and ponies, fundraising and working with the kids and families.

For more information, call (615) 566-4976 or email angelheartfarm@gmail.com.

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BEST OF WEB & PRINT

u Get To Know Valegro!

The Rolex Central Park Horse Show wasn’t just a dazzling display of show jumping, dressage and Arabian horse competition. It also hosted the most famous horse in the world: the Olympic, World Games and World Cup Final dressage champion Valegro.

The charismatic gelding and Charlotte Dujardin put on a thrilling display of the talent and joie de vivre that typifies their freestyle performances in front of a packed house. You can watch it again here: coth.com/article/watch-it-again-valegro-rolex-central-park-horse-show.

And you can get a rare glimpse of Valegro back at the barn with his faithful groom, Alan Davies, in the Chronicle’s Behind The Stall Door: coth.com/article/behind-stall-door-valegro.

LISA SLADE PHOTOS

What’s Hot On The Web

u Throw Back

40 Years …

No, Wait, I Want Them All!

u Three Lessons For Young Horses: Teaching

Them To Think, Love And Work

Blogger Taylor Flury specializes in bringing up young horses in the jumper divisions, and she shares three tenets of her system. In the first, “Teaching Them To Think” (coth.com/article/three-lessons-young-horses-part-1-teachingthem-think), she discusses teaching a horse to respond to pressure in a calm manner, rather than reacting out of fear or panic. In the second, “Teaching Them To Love” (coth.com/article/three-lessons-young-horses-part2-teaching-them-love), she talks about getting young horses to do their best by building their trust in the rider. And in Part 3: “Teaching Them To Work” (coth.com/article/three-lessons-young-horses-part-3-teaching-them-work) , she explores the delicate balance of challenging young horses without overfacing them and emphasizes the need for diversity in their training.

134 NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2016

U N TAC K E D

Amateur rider Jean McLaren spent 40 years in between her junior appearance at the Pennsylvania National and her trips in the NAL Adult Amateur Jumper Finals, but she doesn’t regret a minute of it. She blogs with some essential advice for the junior riders of today. “That trip to Harrisburg, with its stark contrast between my 17- and 59-yearold selves, stands for me as one of the real epiphanies in my life. With our society’s fear of aging, it’s easy to get sucked in and feel that you’ve lost something. But in that moment I had a new appreciation of how much we gain as we age,” she writes in coth.com/article/ throw-back-40-years-no-wait-i-want-them-all.

Don’t Miss In The Magazine OLYMPIC ANALYS IS ISSU

al Nick Sk

elton p. 46

Vol. 79, No. 24

BEHIND THE BLOOD RULE Of

Septemb er 26 & Oct ober 3, 2016

• $4.99

Skin, Spurs And Seco nd Chances p. 32

Chris Kap pler

Inside:

Considers Three vs. Fou r-Man Tea Rio’s Cross-C ms p. 42 ountry: Did They Get It Right? p. 58 Olympic Ink Showcase p. 120

AMY DRAGOO/ARND.NL PHOTO

ANN GLAVAN PHOTO

u When The World Reacts In our Olympic Analysis Issue, Sept. 26 & Oct. 3, we looked at repercussions of the four show jumping eliminations related to the Fédération Equestre Internationale’s “blood rule” in Rio this summer. Is the issue horse welfare? Or is it the sport’s image? Should riders be able to challenge the decision, or should officials have discretion in meting out punishments? Why are the rules different between the Olympic sports?

In her article “Re-Examining The Blood Rule After Rio,” Erin Harty attempts to answer these questions and more.

“If a horse comes into the ring, and he’s got a cut on his leg?” says FEI steward David Distler. “The world is going to react.”

E: The Re

u Protecting Your Horse—And Wallet Have you noticed changes to your equine insurance policies in terms of what is offered, what is covered and what it costs? If you haven’t, you might soon. Lisa Slade explains in her article “The Model Of A Major Medical Policy,” featured in our Horse Care issue, Sept. 19.

“Every company across the board has seen a lot of losses because of major medical insurance,” says Danielle Aamodt, an equine insurance agent.

u A Tale That Doesn’t Measure Up U.S. Equestrian Federation horse recording relies, in many ways, on the honesty of the person registering the horse. But in circumstances where there’s no way to prove an equine age, are owners or trainers taking advantage to create permanent pony measurement cards?

Reporter Ann Glavan followed a convoluted road to trace the age and story behind the incorrect recording of a U.S. Pony Finals national champion in her story “Of Ponies, Papers And Pushing The Limits,” Oct. 24 & 31.

“We needed to make her older in order…to get her perm[anent] card in case she would grow over and be a very useless small medium,” says pony owner Michaila Zandri.

C H RO N O F H O R S E .CO M

NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2016

135

PARTING WAYS

Planted Photo by JON STROUD Australian show jumper Scott Keach and his mount Fedor parted company during the first round of team jumping at the Rio Olympic Games when the gelding refused a water jump. Keach somersaulted over Fedor’s head, taking the bridle with him. His groom collected Fedor, and Keach left the arena on foot.

136 NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2016

U N TAC K E D

Wishing You a Happy & Healthy Holiday Season

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