… for Sarah Cuthbertson and Ashley Tomaszewski’s blog, Eat Sleep Ride Repeat.
9 Really Good Reasons Why Endurance Riders Need To Embrace Dressage
Go have a look, and cruise around the rest of their blog, which focuses on long-distance riding but has lots of interesting tangents, too! (Oh, and if you like the logo, they have lots of lovely merch available. Happy Winter-Celebration-Of-Your-Choosing!)
I know I still haven’t posted about the Pan Am Games showjumping, and I will get to that just as soon as I finish editing an absolutely stupid number of photos, but I had to do a little brag about Young Master Parker.
Ontario summers are brief and frantic, and this year I’ve been pulled in all sorts of directions which, while interesting or productive or useful in terms of paying some bills, have not allowed me to do all that much with my own horses. Between a number of gigs judging schooling shows (for which I’m grateful, don’t get me wrong, and yes, just FYI, I’m available for more of those), and the Pan Ams taking up a good chunk of July, I haven’t managed to get either Spike or Parker out to a single event. Or clinic. Or combined test. Hell, I didn’t even drag my jumps out of storage until the end of July. (For that matter, I also didn’t get anywhere near a beach, a hiking trail, a canoe, or a drive-in movie, either — all usual elements of my summer repertoire. Oh well.) I’ve been riding both of them semi-consistently, and I even succeeded in getting my filly, Trixie, backed at last (oh, gawd, add her to the list, another future blog post). But making good use of all those expensive memberships which allow me to show? Not so much.
So with fall looming and the wretched prospect of being buried in a snowdrift again in mere weeks, I resolved to at least get each of them out to one or two events before the end of the season … budget permitting. The obvious choice for our first outing was Wits’ End, by virtue of it being two concessions away from my home base. Wits’ End, owned by Jo Young and Bill McKeen, both respected officials in the sport, runs divisions from Pre-Entry all the way to Intermediate, and used to host a CIC*** before negotiations with the FEI to get a favourable date in the calendar failed, and the whole thing became too big a money-loser to continue. It’s known for its challenging, extremely hilly terrain and big, but fair, courses. And a long, long walk from the trailer parking to the show rings.
The original plan was to take Spike Pre-Training, but he has come up with a mysterious hard bump on the back of one fetlock. It’s not bothering him in the slightest, there’s no heat or tenderness of any kind, but given that it’s a bit of a headscratcher I decided to hold off on jumping him for a bit. Time for Young Master Parker to step up to the plate.
Given that Parker has really only done t
wo events in his short lifetime, and they were both last year, I figured, damn the optics of it, we’d better stay at Pre-Entry. I know, I know. The shame of it. Log, log, log, log. And me a certified coach and all.
For better or worse, log, log, log was not really what we got. I was a bit startled, to be honest, when I walked the course the day before the show, because there was a whole lot to do out there. For the level, I mean. Baby horse was going to get an eyeful. There were a few definitely-visible-to-the-naked-eye sized jumps, a couple of which were brightly coloured, but I was more worried about the technical fences, which included a Helsinki (a fence set into the side of a hill, the likes of which you rarely see on cross-country courses anymore, and certainly not at Pre-Entry) and a vertical at the top of a steep hill. Also, there was a little ditch — and Parker had not previously had any issue with ditches, except for a week earlier, when we’d gone cross-country schooling at another local farm and he had inexplicably and repeatedly said “fuck you” at every ditch I’d pointed him at. I stared at that inconsequential little thing for a while and thought, “Well, depending on his mood, our day just might end right here …”
I walked the stadium course, too, and it was also Not Nothing. The fences themselves aren’t terribly big at Pre-Entry, but the track was the same one that would be used for the upper-level horses later in the day. Among its features was a triple-bar — which I didn’t even think was legal at Pre-Entry, who knew? — with a bending line to a skinny vertical. Is it just me, or is that way technical for a baby horse?
(I have judged a whole lot of hunter schooling shows this summer, and I could, if I wanted, insert a rant here about how there is an entire generation of kids coming up through the hunter/jumper system, who not only could not handle any of the bending lines in Parker’s mini stadium course without having a meltdown, but who these days aren’t even expected to go into the ring and jump the jumps without having a half-hour ‘warm up’ over those same bloody jumps. But I’m trying to stay on topic here.)
Sink or swim, it was, then. The little peckerhead would either rise to the occasion, or be utterly backed off by the experience and never forgive me. I went home and tied his mane into tiny knots, had a quick swipe at my tack and my fancy half-chaps (still mud-splattered from hunting last fall), and then spent most of the night staring at the ceiling while I tried to ride the course in my brain. (Having taken a number of sports psychology seminars over the years, I’m aware of the value of positive visualization, but my powers of concentration generally let 
me ride the first six or seven fences in my mind really, really well … and then after that, things get fuzzy.) It felt kind of stupid to fret over a course that didn’t (probably) exceed two foot six, except that I find riding baby horses in competition a fair bit more nerve-wracking than taking a more experienced horse over considerably bigger fences. Parker can be a bit of a wild card at the best of times, and I really wasn’t sure how he was going to react.
I won’t give you the entire blow by blow, because let’s face it, you’ve only read this far because you’re probably a personal friend and you’re being polite. Thanks for that, by the by. It’s not like anyone other than me is going to remember next week, what transpired and where we placed. Suffice to say Parker handled the chaos of the dressage warm-up ring better than I expected him to, and apart from a few head-tosses, delivered what I thought was a pretty nice test for a youngling. (And I got to wear my fabulously blingy new stock tie, too.) The judge, tragically, disagreed with my assessment, writing on our test, “Such a shame. A 
disappointing day for you.” But then again, she (or her scribe) also wrote, “abrupt transition” for a movement which didn’t include any transitions, so, you know. Grain of salt. I was just pleased that he kept his head and tried hard for me. No hissyfits = #ParkerFTW.
I got brave for stadium and left Parker’s braids in, steadfastly ignoring the wee voice in my head which recommended having a handhold available in case of emergency. In for a penny, etc. He dragged me down to the jumps in the warm-up area, which I hoped would translate to the stadium ring, and luckily, it did. He isn’t fazed by bright colours, decorations or gew-gaws, and thinks jumping these things is just about the best fun there is to be had with tack on. And wonder of wonders, the rideability between the fences is coming along — or, at least, we had fewer wobbly lines than I remember from a year ago. We had one disagreement as to take-off spot, resulting in some awkwardness, but left all the rails up and were one of the few clears in the division.
Thus buoyed, I brought him back to the trailer and got him unbraided and gussied up for cross-country while he head-butted my most excellent groom, Sarah Cuthbertson, repeatedly. Cocky little bastard. Wits’ End was having a little photo contest in which you were supposed to demonstrate your matchy-matchy cross-country colour excesses and get a bunch of ‘likes’ on Facebook, so I dragged out the red and royal blue saddle pad, the red reins and the blue boots, and the piece de resistance, the scarlet breeches I bought at the Royal Winter Fair last year in a moment of weakness. I figured at least I’d be easy to
find in the long grass if the whole thing went tits up in a snowbank. We snapped some pix, and with loins metaphorically girded, headed towards the start box.
By this point it was fricking hot out — pushing 31 Celsius, I think — so I gambled that Parker’s recent stadium experience would keep his brain in jumping mode. I only hopped over one cross-rail in the warm-up before we presented ourselves for our count-down. Twenty years ago, when I was competing my dear departed Toddy at Prelim, I used to get rather nauseated circling the start box, and I felt a flutter of that walking Parker around — but once we got into gear, we were both more focused on sucking in oxygen and not taking any wrong turns than on churning stomach acids. My brat was bold as brass, and really only showed his greenness at a little post-and-rails (fence four) where he tried to veer sideways and ended up jumping it almost from a standstill, and on a couple of the steep downhills, which he was not quite balanced enough to canter down just yet. He didn’t bat an eyelash at the ditch, nor at the Helsinki, nor at the couple of coops which were bigger than anything he’d tackled before … and he actually listened to me when we came to the vertical at the top of a steep rise, and jumped it safely. 
(That one caused a fair bit of consternation with the other Pre-Entry horses.)
I could feel him gaining confidence as he went, and by about fence 12 (the cabin in the photos at the top of this post), I stopped trying to set him up for each fence from 85 strides away, and just let him roll on down to them the way I normally would on a horse with more mileage. He was fine with that. 1500 metres or so 
later, we passed through the finish flags knowing a whole lot more about each other than we’d known before — which is what a good course is supposed to do, but until we did it I hadn’t been at all sure we were going to get that far!
Rather too late to say, long story short, at this point…. but on account of the time faults we racked up trotting down the hills (and the dressage score handed down by our disenchanted judge), we ended up fifth in the Open division. Just fine by me as ribbons weren’t even on my radar for this outing. (I’m running out of room on the lampshades anyway.) Then, of course, Parker had to ruin our good mood by being an asshat about loading to go home — that’s still a work in progress — but overall, he’s still on Santa’s nice list. And he may have earned himself an upgrade all the way to (gasp!) Entry level before the season’s over. Depending on whether I can scrape together the shekels for another entry fee.
Hey, it`s a Canadian blog, so you`re gonna get pix of the Canadians. All of whom were legitimately excellent, and I don`t say that lightly — all four delivered tests that were the best I`d ever seen from them, especially Belinda Trussell`s Anton, who, frankly, had the best piaffe in the Games and wuz robbed of a medal, IMHO.
Dressage at the Pan Am Games has a complicated history. The Pan Ams are qualifiers for upcoming Olympic Games, and as such are hotly contested, but for the past couple of decades at least, the level of competition has been at the Prix St. Georges/Intermediare level, not the Grand Prix level demanded at the Olympics. Which means a country may qualify for the Olympics, but will probably not be sending the horses and riders who cinched the qualification, because it takes more than a year to take a ‘small tour’ horse and have him confirmed and solid at the ‘big tour’ level.
Recognizing that the standard of dressage has improved markedly in Central and South America and the Caribbean in recent years, the Powers That Be decided for the Toronto Games that countries with the resources to do so could bring up to two Grand Prix partnerships of their four that made up a team. Riders who showed at the Grand Prix level were given more weight on their results (I think it was a coefficient of 1.5) than the Prix St. Georges horses. The US, Canada, and Argentina all managed to scare up two Grand Prix horses to send to Toronto, and Mexico and Uruguay each had one GP horse. The happy result was that spectators didn’t have to sit and watch the exact same test all day, but it did make the scoring, and the qualifications for the individual medals, confusing to say the least.
There was also considerable debate as to how many competitors from each nation were allowed to move forward to the individual round, after the US took the Team gold, Canada the silver, and Brazil the bronze. The FEI issued a bunch of contradictory statements the night before, and apparently volatile Team meetings back in the barns went into the wee hours, before it was declared that each nation could send forward only three of its four qualified riders. That meant both Canada and the US had to leave one horse in the barn despite qualifying scores. Which kind of sucked, but it did ensure that spectators got to see more individual freestyles from more countries.
Have to say, the South Americans have the best music for freestyles. The North American musical selections have all gotten to be much of a muchness, due in part, I think, to the fact that there are only two or three people writing and choreographing these things for the riders. We could use a little more soca and samba and a fair bit less of the generic-movie-soundtrack type stuff.
And here’s the afore-mentioned Puerto Rican rider, Luis Denizard, and Royal Affair, in a probably-illicit snippet from their freestyle, embracing the Leonard Bernstein:
End result: The US claimed individual gold (Steffen Peters and Legolas 92, 80.075%) and silver (Laura Graves and Verdades, 79.825%), and Canadian Chris Von Martels, who had put in a spectacular freestyle with Zilverstar, hung in for the bronze (79.50%). The other two Canucks, Belinda Trussell and Brittany Fraser, tied for fourth with 76.80%. Canada didn’t qualify for the Rio Olympics with their Team silver — there was only one spot going begging and we would have had to have won gold to get it. There are still some opportunities to qualify individuals, but it’s going to take more expensive trips to Europe to do it, so may those with the deepest pockets, win.
Now that it’s all over except for the continuing self-congratulatory smugness (Toronto’s, I mean, which might or might not be justified — the actual numbers rating its success have not yet been released) … I figured I’d better recount my experience at the 2015 Pan American Games for posterity. This may, in fact, be practically the only place in which I do so, assignments from magazines and newspapers having been discouragingly thin on the ground. So much for home court advantage.
Watch this space for some separate blog posts on each of the equestrian disciplines (dressage, eventing, and showjumping), which are the only three sports I got to see in the three-week run of the Games. Yup. Despite my best efforts, I completely failed to get to any of the other venues for which I had media access, much less any of the concerts and other entertainments. The last Pan Am Games I attended was Winnipeg, in 1999, and I had a blast going to free concerts, jazz clubs, and outdoor theatre performances in the evenings while I was there (and favourably revised my opinion of Winnipeg in the process). I guess the difference this time was that I was trying to fit the Pan Ams around all the regular demands of my life — teaching riding lessons, getting my own horses fed and worked, doctor’s appointments, truck breakdowns, and so forth. Somehow, the hassle of making it all the way into downtown Toronto from my home base in the boonies, never quite seemed feasible. I am bummed about having missed Colin James though.
Anyway. For what it’s worth, here are some random bits of snark about the Toronto Pan Am Games. In no particular order.
1. OVERBLING: The medal for sheer overbling has to go to the South American dressage riders, especially the women. If there was a location where they could legally place Swarovski crystals, they did so, unreservedly. From their hair bows to their helmets to the tops of their shiny black patent boots, to their gloves, their horses’ braids and flyveils and browbands and, yep, even the cantles of their saddles, there was really no such thing as too much bling. The places where the press were allowed to photograph were too far from the ring to tell for sure, but I strongly suspect that those who had experience with Rio-style carnival makeup may even have had bling on their eyelids. In general, the South Americans put the Northern hemisphere riders to shame in the stylin’ department — the Argentinian eventers, for example, had the most drool-worthy boots (or maybe they were half-chaps) in their flag’s sky-blue-and-white colours. (They also had way better music for their dressage freestyles.)
2. EMBRACING THE CLICHES: I had to love the Puerto Rican dressage rider who rode his freestyle to selections from “West Side Story”. I confess, I can never hear an announcer say the words “Puerto Rico” without a little echo of Rita Moreno in my head … but you have to figure that they’re sick to death of it in the actual country. Took chutzpah, then (or cojones) to say, fukkit, I’m not going to cringe about it … I’m just going to go there, goddammit.
Also, there was a Venezuelan showjumper named La Bamba.
Canada, however, was not to be outdone when it came to cliches. From the moment I heard that the cross-country course for the eventing competition was going to feature, um, Canadiana … and that it was going to be built by Americans and shipped up on flatbeds from South Carolina … I dreaded the outcome. The end result was not quite as bad as I’d feared, but it did have carved beavers, Canada geese, something that was supposed to be a keg of maple syrup, and a water jump that seemed to be a mishmash of every overworked Canuck icon the designers could toss together in a single obstacle. It had one jump bristling with lobster pots, another with a stylized Toronto skyline on it, and a rather regrettable wooden grizzly with a salmon in its mouth … positioned at the base of a water trickle that I was reliably informed was supposed to represent Niagara 
Falls. WTF? doesn’t really cover it …
And then there was the showjumping course, which was slightly less horrifying, cliche-wise, though there was a plank jump emblazoned with an image of Mounties galloping straight at the observer with their lances in attack mode, something adorned with oversized cowboy boots and saloon doors (presumably representing Calgary), and another which mimicked a mountain pass in the Rockies with a railroad bridge spanning it. The blocks on the top were little rail cars, so I guess when the blocks were knocked down (which was only a couple of times), it was (groan) a trainwreck.
3. THE MUSKOKA CHAIR DEBATE: One of the more popular bits of decor in the showjumping ring was a pair of giant green Muskoka chairs, which every rider and groom on Facebook apparently felt compelled to climb up into for a selfie. The Am
ericans, however, kept erroneously referring to them as “Adirondack chairs”, and couldn’t figure out what was supposed to be Canadian about them. Sources on the infallible interwebz disagree, of course, on the provenance of the Muskoka chair vs. the Adirondack, but at least some of them will tell you that the Muskoka chair is subtly different in its design and the curve of its back. But both of them are bloody difficult to lever yourself out of, 
particularly the eight-foot kind.
4. FUGLY: Is it just me, or is this sculpture, which was squatting in the Caledon Equestrian Park, fugly as hell? Maybe not, since people seemed compelled to pose in front of it on a daily basis for even more selfies.
Much more egregious were the outfits inflicted upon the hapless presenters-of-medals-and-stuffed-toys. Can you say, “shapeless beach cover-up”? I think back to the presenters at the Beijing Olympics, who looked utterly stunning, and I try to imagine what the Pan Am people were thinking when they approved these horrid, droopy, waist-less, sweatpants-gray monstrosities. Seriously, who looks good in this fabric? One out of 10,000 supermodels, that’s who. And to top it off, each dress was cut at exactly the right length to flatter no-one in this universe. These girls were 
putting on a brave face, but personally I would have been mortified to have turned up in public in one of these. Hashtag fashion fugliness.
5. FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE: By most ratings, Canada is not a Third World country. But we do have an alarming predilection for re-inventing perfectly good wheels. In the instance of the Pan Am Games, that meant that procedures which have been in place for major sports events around the world for years or even decades, were not necessarily in place here in Toronto. Felt a little like we were either deliberately trying to represent as a provincial backwater, or we were stuck in some wormhole taking us back to 1985.
The official broadcaster for the Pan Am Games was the venerable CBC, which has long been of the opinion that showjumping is the only equestrian sport with any merit whatsoever. (It’s a bit of a circular argument: if North American spectators never get to see eventing or dressage or combined driving, how is it supposed to develop a following? Numbers for broadcasts of Badminton or Burghley, in the UK, would seem to suggest there’s massive untapped appeal. Ugh.) So in its infinite wisdom, the Ceeb — which had sewn up exclusive video rights to absolutely everything — declined to show up for most of the equestrian events. Which meant that we didn’t even have a video feed in the press tent, thus rendering the luxurious air conditioning in there useless because we had to be outside in order to see what was going on. There was also no live scoring for the dressage, something that has been available for yonks at most major venues and should have been a no-brainer.
There were also all the usual communications fuck-ups that go with most major Games. Nothing disastrous, just a lot of Orwellian, “you were allowed to walk past the warm-up rings yesterday, but today you were never allowed to do that and whoever told you that you were didn’t have the authority to do so and you should have known that” type stuff. The rules for the media seemed to change on a daily basis, which inevitably led to a lot of bitching and frustration from those of us who were trying like hell to comply but couldn’t tell which rules were the real ones. I’m willing to bet it was the same for the riders and grooms and assorted Team hangers-on from the various nations.
There was a concerted effort made to make these Games more accessible to various types of ‘new’ media (podcasters, bloggers, vloggers, web publications, and basically anyone who wasn’t the host broadcaster) and we were all told in no uncertain terms that we should not fuck it up because Toronto was being closely watched and that it would set a precedent for next year’s Rio Olympics and beyond. But a lot of the attempts to make media access to the athletes more ‘casual’ just didn’t work. At the Caledon Equestrian Park, they decided to forego the standard end-of-day press conferences with the top three riders, in favour of just having everyone swarm the poor souls in a noisy corner of the tent. Later, when that turned out to be unsatisfactory, they tried to set up the athletes in the press seating at one end of the stands — next to the VIP seating, which at the end of each day was cranking up for another deafening party. Most of what I got on my digital tape recorder was unintelligible, even when I had managed to elbow my way near the front. But at least the poor riders had chairs to sit in. Note to the Pan Am organizers: if it ain’t broke …
6. PECULIAR PORCUPINE: How a stylized porcupine in a baseball cap came to be the mascot of the Toronto Pan Am Games is another one of those inexplicable Dafuq? decisions. If I were selecting a species of wildlife to represent Toronto, I’d think the obvious choice would be a raccoon. (For the uninitiated, Toronto is overrun with urban raccoons, who hang out on people’s fire escapes and can finagle their way into any variety of garbage can ever 
designed by humans. They are fearless, intimidatingly intelligent, and absolutely huge.) I also have no idea where the name “Pachi” for the mascot originated. I’d like to think perhaps it’s Ojibwe for porcupine or something, but that’s not bloody likely. In any event, I was told that the strangely multi-coloured pointy bits on Pachi’s back numbered 41, to represent each of the countries involved in the Pan Am Games (is that countries eligible to compete, or actual number of countries which sent at least an athlete or two? No clue there either). Certainly there were fewer than 41 ‘quills’ on the little stuffed-toy versions of the mascot that medal-winning athletes were given in lieu of flowers. (The looks on the faces of some of the South American guys who received them was priceless, though.)
7. JOURNALISTS BEHAVING BADLY: As noted above, the CBC was the only body officially allowed to take video of the ‘field of play’ (ie. athletes actually competing in anything). Other media outlets could take video interviews of athletes in the ‘mixed zone’ or outside the venue, and they could send out still photos of the action with a 30-minute embargo, but that was it. At the beginning of the Games, that meant there were volunteers patrolling the stands trying to confiscate people’s iPads — though eventually that was given up as a lost cause. The more people were told they couldn’t take video, the more affronted everyone got when it became apparent that the CBC had zero intention of even providing livestreaming or posting anything on-line after the fact. YouTube became the place to go …
Still, I was unimpressed when I heard that two of the accredited Canadian journalists in our midst were blatantly taking video and posting it on their magazine’s website. I can understand when paying spectators want to preserve a video clip of their nation’s representative(s) for their own enjoyment, but this was another deal entirely. Guess they missed that little (mandatory with your accreditation) lecture about spoiling it for the rest of us? They very nearly got their accreditations yanked, and I would not have been the only one to tell them not to let the door hit them in the ass on the way out.
8. ALL THE FAKENESS: These giant mutant daisy things sprouted like triffids all over the dressage arena at the 
Caledon Equestrian Park. They were at least five feet tall. I told a couple of American journalists who asked that they were trilliums, the provincial flower of Ontario. (There was actually a rather nice showjump which had real representations of trilliums; it showed up later.)
Another headscratcher: the cross-country course, at nearby Will O’ Wind Farm, was decorated throughout with huge volumes of fake, plastic flowers. And they looked really …. fake. I dunno, you’re in Ontario, in July, in the middle of some of the richest 
farmland in North America … you couldn’t scare up some real flowers and foliage maybe?
9. THE SOUND OF SILENCE: Did no-one tell the American fans that Canada is right next door? As in, within driving distance for many? At most events of this size, Canadian cheering sections are accustomed to being drowned out by loud and persistent, “USA! USA! USA!” chants and lots of screaming. The American brand of patriotism can be a little oppressive, to be sure, but you have to admire their enthusiasm. Maybe the Pan Am Games are just not on the American radar (though any event in which Murkans have this good a shot at lots of gold medals, you’d think would be very popular)? Speculation aside, the Canadian riders were greeted by roars from the crowd and lots of flag-waving (it’s worth 
noting that the vast majority of the Canadian competitors, in all three disciplines, live within an hour of the Caledon Equestrian Park — it’s a very horsey neighbourhood). But the Americans got mostly crickets, or polite smatterings of applause at best, and it was actually kinda sad. They must have felt rather lost without their usual wall of noise.
10. KICKSTARTER?: The next Pan Am Games is in Lima, Peru, in 2019. Always wanted to go to Peru. Send money, please?
(Please note: pretty much all the images in this post, and the next few, are Copyright (c) Karen Briggs, 2015. 
Using them anywhere else without my express permission, and fair payment, will quite possibly result in my hunting you down like a dog and making your life squeamishly unpleasant. Thank you.)
Far be it from me to ignore a challenge. Well, okay. I do occasionally ignore challenges … only so many hours in the day, and I’m edging towards an advanced state of decrepitude, after all, and I’m way behind on blog posts about the Toronto Pan Am Games already, and besides, you think all these excuses just spring from the firmament fully formed? This kind of carefully crafted obfuscation takes time and effort, people.
But my good friend (and far, far more consistent blogger than I), Katherine Walcott, over at Rodney’s Saga, tossed out a request to describe the best class I ever had at a horse show. So I’m going to reach a bit into the pre-Cambrian era (or, at least, pre-Spike) and tell you what I remember, rose-tinted though it may be. Cuz apparently, it’s a thing to do if you blog. Creates traffic and all that.
So. Once upon a time. I had a big lanky chestnut Thoroughbred gelding who was an obstreperous bastard and my horse of a lifetime. That his show name was Sweeney Todd ought to tell you a little about him … he went through life with his ears permanently pinned, but OMFG, he had more run and jump in him than I ever knew what to do with. Transforming him from a malcontent racehorse into an event horse took every ounce of persuasive ability I could muster, a willful ignorance of the peril he semi-regularly put me in, and the approximate weight of a Buick Skylark in bulk-food-store Scotch mints, but we did forge a productive partnership eventually — and he was a nice enough horse that several Big Name Riders noticed him. (And went out of their way to tell me I was wasting a talented animal and ought to pass him over to someone who could do him justice, but whatever.)
Please can I have just a little peril?
Toddy had a highly developed sense of self-preservation and that “fifth leg” (no innuendo intended) that a really intelligent and athletic horse has; I trusted him implicitly on cross-country, and he got me around some Preliminary-sized courses I probably had no business getting around. He remains the only horse I’ve ever had who probably could have gone Advanced — had I had more money, more time, and the talent to match his. But as it was, with a limited supply of all of the above, we did reasonably well at the Preliminary level in Ontario in the early 1990s. And then I took a job managing a riding school in Bermuda for a year, and leased Toddy out at the height of his eventing career. (Looking back, not sure that was the smartest thing to do …)
So. The job turned out to be a bit of a trainwreck, and I returned to Ontario pretty much penniless and had to regroup for a while. The resumption of Toddy’s career took more time than I would have liked. He was 15 before I managed to get back
in a position to show again. I’d realized by then that an upgrade to Intermediate was probably not in the cards, but I did have another bucket list item on the agenda: doing a full-on three-day event. We’d never managed to fit one in prior to my semi-tropical hiatus, and I knew if I dithered too much longer, it wasn’t gonna happen.
This was shortly before the “long format” three-day event became extinct, and the Ontario Horse Trials Association used to make a point of offering a Training level three-day event each year as a sort of gentle introduction to dealing with a real three-day (as opposed to the simpler, one-day horse trials format that most amateurs are accustomed to). “Real” three-days began at the Preliminary level and were FEI-sanctioned, so the Training level three-days were run as clinics, with BNRs talking you through the extra steps: the two veterinary inspections, the various Phases of cross-country day (does anyone still remember Roads and Tracks and Steeplechase?), the dreaded 10-minute vet box, 
the demands of caring for and cooling out your horse after that sort of intensity.
So Toddy did his first — and only, as it turned out — three-day event at the age of 16, passing the jog despite his super-fancy track jewellery, and delivering a mediocre dressage test in the rain the next day. (He often delivered mediocre dressage tests, not because he couldn’t do the flatwork, but because he held it in disdain and far preferred to embarrass me than to wow the judges. He was the old-fashioned type of event horse who wanted to get on with the running and jumping as soon as possible, please.)
That’s not the “best class” part. That came the next day, when Toddy trotted around Phase A — the first Roads 
and Tracks section — and then came out of the start box on Phase B (steeplechase) monumentally confused. Ordinarily, one gets a few warm-up cross-country fences before one goes out on course, but at a long-format three-day, you book it straight down to the (substantial) brush fences on steeplechase with no heads-up for your poor beast. Toddy, three-day virgin that he was, launched himself about five feet in the air over that first 3’3″ brush, with his eyes out on stalks. (Please note my bravery in providing you with photographic evidence of this: I was not exactly at my slimmest at the time, and between his helicopter effort and my thunder thighs, it ain’t a pretty picture!) We landed in a bit of a heap, and (with my heart in my throat) I chirped to him to gallop on … and suddenly there were tears streaming from my eyes as the pretty-good-allowance-turf-horse inside my teenaged beast asserted himself, and he realized that pelting like a bat 
outta hell at big brush fences was just about. The BEST. Thing. Ever. EV. ER.
To this day I don’t think my heart-rate has ever gotten higher; I’m lucky I didn’t stroke out, but I suspect that Toddy would have continued to pack me around even if I had been as limp as a bag of hammers at that point. I had galloped plenty of racehorses in my youth, but nothing ever felt faster or more terrifying or more fantastic than that two minutes and change on steeplechase, on the most athletic damn horse I ever sat on. The finish flags were a blur, and it took me one helluva long time to pull him up, but eventually we completed the second Roads and Tracks section and came into the 10-minute box on time and unscathed. (Good thing they weren’t checking my heartrate in there — it was still pounding like a bunch of demented Kodo drummers, but my shiny metallic chestnut dude was good to go despite the heat.)
The actual cross-country, Phase D, was almost anti-climactic after steeplechase, considering it was a Training level course and thus not all that challenging for Toddy, who’d been running Prelim for years. My brain stalled out at one point and I wasted a good 20 seconds circling in a field before I remembered where my next jump was, so we ended up with time faults, but I really didn’t give a rat’s ass. We were clean, Toddy had come through all of it beautifully (especially for an old warrior with osselets and a minor heart murmur), and his legs were cold and as tight as they ever were the next day. He hadn’t even managed to pull a shoe, which for Toddy, was saying something.
We capped the whole experience the next day with possibly the most perfect stadium round I have ever jumped. I freely 
confess to being a bit of a ‘seat of the pants’ rider. My eye for a distance is not the greatest, and I’ll routinely flub at least one fence by second-guessing my horse — but on that day, we absolutely nailed it. I remember cantering down to the final vertical on the course thinking, okay, I’ve managed to get a perfect spot to every fence so far, which never, ever happens … surely I’m going to come down to this last one and fuck it all up. Instead, I saw the distance, and the distance was good. It felt amazing. And I — and maybe the stadium judge, maybe not — was the only one who saw that round. Because the rain was coming down in absolute sheets, and pretty much everyone else had abandoned ship and was huddled in the indoor arena, some distance away.
To say I was proud of my Grinch that day is a huge, huge understatement. On top of all of his other little successes that weekend, he was normally a horse who loathed having to compete in the rain. He’d flatten his ears to his skull and grind his teeth and make it clear that I deserved to burn in hell…. but that day, he put away the ‘tude and pulled out the stops for me. Never mind that it wasn’t a ‘real’ three-day and it didn’t count for anything of any significance, and never mind that I don’t even remember where we placed. (Eighth or ninth, I think, thanks to that dressage score and the time faults on Phase D.) It still sticks in my mind as the most awesome show we ever had.
But you’re really going to have to take my word for it.
Writing From the Right Side of the Stall 