Sinead has trained with some of the best eventers in the world. She started to work with David and Karen O’Connor in 2001. “They have been fantastic coaches as well as mentors, shoulders to lean on, psychologists and basically family,” she says. Together with Canadian 2010 World Games silver medalist
Rebecca Howard, longtime supporter Nancy Neubeiser and Sinead’s mother Bernadette Cogdell, Sinead started a sales import business called Dunlavin Horses in 2003. “What a fabulous time we had!” she says. “We traveled to Ireland, England, Canada and Argentina picking out young horses to produce and sell. Not a bad day job!” While the traveling and training was fun, selling horses is
a tough way to make a living. Eventually Sinead and Rebecca decided to pursue their own personal competitive goals and put the business on hold. Rebecca became head trainer at the Cogdells’ Fork Farm in Norwood, North Carolina and Sinead moved to England.
THRIVING ABROAD In 2006 Sinead’s horse Tommy II, owned by Nancy Neubeiser, with whom Sinead had won the 2005 Radnor Hunt CCI** in Pennsylvania, died in a fall at the Poplar Place advanced horse trials in Columbus, Georgia when he hung a leg and flipped over a cross-country fence, breaking his neck. It was a trying time for Sinead and a turning point in her life. “When Tommy died, I just needed to get away,” she
recalls. “I knew I didn’t want to leave the horses but in the years leading up to the loss of Tommy I had several injuries and couldn’t quite get things to go my way, no matter how hard I worked. So I thought maybe my perspective was off. Sometimes when you are too close to things you can’t see the big picture, so I shut down a successful business and moved to England with one young horse. No one in England knew me or knew of the misfortunes I had had in the past and I was able to move on and let go without familiar surroundings reminding me of the past. England was a huge turning point for me: it allowed me to grow up as a person and a rider without being under a microscope.” She spent nearly a year and a half living in England, where
she worked first for European Champion (and daughter of U.S. Chef d’Equipe Mark Phillips), Zara Phillips. As her coach Mark felt that living and competing abroad would help Sinead bring her riding up to a more professional and competitive level. She took a young horse, Scottie Ducati, owned by long-time supporter Nancy Neubeiser, along to the Phillips’ farm, Aston, in the Cotswolds, and spent six months working for Zara and training with Capt. Phillips and his wife Sandy before moving on to work for William Fox-Pitt for another ten months. It was during this time in late 2007 that she sold Scottie to
Irish rider Austin O’Connor, and her step-father, Jim Cogdell, purchase Manoir De Carneville for her to ride. “Jim hugely
Warmbloods Today 21
supported and encouraged my trip to England and I couldn’t have done it without his help,” she says. Unfortunately things did not go completely as planned. “Tate” severed his extensor tendon in January and Sinead could only compete in the U.K. in the later spring. Completely recovered from his injury, Tate traveled home to the U.S. with Sinead in August 2008 and finished third in the two-star at Fair Hill, which put the pair on the USEF Developing Riders List. “Things got much easier when I got to William’s because I
was part of a team as opposed to the lonely American,” recalls Sinead. “Being away from friends and family was hard, but honestly I worked so darn hard the time flew. I wish I had gone abroad sooner! As young people, especially if you’re not independently wealthy, we feel a bit limited to what we are able to do. I do however believe that I would not have been ready for William’s yard if I had not been properly educated in the states. It was kind of like going to Harvard, which wouldn’t be very useful if you only had a middle school education.” A serious competition “yard,” the Fox-Pitt’s business
focused around William. “It was not a teaching yard —William had 29 competition horses with owners paying him to ride, compete and win on them,” Sinead explains. “My job was to help him with that by learning the way he wanted them ridden and making sure they felt the same every time he got on them. Regarding the pressure—there was a lot. I probably would have been too insecure as a young person to handle this, but I was fairly confident in my foundation and was dying to learn how he did what he did…eventually by
Sinead Halpin was awarded the USET Foundation’s Pinnacle Cup Trophy as the highest placed American rider at the 2011 Rolex Kentucky Three-Day Event CCI****. Photo by Amy Dragoo
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