training on her own. “I would buy a horse, train it and sell it,” she explains. “Then I would buy another one, train it and sell it. That’s how I started to get up to really nice horses.” Rock ‘n roll changed Elena’s life in 2000 when she made a
visit to Cleveland to see the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame. There she met her husband-to-be (last name Golubitsky) and eventually she moved to Ohio. “When he asked me what I wanted as my wedding present, a lot of Russian ladies would ask for jewelry or a car. I asked him for a black stallion. Little did he know what he was getting into!” The horse she bought was a young Trakehner that looked
exactly like her current horse Adesco C, she says. Sadly, her dreams for her young horse did not come true. While pregnant with her first child in 2003, Elena’s young stallion developed an inguinal hernia (hernia of the groin, with swelling near the scrotum). Unfortunately, even emergency surgery didn’t save his life. With the insurance payment for this horse, Elena found her
next prospect, one with similar bloodlines. “He was a yearling that I bought from pictures in Canada,” she recounts. “When he came off the trailer as a two-year-old, I said, ‘I bought myself a hunter.’ So I trained him for a year and I sold him as a three- year-old.”
Tird Time’s a Charm Despite these setbacks, Elena refused to give up the search for
her dream dressage horse. For a year, she looked at prospects but none seemed to be that elusive right horse. Finally, in 2005 Elena found a young horse in Canada called Adesco C—another black stallion—listed for sale. “I thought, he’s a Holsteiner, jumping bloodlines, but I’ll go see him anyways,” she says. “I didn’t want a chestnut. I didn’t want a gray. I wanted a dark bay or a black.” She contacted his breeders, Susan and Ron Svarich. It
turned out that Elena had met them previously when she had talked with them about a different stallion to breed to a Trakehner mare. So she took a trip to Alberta to check out Adesco C. “He was this three-and-a-half-year-old with a very nice attitude. He had a little bigger head and I thought, he will grow into it. He had a very kind eye,” she says. His sire was the Holsteiner Ariadus that stands at Fox Fire Farm in Washington. His dam was Zenit, a State Premium mare (Caribo x Tumbled xx) whose sire was Caribo, a son of Calypso II. She had won her Mare Performance Test in Germany. “When I saw him, he was unbroke so they free lunged him
for me. He was already licensed as a jumper for the Canadian Warmblood Horse Breeders Association. Adesco had this very good mind. I knew he was a little long in the back, but he had a good jumping hind end. The trot was good,” she continues. Elena appreciated Adesco C’s blood- lines, although not dressage- oriented, and
his good
Elena and Adesco C in piaffe, in the Developing Grand Prix Horse Championship.
manners. When he showed an impromptu piaffe, that natural tendency told her he could be a Grand Prix prospect. She definitely didn’t want another horse that moved like a
hunter, so she wanted to test ride the horse. “I really wanted to feel him between my legs. They said, ‘Well, he’s had the saddle on.’ I said, ‘Okay, has anybody sat on him? Can you put the saddle on and see how he reacts?’” Although the young stallion hadn’t yet felt the weight of a
rider, Elena determined she would take the chance and sit on him. “So we put the saddle on, we longed him, put the stirrups down. I said, ‘I really want to feel him.’ They gave me a leg up and here I am on the top of my future horse. He just looked and said, ‘All right.’” She felt he was perfect and knew he was the horse for her.
“He felt great under me. I didn’t want a horse that would be too wide. I don’t like really wide horses. He wasn’t too skinny, either.” His height, at 16.2 hands, fit Elena well. (Since then, he’s grown to 17.2.) After starting his training, Elena encountered her first setback with Adesco C. He developed an inguinal hernia, the same thing that had claimed the life of her first horse in 2006. Fortunately, he recovered. “I think the one horse that I lost, my wedding present, helped me,” Elena explains. “You know how you look for the reasons why things happen and you want to find a good reason, even in a bad time? Maybe that’s why it happened, so I could save this one. He recovered really well. I gave him good time off to make sure.” Elena was working two jobs at this point in her life, both as a horse trainer and as a part-time dental hygienist. She first
Warmbloods Today 25
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