Finding CAVU Ten years later, she called her former trainer to say the time had come to find her dream horse and become the best rider she could be. “I was ready, though I didn’t know how I would fit it all in,” Susan says. Her trainer, Nancy Baker of Union, Kentucky, went
shopping. Sitting on top a horse in Florida, Nancy called Susan to say that she found him. She didn’t want to get off because other people were in line to try him out. Susan was deplaning in Chicago. Nancy stayed on the horse until Susan was in the terminal and returned her call. They made an offer. Susan went to Florida the next weekend and Connaisseur was hers. She was ready to go. Or was she? At eight years old,
“CAVU” was something of an unknown quantity. (He was nicknamed by Susan’s husband, a retired F-18 Hornet pilot. The initials stand for Clear Above Visibility Unlimited or the crystal blue sky.) A Conteur son out of a Weltmeyer daughter, he had been imported from Germany in November 2009, arrived at Susan’s Flyaway Acres in March 2010 and had yet to be shown.
Nonetheless, Susan gave the show arena a try with him
with results that were consistently frustrating. “He would get heavy and explosive in a new environment. He would do well in the first part of the test, then get nervous and come
“The key to improvement is staying tuned in to when the balance falls apart.”
plan. The obvious might be to keep showing and showing the horse until he eventually settled. Instead, they kept CAVU out of the show arena until he learned to focus. Nancy believed that he would tell them when he was ready. “Nancy put in two months of intensive training. Then I
would ride a couple of times a week, mostly riding tests. I’m a good test rider. I would tell her when something went wrong in the test and she would work on that when she rode.” Once again, Susan accepted that she needed to be
patient to achieve her goals with CAVU. She loved striving to be the best, preparing and stepping up to the evaluation of an expert. The 5’11” amateur ran track in college and knows how under pressure to strive for her personal best. But now competing on her dream horse would have to wait. Eight months later, Susan and Nancy felt CAVU’s
Above (and with article title, left side): Susan and CAVU showing during the Region 2 AA championships last year at Third Level.
unglued. In the first half he might have scores of 6, 7, 8, even a 9. The second half he would earn a 1, 4, maybe 5. He would buck, push heavily into my hands, switch leads every other stride. He would mentally check out in the middle of the test and be quite wound up.” Susan and her trainer agreed to take him down from
Third to Second Level. He did a bit better and won a local championship but didn’t qualify for the Regional Championships in 2011.
New Strategy So the women put their heads together to come up with a
22 March/April 2013
confidence had improved dramatically, but he wasn’t quite ready for the show arena. Then as luck would have it, Susan’s other mount, a seasoned show horse named Reliance, was pricked by a farrier’s nail and couldn’t compete in the show Susan had entered him in at Kentucky Horse Park. She had two choices: scratch or ask CAVU to step up and fill in. They decided it was time to see if their training strategy worked. The sights and sounds at the show were quite dramatic, especially for a horse that found the show atmosphere so exciting. At one point, with Susan in the saddle, CAVU panicked, leaped in the air, snorted like a dragon and seemed to grow three feet taller on the spot. Nancy called to Susan to get off so she could get on. Susan didn’t think she could get off, however. “He did two of those fire breathing snorts and then he was fine,” she recounts. The next day, when the show began, he settled and was truly a champion “He stayed with me, never lost focus, and we won some classes. I felt like a professional rider. I did it. I kept my seat. I didn’t hold him back and he qualified for the regional championships for Third Level.” Nancy continued to train CAVU for Susan, and she
shares with us the two-prong approach they found particularly beneficial to overcome his jitters. “Confidence was built bit by bit in our daily training with consistency. First we taught him to listen to the whisper of the leg, beginning with the walk. The rider must be attuned to the moment the walk lacks energy and immediately make a correction with a quick leg. When he answers, the reward is a quiet leg. While the correction is easy, the difficult part
Courtesy Susan Jones
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