Syndications Attract Owners, From Few to Many OWNER’S POINT OF VIEW By Tim Holekamp
progress made in upper level Three-Day Eventing here in the U.S. in the last two years with regard to increasing the resources available to our national team riders and aspirants. The article revolved mainly around the syndicating process from three riders’ points of view. Perhaps it might be helpful to mention a few aspects that owners in syndications think about.
T
Togetherness Breeds Better Sponsorship I have owned competition eventing horses for over twenty years. Some were breeding animals that my wife and I used for our Trakehner breeding program and some were not. Some made it to three-star level (Amethyst, Trading Aces) and some higher (Windfall, Otis Barbotiere, Neville Bardos), and some are still working their way up (Komik, Project Runway, others). Until the last few years, we owned them entirely on our own and paid to support them. Some of these involved handshake deals, and some involved written agreements that were pretty sketchy. Luckily, and it may well have been due to luck, none ended in chaos and hostility. For others around us, things sometimes did not end so happily. Unfortunately, some of those situations became embarrassingly public, to the great detriment of our sport and to the discouragement of potential owners and sponsors. Good riders really need owners and sponsors, and our sport needs to have successful upper level riders—it supports growth for everyone. Unlike in European countries, there is no public money
in the U.S. to directly support our international competition horses and riders, so private owners must step up or we have trouble winning medals. (Even sometimes when they DO we have trouble….) Times have changed and where in the past top eventing horses cost X, now they sell regularly for 5 to 10 times X and the support costs have soared as well, in part due to our geographic location on the globe. We need more total investment and that means more folks being involved. That is how syndication came up, and that is a major reason why the Eventing Owners Task Force (EOTF) was founded. So far, about 35 syndicates have begun to form and operate through EOTF facilitation, and it would be fortunate if more were started.
Clarity Engenders Happiness The key to syndications executing and ending happily is for the paperwork to be clear and complete, where goals are
he last issue of Warmbloods Today carried an excellent article by Amber Heintzberger, “Sport Horse Syndications Popular with Eventers.” It captured the remarkable
Allie Knowles and Komik, a syndicated event mare, bred by the Holekamps.
agreed to, plans for all possible outcomes are laid out and the needs for both riders and owners are met. Curiously, the two key elements for owners are not profit and power, but rather defined exposure in both cost and liability. Smart riders cap support payments required, at levels that do not result in “milking” owners, but rather just covering operating costs. LLCs can and do provide complete protection for owners from liability, which is only fair in the normal situation where the rider entirely controls the horse, and thus the liability. Insurance on the horse helps protect everyone and is usually part of the deal. In exchange for these protections, riders are almost always also “managers” and are given complete control over the care, training and competition goals and schedules of horses. The very thorny problem of owners choosing to sell the horse against the rider’s will is covered too, in ways that can be tailored to various situations and in ways that protect the rider’s access to the horse for team use and other career benefits fairly. It is not only the rider who has an interest at stake in this matter—so do our sport and our national effort to win in international competitions.
Syndications Can End the Feudal System With national team goals in mind, planners of syndications might also consider an unsung side benefit of shared or partial ownership of upper-level horses. In the past, there was a very strong tendency for a single rider to enter into a relationship with a single owner/sponsor and through various methods coerce that owner/sponsor into supporting ONLY that rider. To put it bluntly, riders owned owners, or surely
Warmbloods Today 87
Samantha Clark
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