What to do with a Retired Trakehner Event Horse? Teach Him Something New! By Tim Holekamp President of the American Trakehner Association S
urely there are a lot of aged former three-day event stars still out there? One doesn’t hear much about them for the most part. Some are school horses;
maybe some are just enjoying pasture life. One has to as- sume that many are no longer sound, as upper-level event- ing does tend to take its toll on joints and soſt tissue. But there are a few, mostly those with something unusu- al in their pedigrees such as extreme longevity and soundness in their parentage, who just don’t want to quit. Certainly the ap- proved ATA stallion Windwalzer fits that bill, having stayed in Grand Prix form into his 20s. And Valhalla’s 18 year-old Stileto, performing at Grand Prix aſter a very respectable career in two-star eventing. Trakehner horses very oſten are multi-talented by nature and eager learners as well, as these two late-in-life dressage successes demonstrate. Our stallion Windfall is also such an animal. His sire,
Habicht, was still strong and active when he broke his leg in a freak accident at age 25 and his sire’s sire, an Anglo-Arab named Burnus, lived comfortably to age 32, still jumping out of his pasture whenever he felt like it right up until the end. Both of those stallions competed at the four-star level for the German team. And Windfall’s dam, Wundermaedel xx, lived until age 28, having raced, evented and produced a whole string of good riding horses. So perhaps it was not a fluke that Windfall enjoyed ten
years of upper-level eventing and retired at age 17, fully sound and on no medications. He really did not have any
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reason to become a “pasture ornament” and so he didn’t. Because she has always been absolutely crazy about him, my wife Cheryl kept him going on the flat just for the fun of it. She is a USDF gold medalist, now also a candidate for an “S” dressage judge’s license, and thus it came as no surprise that she began teaching him those litle “tricks” that even four-star event horses don’t learn, the very difficult FEI dressage movements. Not that Windfall wasn’t
already a bit of a dressage phenomenon, holding the all-time record for the highest CCI**** dres- sage score at Rolex for a number of years (78+%), but there is a considerable distance between four-star dressage tests and Grand Prix, a chasm that only a handful of successful upper- level event horses have ever crossed, perhaps none who had won a CCI**** in their careers. When Robert Dover
was coaching Windfall back in his days on the U.S. team, he commented that he thought it would be possible for him to learn and perform the Grand Prix movements. Te idea was planted and Cheryl sort of worked at it for fun, litle by litle, being careful to mind Windfall’s soundness and com- fort. No medications were needed. In fact, Cristin Stoop, his groom for many years, came to
our Missouri farm to ride him as a demo horse at the ICP (USEA’s Instructor Certification Program) workshops we hosted for upper-level instructor candidates, as did Callie Judy. Every time he finished his cross-country jumping les-
THIS PAGE, ABOVE: Cheryl Holekamp and Windfall warm up for their first Grand Prix September 2013. OPPOSITE PAGE: Cheryl and Windfall after competing the Grand Prix.
American Trakehner Association
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