POINT OF VIEW
make them bored—they’re just babies! When something’s not fun, they start to act up to entertain themselves. Sometimes they need to take a break and grow and then
go back to school. Instead of just one day off they might need a month or two off. After those two months, you’re back to where you were after just a couple days; they never forget. I’d rather push in a good way for two months, than leave them alone, rather than drilling them.
What is most challenging?
Lauren: Going slowly. Sometimes you get very special horses that have the mind and ability to progress quickly but you have to see long term and stay patient with them.
Nicki: I think there is as much prestige and skill in riding young horses as there is in riding Grand Prix horses, but our prize money doesn’t always reflect that. I think a lot of professionals have to choose between traveling with their Grand Prix horses and showing young horses, because it still costs a lot to travel around with young horses. If the U.S. wants to provide equine Olympic-qual- ity athletes that are born and raised here, the incentives need to keep increasing so those young horses can travel with top- notch riders. At the young horse classes that I at- tend—beside the
Nicki Wilcox competing Cha Ching.
finals—the Grand Prix is always in a time slot when everyone can watch, while the young horse classes are during the day and there’s not a lot of emphasis on the classes. There are the professionals who make money bringing hors- es along and selling them, or who get Grand Prix horses and make money winning GPs. Without the prestige and influence in the young horses, it’s hard to take a horse all the way up through its career without re-selling them. There’s more money in selling a horse than in prize money, generally speaking.
Marjory: In France there’s a specific circuit for showing young horses that is very strong, for eventing, dressage and jumping. Here you have trainers who specialize by discipline; in France you have the upper-level riders and also specialists for young horses who are well-known by those upper-level riders; every- body knows you need people who are good at bringing the horses along from the beginning so when they’re six or seven
they’re ready to go to the upper level barns. Some trainers have a rock-solid reputation for starting young horses. Here there’s not a good circuit to start the young horses and most upper-level riders don’t want to start the young horses because of the risk—it’s time-consuming and it’s a whole dif- ferent ballgame. Horse people in America tend to send their young horse to the cowboy to start him under saddle and then on to an upper-level trainer. When the upper-level trainer has a barn full of horses, the younger ones are often ridden by assis- tants or whomever—they are not the trainer’s first priority.
Do you think it is important that some trainers specialize in working with young horses? Why or why not?
Lauren: I do. Some people are very talented at working with young horses, yet some people are equally as talented with working with young riders, problem horses, coaching and so on. The horse world is made up of so many people with so many different talents and abilities, and that is what is so won- derful about it. Everyone should find their area of expertise and contribute to it and continue to help it grow.
Marjory: You can dream of sending your kid to Harvard, but if he doesn’t learn to read properly in kindergarten, he won’t make it. My barn is like kindergarten—and those months are very important. It’s so much harder to work with a horse that wasn’t
started well than it is to start one from scratch. They’re like a notebook—with a young horse the pages are blank, and you start to write things down and add to the pages each day. If along the way you mess up somewhere, because you didn’t know what you were doing, you can use an eraser but the page is never going to be blank again. Whatever you wrote in the first place will always be there, you’ll never get it off com- pletely, and it’s the same with the young horses. I think it’s crucial to give them a really good start. So yes, these special- ized trainers are very important.
Do you think it can be a full-time business?
Lauren: If you have proven yourself successful at it, absolutely. For the foreseeable future there will always be young horses that need to be brought along and it is definitely a skill set not necessarily every rider has, nor needs to have, as long as they allow someone else to properly start their young horse.
Marjory: I have about seven to ten horses in training at a time. For a while I had exclusively young horses but the thing is when you have a good one, people usually want to sell them. You sell it, make the commission and start with the next proj- ect, so it’s hard to build a name for yourself. I think people are starting to find the niche as young horse trainers but it is not quite as easy as riding made horses, and
Warmbloods Today 91
Deb Dawson
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