Warmblood By Boyd Martin Rolling with Pancho’s Punches I
n the sport of eventing, there’s one thing I can guaran- tee: if you own a top-level horse, there will be moments of glory followed by moments of despair, followed by
more moments of glory and more moments of despair. In 2013 I spotted Pancho Villa in a clinic down in
Texas and right off the bat, this flashy bay French horse really caught my eye. The rider, Sydney Elliott Collier, noticed my interest and mentioned she wanted to sell him. At the time I was looking for a backup horse for the World Equestrian Games and even though Pancho wasn’t qualified, I thought if all went well, he might just be the horse.
One thing I did underestimate was the riding skill, abil-
ity and hard work Sydney had put into Pancho. I knew he was a quirky horse and he had some trouble on cross- country in his past, but at the time of the clinic he was hit- ting form and competing well. I quickly rounded up a syndicate, which included a
lot of my long-term supporters, to purchase Pancho. He wasn’t super expensive when compared to my four-star horses Trading Aces and 2012 Olympic partner Otis Barbo- tiere, so it wasn’t hard to get a group behind him. I’ll never forget our first event together. Right off, I
just ran him around a prelim. I’d recently come off ankle surgery and when I rode him around the cross-country at Plantation Field, I remember thinking he was a little more spooky than I first anticipated. I then went and had another ankle surgery and got my good friend Phillip to run him around a CIC3* at Jersey. In hindsight this was the wrong move on my part, as Phillip crashed and burned on the cross-country. Basically Pancho spooked at the water, misread the question—and Phillip took a swim. The next start for Pancho was intermediate at Mill-
brook, New York, where a lot of his owners are residents. Again Pancho was quite frustrating to ride, after he’d had quite a good spring of show jumping. He was spooky and looking at everything, and I’m sure at this point everyone in the syndicate was thinking along the same lines as my- self: this might have been a terrible mistake. The point of this column is to explain that not every-
thing was smooth sailing with my [Pan Am] team gold medal winning partner. At one point we even put him on the market, but fortunately he did not sell. It definitely took us a good 18 months to build a partnership. During that time, the Pancho Villa Syndicate never made me feel
74 September/October 2015
guilty or bad. Lucky for me, Pancho has evolved into a top event horse. To get Pancho going well, I got in touch with his past
rider, Sydney, who gave me good advice and helped me walk the cross-country course at a few events. I quickly figured out that he was suspicious of accuracy fences, especially on cross-country and coming off a turn. He was fine going straight to a fence but when you have to make a curving approach to a jump it made it very easy for Pan- cho to run out. I was also very lucky that I have a cross-country school-
ing course at my own farm and for about six months straight I hardly show jumped Pancho; I just took him out and jumped small cross-country fence after small cross- country fence, until my crooked-nosed partner and myself really got in sync. On top of that, I had to experiment with a great number of bits and martingales. I made the mis- take early on of using too sharp of a bit, which offended Pancho even more. I found that in his case nothing is bet- ter than the plain and simple old snaffle. I did use a mar- tingale for a while but then stopped. The bottom line is that it takes a considerable amount
of time to build a partnership with a horse. I thought I had the same ability as Sydney and could jump on and get him going as well as she had. But Pancho is quite a quirky horse and it took time and patience; once we started to figure each other out, and our partnership was solid enough to start training with the U.S. team, we’ve been nothing but successful. At the Pan Am Games in Toronto I stood on the podium
with my teammates, gold medals around our necks, look- ing up at the syndicate members who were applauding loudly. I remember thinking to myself that this feeling of success was even sweeter remembering how little ap- plause there was just two years before!
Four-star event rider Boyd Martin repre- sented the United States at the 2010 and 2014 World Equestrian Games and the 2012 Olympics. He and his wife Silva, a G.P. dres- sage rider, own and operate Windurra USA in Cochranville, PA. Learn more about them at
www.boydandsilvamartin.com.
Amber Heintzberger
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