Warmblood
invested in these foals by now. But it’s worth it to me; I don’t want to ever have a time when we don’t have a horse developing. If you look at the top riders in America, we have many
who have one good horse and then they’re out. Maybe they have another horse coming up, but that’s it. We tend to rely a lot on luck and hope, and if your chances buying a lottery ticket are one in a hundred, buying fifty makes your chances one out of two. That’s what we need to do with horses. I’m sure Edward Gal is not buying foals—he’s buying
a five-year-old that has a wow factor. He’s buying a lot- tery ticket that gives him a 1 in 2 chance to get to the FEI level. But sponsor Glock is funding that. The rank and file professional doesn’t have that kind of backing. There’s no reason those riders can’t be in the game, but they have to be creative and find a way to do it. The first foals we bought are now coming five. One
is a lovely creature who’s attractive and a kind and fun horse. She’s probably not an Olympic horse—you never know, of course, but we do hope she’ll become a suc- cessful Young Rider and FEI horse for her new 15-year- old owner. Another of our young horses is a rock star. She’s phenomenal. She’s a foal that was bought for
fair money and we put her in a field, and now she’s a diamond in the rough. It stands to reason that some of these foals we bring over will be international horses, some will be useless and some will be suitable for an amateur. If every good FEI rider in this country bought a two-
year-old every other year, in ten years we would have a juggernaut of horses to rival any European country. Generally speaking, we don’t do this in the United States. We don’t think of the future in this way. But if we want to be successful on the international stage, we have to start—now.
An FEI dressage rider/trainer of Long Valley, New Jersey, and Loxahatchee, Florida, Michael Barisone has a thriving training business and several horses winning at Grand Prix, including HF Victor, Urbanus and Lauren Sprieser’s Ellegria. Michael was reserve for the 2008 Olympic team riding Neruda. He and Vera Kessels-Barisone, a Dutch native and Grand Prix dressage rider, purchase foals in Holland each year and produce all of their own Grand Prix horses.
66 May/June 2017
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