Three Strikes and Still Swinging
Three Strikes
By Charlene Strickland
andStill Swinging
After multiple setbacks, grand prix rider Shelley Fellers rebounded in 2017. Riding her 16-year-old Swedish Warmblood Revenge (Quite Easy x Robin Z), Shelley competed in her first AIG $1 Million Grand Prix this year, and followed that with top-five placings at several different California shows.
S
helley Fellers struggled with her equine partner’s injuries and a health scare. But her troubles weren’t just with her horse—they also included two years recuperating from three of her own injuries. Despite
these career-interrupting challenges, Shelley has made it back to the grand prix arena, demonstrating her extraordi- nary grit and perseverance in the process. Shelley’s part of an established horse show family hail-
ing from Oregon City, Oregon: she is married to Olympian and World Cup winner Rich Fellers, and is mother to Christo- pher and Savannah. Both kids are active in the horse world. Christopher is now the assistant trainer at Rich Fellers Stables, while Savannah is learning the equestrian apparel industry at Irideon.
FIRST INJURY In July 2014, Shelley hurt a groin muscle. “I strained it when I was at Spruce Meadows. I’d never hurt it before. I just thought it would be fine,” she recounts. She continued jumping, and she and Rich competed at
the Spruce Meadows Masters CSIO5* in the beginning of September. “I was warming up, and at that point I was taking a lot of Advil just so I could ride. I landed off a jump in the warmup ring and I heard something pop. There was this
All photos by Charlene Strickland
excruciating pain and I thought, ‘What was that?’ I walked around for a minute and then went into the ring,” Shelley says. That class was her last one at that show. “The next day I
couldn’t even post the trot,” she recalls. Once she returned home she proceeded to get an MRI.
“Right where your adductor tendon connects to your pubic bone, it had torn almost completely off. It was just hanging by a thread,” she describes the test results she received. “They said, ‘You are done riding for a long time.’ I said, ‘What can I do? I want to get back to it as soon as I can.’” What frustrated her most was the timing. She’d been
waiting for Revenge to come back after his own accident two years before. At the HITS Thermal Desert Circuit, he injured himself on the lip of a water jump in a class before the 2012 World Cup qualifier. “And he jumped terrible in the qualifier,” she recalls. “He was throwing himself to the side.”
She learned that he’d strained a front suspensory. “That
explained why he was just hurling himself to the side. He didn’t tear it, but it was inflamed. So he was out for a year. And that’s when we got going again and I hurt myself.”
TOP: Shelley Fellers on her own horse Revenge at the HITS AIG $1M Grand Prix in March 2017 in Thermal, California.
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