“I think everyone laughed that Boyd was on this little
‘pony,’ but I think Erik liked the horse when he said, ‘Let’s do something with this horse.’ Erik’s great, he’s ‘on’ all the time, he’s go, go, go. The other day Boyd copied me on an email with some grid work he was doing that wasn’t going well, and Erik explained in great detail how to improve it. He really takes his time and pays attention to detail. Erik also rides Thomas on occasion and watching them is like watching them dance the tango—Thomas just floats.” “I asked if his specialty is dressage,” Chris continues, “and
he said ‘No, it’s cross country,’ and I thought, ‘Oh yeah, we can go really far.’ The WEG didn’t go the way we wanted, but we all finished. But I think Erik also really helped get him moti- vated to move on after that disappointment.”
What the Future Holds Tommie is now 23, and Chris says she’d like to turn the farm and horses over to her eventually. In the meantime, the fate of the family’s Texas farm is uncertain, as the state is putting a six-lane highway through the property. “There’s a house built in 1874 and they won’t divert the highway,” she says. “Poten- tially I will sell the farm. I only bred one this year because I’m so worried about it. I’m trying to trim down my herd, and I don’t want to just give the older broodmares away because they’ll go for meat—you have to find good homes for them, and that’s hard.” The family also owns a farm in Ocala, Florida, a hot spot
for east coast eventers heading south for the winter as well as a number of eventers who live there year-round. Former event horse Schoensgreen Hanni is a dres- sage schoolmaster for Tommie, and she also rides a former eventer named Contaro. “Tommie’s broken her pelvis on him twice, but she loves him,” says Chris. “He and Hanni went up to Boyd’s this summer for about a month of training.” Of course horses are not the only focus for the family;
Chris’s husband had a family business in the petroleum industry, which they sold, and now they operate a bullet- resistant materials company and a microbrewery. She was on the San Antonio Conservation Society board for more than 20 years, though she has recently stepped down because of all the travel involved with the horses. “I’m more or less trying to wind down now,” she says. “If I didn’t have all of this going on here, I could travel and do more. It gets to be too much.” Meanwhile, Chris still has her Arabian, now 25 years old. She doesn’t ride him anymore, but she still goes out in the field and plays with him. “He nuzzles me and we’ll walk around together and stuff, but he’s retired and deserves his retirement.” Looking forward, while Chris is scaling back her breed-
ing operation she still has big plans for her core group of high performance athletes. Perhaps Tsetserleg, Kyra or On Cue will be a horse for the Tokyo Olympic Games. Only time will tell.
40 January/February 2019
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