? $ $ $
t with a Grand Prix Jumper?
very best to educate them. Once reality sets in, then you know what you’ve accomplished. By the time they’re about 11, it is what it is. The hopes are free. Dreams are free. Reality is expensive.” In his career, Richard has earned over $3 million competing jumpers. Some trainers own and compete their own horses, and gain personal satisfaction with a horse’s success along with all the earnings the horse might produce. It’s also a bigger risk, of course. Hugh “Bert” Mutch of 2Mutch Show Jumping, based in
Nicasio, California, talks about his jumper, Cristar (Cristo x Quinar), co-owned with his fiancé, Jenna Hahn. He saw the horse jump in the 2017 HITS AIG $1 Million Grand Prix taking second place for $200,000. “He caught my eye. He’s my type of horse,” Bert says. Cristar’s price was high, but he became Bert’s ride in 2018, when the horse’s owner told Bert she would sell and that he was her first choice. “All I can say is it was a dream come true. I happened to be in the right place at the right time. I was able to afford this horse,” Bert says. Originally from
Connecticut, Bert learned from his father, the legendary R.W. “Ronnie” Mutch. Both won the American Horse Shows Association Medal Finals, Bert in 1978 and Ronnie in 1950.
Time to Develop To transform a dream into reality, the jour- ney often starts with a fairly young horse. “I buy them quite young. Normally I buy a five- year-old and bring him up,” Lauren Hester of Hester Equestrian in Lexington, Kentucky says. She currently has a seven-year-old she bought as a foal, however. “At this point, she is probably the nicest horse I’ve ever sat on.”
She bought her current star, Warinde B (Padinus x Ekstein),
as an eight-year-old who is now sixteen. “I needed a good Grand Prix horse and bought her eight years ago. She’s my first and I love her,” Lauren says. The mare even produced a foal for Lauren and then returned to competition. She’s breeding other Grand Prix mares at her Kentucky farm and in Europe. Derek says he tries to search for high-quality young horses and take the time to produce them up the ranks. “You can feel in them a little bit, too, if they have the desire to do it. Riders can really sense what the horse is telling them, and if they have the desire. They are athletes. And the good horses actually think that way, I believe. Good horses have the same desire to jump those jumps and jump the Grand Prix. We’re not forcing them to do it. We’re just training them to do it.” “A lot of horses can jump the same way they do at
meter 20 as they do at meter 60,” he explains. “You really have to feel the horse’s desire, whether he continues to progress up through the levels, jumping the same as he does at a lower level.”
Good trainers aim to help the jumper thrive, and not over- face the talented ones. Bert talks about a particular jumper moving into the Grand Prix, a 10-year-old that “needs more miles,” for example. “I’ve spent the year trying to get him more broke so he’s more rideable. The jump is the easy part,” he says. “The bigger the jump, the better he is. For me, it’s just placing him where I want him. That’s his greenness. He’s very good, and getting better.”
Derek Braun on his 2003 Holsteiner Lacarolus (Lasino x Carolus I) at the AIG $1,000,000 Grand Prix in March 2017 at HITS Desert Horse Park in Thermal, California.
Warmbloods Today 23
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