Pony power! We are celebrating ponies of all breeds on YourDressage through the month of June!
Did you know dressage riders who choose ponies as their mounts are eligible for many Adequan®/USDF All-Breeds Awards, as there are several pony organizations on our Participating Organization list?
Here, a rider from Region 5 shares how she and her show pony “sized up” to the competition, warming up alongside Olympians, bringing smiles to the crowd, and taking home titles of their own.
By Lori Barrett
Picture this: it’s early May 2023 at the Galway Downs Equestrian Center in Temecula, California, and I’m getting ready to compete in the Fourth Level open class at the California Dressage Society (CDS) Spring Benefit Show, a CDI1* World Cup Qualifying competition and national level dressage show. There’s been heavy rain, so all of the warm-up rings are closed, except for the giant jumping ring, which is now serving as the warm-up for every horse and rider team from Training Level to Grand Prix.
As I step into the warm-up, I’m sharing the arena with no fewer than five Olympians: Sabine Schut-Kery, Steffen Peters, Guenter Seidel, Christine Traurig, and Nick Wagman are all there, schooling, warming up, and preparing their horses for the show ring. We’re not necessarily in the same class (in every sense of the word), but I’m still intimidated as heck. Oh, and did I mention that I’m on 14.1-hand Dutch Riding Pony, Magnum KV? Yes, so there’s that, as well.
We had traveled to this show from the relative dressage outpost of Park City, Utah, to both test our mettle and be surrounded by great riders as inspiration. With that in mind, I took a deep breath, and off we went.
Everywhere I take him, Manguito (or as we call him at home, the little Mango, since he gets a total mango-shaped dad-bod if we don’t manage his hay intake closely) turns heads.
Even here, in fancy California, people turned their heads and smiled as we made our way across the showgrounds. It took me a minute to figure out why; to me, I was simply on my mount, preparing for competition like any other day, with any other horse. But with Manguito, I finally realize that here I am, living out my childhood dream, literally on a show pony. I also realize that I’m living a lot of other people’s childhood dreams as well by the way their faces light up, and the jaded gaze of people who spend a lot of time looking at nice horses falls away, and they remember that childhood wonder – a show pony.
Years ago, when I was working as an assistant trainer in Germany, we had a German Riding Pony in the barn. His name was Karl, and he was trained through S-Level, which is approximately equivalent to Fourth Level here. Since I am a smaller rider, he was often assigned to me, and he was SO much fun. I put it in my head that one day, I would have a pony.
But the US was deep in the throes of giant warmblood enthusiasm, so it wasn’t until a couple of decades later that my pony dreams came true. And boy, did they!
Manguito owned his spot in that crowded warmup, entered the show ring like the champion he is, and scored over 69% in his Third Level Test 1 to finish third, placing over a half-dozen other full-size horses. The following day, he scored a solid 65.75% in our Third Level Test 3, securing second place, again behind Nick Wagman.
That score clenched his Reserve Champion spot in the National Dressage Pony Cup Third Level standings. Later that year, we also secured the title of Top Pony for Fourth Level. We’re all in this for the journey, but the big trophies and neck ribbons are pretty fun, too.
As we were preparing to embark on our winter sojourn to California this year, a student of mine, who is a professional photographer, asked if we could do a photoshoot of one of my horses skijoring. If you don’t know, skijoring is a western sport where a rider gallops a horse on a snowy course towing a skier, who is going through various gates and over ski jumps (I did say we’re in Utah!). I thought, “What better than to add ‘skijor pony’ to Manguito’s resume?”
So, we spent an afternoon teaching him to get comfortable with the tow rope and harness, and then, with me in my dressage saddle, went to my outdoor arena. As we were in the throes of the snowy mountain winter, the arena already had a solid two feet of snow on top. Sure enough, Manguito took it all in stride, so to speak, towing our barn manager and going about his temporary job like the professional he is. It was a total blast.
The next day, we loaded Manguito and a few other horses into the trailer for the two-day drive to Southern California for an intensive winter of training with my coach, Sabine Schut-Kery, and competing. What could be better than that?
