ISSUE 81
AUG 2022

GAME ON
IN HERNING
MEET THE AUSSIE TEAM
TORI STUCKEY
DOESN’T MISS A BEAT
KENYA WILSON
RISING STAR

PLUS: HEATH RYAN ON HIGH PERFORMANCE ISSUES, ROGER FITZHARDINGE & COMPETITIVE LONGEVITY IN YOUR HORSE, WORLD STAR – WHERE IS HE NOW?, NICOLE KIDMAN’S OTHER TALENT, SUBBIE & HIS MATE, SUZY JARRATT ON ‘EO’ THE DONKEY, & ACHIEVING BEST OUTCOMES WITH DR MAXINE BRAIN.

AUSTRALIA`S BEST EQUINE MAGAZINE
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ISSUE 81

CONTENTS

AUG 2022
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A Few Words

FROM THE CHAIRMAN

ROBERT MCKAY

Ryan's Rave

BIG HIGH PERFORMANCE ISSUES

BY HEATH RYAN

Dressage

MAKING THEIR MARK IN DENMARK

BY EQ LIFE

Showjumping

GAME ON AT THE CHAMPIONSHIPS

BY EQ LIFE

Vaulting

LEAPING FOR JOY AT THE WORLDS

BY EQ LIFE

Para Dressage

FROM HALF-HALT TO HERNING

BY EQ LIFE

Eventing

A STAR RISES IN THE WEST

BY ADELE SEVERS

Lifestyle

NICOLE KIDMAN’S OTHER GREAT TALENT

BY BERNARD BALE

Special feature

SUBBIE & HIS MATE

BY CORINNE FENTON

Dressage

WORLD STAR STILL RULES IN HIS WORLD

BY ROGER FITZHARDINGE

Health

WORKING TOGETHER FOR BEST OUTCOMES

BY DR MAXINE BRAIN

Lifestyle

THE LITTLE GREY DONKEY THAT COULD

BY SUZY JARRATT

Dressage

FREESTYLIST DOESN’T MISS A BEAT

BY AMANDA YOUNG

Training

TRAIN YOUR HORSE FOR LONGEVITY

BY ROGER FITZHARDINGE
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With the Commonwealth Games in full flight, the Australian athletes including Para are out there on the international arena going really well in terms of gold, silver and bronze medals.

At the time of writing, Australia had won 32 medals all up, including 13 gold. We are currently leading the medal tally. Well, big breath; here we go with the FEI World Championships for our equestrian athletes.

DRESSAGE

The team has been named:

  • Lyndal Oatley riding Eros
  • Mary Hanna riding Calanta
  • Simone Pearce riding Fiderdance
  • Jayden Brown riding WillingaPark Sky Diamond

This team starts competing on 6 August 2022 with the final individual freestyle competition on 10 August in Herning, Denmark. We are not going to win a team medal, however, what we do need to aim at is to achieve the scores that our riders have been selected on. We have to start reproducing our best performances. We would of course love to produce our personal best performances, however, for our dressage team to equal our best performances in Championship competition would be a huge start in the right direction.

So, Lyndal Oatley and Eros have a selection score of 74.370%. This is the highest selection score for all four Australian riders and we so need Lyndal to anchor the team and replicate this score in the Grand Prix at Herning.

Simone Pearce and Fiderdance have a selection score of 72.261%. Interestingly, Simone nailed this personal best score just recently at Aachen, which is one of the biggest shows in the world and very German, and a tough spot to run down a personal best score. Simone and Fiderdance are obviously very, very tough competitors and this combination is on the up and up. I think we have a reasonable chance of Simone ripping in a similar score at Herning. I think Simone is actually the most likely team member of the four to actually attack and do a personal best. It has been a long, long time since we have had an Australian rider attacking in the Olympics or World Championships.

Mary Hanna and Calanta are shooting for a score of 70.478%. Mary has done better than this score in the past, but within the selection period for the World Championships this is the score which she and Calanta were selected on for the Australian team. It is important that we dressage supporters and enthusiasts do not ask for miracles. So just possibly, Mary will do better at the Championships, which would be just brilliant. But let’s not get excited, what we do need is for Mary to nail her score on which she was selected in the Grand Prix.

Jayden Brown and WillingaPark Sky Diamond have a selection score of 69.674%. Jayden is a very interesting last-minute inclusion in the Australian team and like Simone, his performances are on the up and up. What we do need is Jayden to replicate his 69.674%. Anything over that is a bonus. Personally, I think Jayden being part of the team does change the equation more than the selection score indicates and I think Jayden will be like Simone and actually attack the competition. Of course, this sort of an approach can backfire, but for me we need to go with courage. Jayden is exciting and does have the potential to be part of a changing future for dressage in Australia.

So don’t go expecting dressage medals this time round. However, the World Championships are absolutely the forerunner for the Olympics in Paris 2024. I would suggest this Australian dressage team could be a historical turning point. We do need to be talking team gold medals for dressage in 10 years’ time at the Brisbane 2032 Olympics. This team does have the potential to dig in and start the Australian counter attack and the Australian dressage journey to Brisbane. The really big step forward is for these Australian dressage riders to replicate their selection scores. That would be a huge step in the right direction.

SHOW JUMPING

The team has been named:

  • Billy Raymont riding Black Jack IXE
  • Hilary Scott riding Oaks Milky Way
  • James Arkins riding Eurostar 1
  • Katie Laurie riding Django II

“Equestrian Australia High Performance acknowledge that additional combinations had secured a Minimum Eligibility Requirement for the Championships, however, all have advised of their subsequent unavailability for Herning.”

Oh, my goodness! What sort of a comment is that from the Australian High Performance team?

You can just see the Australian show jumpers falling over themselves to ride for their country! Not!

Why? I would suggest that the horrendous performance of EA High Performance and their handling of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic show jumping team has lots and lots to do with this.

The Australian show jumping riders are a very different kettle of fish from the dressage and event riders. Show jumping riders are actually a really tough group of people, especially at the top. However, the show jumping sport itself is much more social and is a bit like going to Hollywood to be a movie star. The attrition rate of those that try and fail is considerable. The social side of the sport does white ant and destroy riders that at first glance are superstars in the making.

“Don’t go telling me they don’t
want to ride for Australia.”

Interestingly, we have many years ago challenged the world at the top in show jumping with John Fahey riding Bonvale, who was a 15hh Australian Stock Horse and made it to the individual jump-off for the bronze medal in the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. John was 21 years of age. John and Bonvale came fourth by a whisker of a second. Not too shabby! We did in those days have a bunch of Australian show jumping legends who were so good and included people like Kevin Bacon, Art Uytendaal, Guy Creighton and others who I watched from the sidelines as a little kid. These riders would go from one agricultural show to the next, which was their high performance program. Winning enough prizemoney to fuel up their trucks to go to the next show was the immediate goal and these riders could be at times found going through the garbage bins looking for bottles which could be refunded for enough money to purchase fuel. These were tough guys for tough times. The show jumping sport has evolved and the Australians for a long time lost touch with the top end of the world. The sport is different today, however, almost to everyone’s disbelief operating at the top is still just as hard. Just different. Not a great bunch of people for the High Performance team to go messing with.

Interestingly enough, show jumping people here in Australia are like all the equestrian sports people in that they are fascinated by the breeding of special horses. With the advent of frozen semen in the last 30 years allowing the Australians to access the best genetics in the world, the Australian show jumping breeders are now producing horses that are more and more equivalent to what is jumping in the Northern Hemisphere. Bingo! With better horses becoming available to the Australian show jumpers, the standard has taken a rapid upward climb and we are seeing Australian riders starting to look very good even on the international scene. It has been a little bit sporadic and hit and miss as these horses have started to infiltrate the show jumping scene.

In my opinion the show jumping riders are now embracing these horses and the standard is consolidating and improving at a very exciting rate. At the World Equestrian Games in 2018, Australia sent a team of four boys! You can imagine! Billy Raymont, Rowan Willis, Jamie Kermond and Scott Keach. I wouldn’t call these boys a B team, but this was definitely not the Australian A team at the time. Well, guess what. These boys were heroes and dug in over some really big courses and came as a team 6th in the world. Amazing, and this automatically qualified Australia for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. This had never been done before. Normally, we qualify a team for the Olympics by being part of the Oceania region, which includes nations like Sri Lanka, Indonesia and New Zealand amongst others, but qualifying for the Olympics among these nations is not so difficult. Qualifying against the best in the world, as they did in Tryon, is nearly impossible. This team of boys did exactly that in 2018! The horses these boys were riding were all beautifully bred with two of them being by Conquistador, who was part of the Chris and Helen Chugg stallion band here in Australia. One of them was by Chacco Blue, who was also the sire of the individual Tokyo 2020 Olympic gold medallist, Explosion W. The other horse was by Kashmir Van Schuttershof who, would you believe it, was the sire of two of the three Swedish horses which won the team gold medal at Tokyo 2020 Olympics! Yes, that is right. Put the Australian show jumping riders on top-of-the-range horses and the world does have to start worrying about us. Don’t go telling me they don’t want to ride for Australia. We definitely need a much better High Performance team with this discipline or we are all going to miss out.

So that’s the dressage and show jumping done!

“Can we field our top team?
Please, please, please be yes!”

EVENTING

The eventers are not going to be nominated to the FEI until 10 August (10 days after writing this column). There will be up to 15 horse and rider combinations nominated. The actual team will be named on 17 August. There will be five combinations named, all of whom will get a run. There will also be three reserve combinations named. If you would like to look at who are the top contenders ranked by me, you can read my last column. The World Championships run from 14-18 September in Pratoni del Vivaro, Italy. The eventing team will potentially be a gold medal team, however, this will be completely determined by us managing to get our A team intact and in form at the starting gates. Currently the Australian eventers are the silver medallists from Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. So they are indeed very, very tough and operating at a very, very high standard. This means that the management and the looking after of our horses has to be done better than nearly anyone in the world believes is possible. The horse is absolutely everything. Basically a silver medal at Tokyo means our Australian horses are trained better and run harder than nearly every other eventing horse in the world. The athlete is the horse and so the riders spend their whole lives protecting their horse with everything they have.

Of course, the rider has to be brilliant as well but that is something that just at this moment we do have as an Australian resource: very, very good Australian event riders. For Australia, it is a matter of how well these top riders can look after their horses. Part of the equation is that these horses are at their best usually between the ages of 12 to 17 years. There is just a five-year window there. Some of our horses are definitely at the older end of this window and of course this is a self-fulfilling prophecy that these horses are going to slide past their peak in terms of winning medals and wind down to smaller competitions and eventually retirement. As I said at the start, getting our top team to the World Championships will determine whether we win gold medals or whether we just give a good account of ourselves. The eventing is all about “can we field our top team?” Please, please, please be yes!

PARA DRESSAGE

Finally, the para-dressage. Man, did these guys get a serious pounding! I reckon that all the para-dressage riders are all traumatised and I do hope they are tough, and they refocus and they do all of Australia proud.

On 6 July, the EA nominated eight para-dressage horse and rider combinations to the FEI. You can find this announcement on the EA website.

On 11 July, an announcement came via the EA website and EA Facebook naming the able-bodied dressage team, the show jumping and the vaulting team at approximately 5.30pm. The para-dressage team did not appear until about 7.15pm in a separate announcement saying that there was to be no para-dressage team at the World Championships and that instead they were: “Subsequently, the EA High Performance Program will be conducting an off-horse programme at the 2022 FEI World Championships to further strengthen Australia’s chance of Paralympic success in Paris.

So that means the High Performance team were not sending a para-dressage team. How did that happen?

Three para-dressage athletes had met all of the selection criteria laid out by the Australian selectors. High Performance director, Chris Webb, told the athletes that no team would be going to Herning and that resources would be instead allocated to the Paris Paralympics in 2024 – and furthermore, self-funding was also not an option. No team was being sent, funded or not funded! It was brutal.

Now from my understanding, Dianne Barnes is 64 years of age and has Parkinson’s disease; her prognosis is that she is unlikely to be competing or riding by 2024, and her horse is 18 years of age. For her, Herning was clearly a case of now or never. I personally am just distantly interested in the para-dressage journey but by no means do I feel any responsibility to champion a para-dressage cause, however, on hearing that there seemed to be little apparent empathy for the athletes – in particular Dianne’s circumstances – I was just immediately outraged.

Facebook certainly was also outraged, and I think Maree Tomkinson very early in the piece worked out that it wasn’t actually the EA that had caused this decision, but it was the High Performance people, including the Australian para-dressage selectors and of course headed up by the director, Chris Webb.

“Holy smoke! Talk about
an outraged public.”

Julia Battams, who was the High Performance manager of dressage including the para-dressage at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016, put up a Change.org petition asking for support for the para-dressage cause and calling for a reversal of this decision. I would point out that Julia’s contract ended and was not renewed by Chris Webb after Rio and she became so disillusioned that today she is not even a member of EA. Julia is, however, a big supporter of para-dressage and does run a para-dressage program – Equine Pathways Australia – from her facility in Victoria. Amazing that this petition came from somebody outside the EA. I did wonder, where are the High Performance managers for para-dressage or official bodies of some sort in this time of crisis? Why aren’t they championing the para-dressage cause right now? Based on the deafening silence, I can only surmise that the para-dressage managers and official bodies are reluctant to be openly critical about the leadership at High Performance.

The EA in these situations usually close ranks and it doesn’t matter how correct or incorrect a policy is, the ensuing altercation is always hopeless. I do think this is absolutely true, however, it is really important that sometimes a good fight is fought even if you are doomed to failure. On approaching the EA, it did come as quite a shock that the EA board was mainly uninformed about the decision not to send a para-dressage team to the World Championships and they were themselves not that pleased with the decision. Two state EA branches were approached in New South Wales and South Australia, and to our absolute amazement both of these states consulted with their boards and were in the process of lobbying the EA to reverse this no para-dressage team to the World Championships decision. It is my opinion that every state in Australia would have opposed this non-inclusion para-dressage selection policy if they had been approached, and they would have been except Mark Bradley, the Chair of Equestrian Australia, stepped up and reversed the no para-dressage team policy on the Equestrian Life livestream on the evening of Wednesday 13 July.

The petition that circulated Facebook received 14,850 signatures in less than 12 hours. Maybe, there are 17,000 members all up in the EA. Holy smoke! Talk about an outraged public.

So how did this happen?

In 2009, Julia Battams was appointed the National Performance Director of Equestrian Australia.

In 2010, at the World Equestrian Games in Lexington, USA, Sharon Jarvis won two bronze medals in the para-dressage.

In 2012, at the London Paralympics, Joann Formosa won an individual gold medal in the para-dressage.

In 2013, Chris Webb was appointed as the Australian High Performance Director for the Australian Equestrian Team.

In 2014, in Caen, Normandy, France the para-dressage team came 13th. No medals.

In 2016, at the Rio de Janeiro Paralympics the para-dressage team came 9th in the team classification. However, Lisa Martin ran fourth in two different classes. So, very close to a bronze medal.

In 2016, Julia Battams’ contract ended and was not renewed.

In 2018, Chris Webb started his policy of not sending a para-dressage team to the World Equestrian Games in Tryon. However, he did send an individual in Emma Booth. So, no team at WEG and Emma did go well and was pretty close to a medal, running a fourth and a fifth. Still, no medals.

In 2020, at the Tokyo Paralympics, which should have been outstanding what with no team at WEG 2018 in Tryon and everyone putting everything they had into the 2020 Paralympics. Well, clearly this policy did not work; no medals and the para-dressage team came 13th.

In 2022, history is starting to repeat itself and Chris again has tried to implement a policy of no para-dressage team with the explanation that all efforts and funding were to go towards a successful 2024 Paris Paralympics.

In 2021, the show jumping debacle at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics was much more complicated than just a positive drug test on one of the riders. The rider, however, absolutely got blamed for Australia not fielding a team. There definitely were options regarding reserves which should have been implemented by Australian High Performance, which were not done. Basically, this was in my opinion an administration High Performance bungle.

In 2016, the able-bodied dressage debacle at the Rio Olympics again involving alleged drugs. Again, I think this did revolve around a High Performance administration mistake in not having enough reserves nominated. The riders really had a very tough time as a result of this.

The Tokyo Olympics are held up as a success by the High Performance people where the eventers did win a silver team medal and Andrew Hoy won a bronze individual medal. Andrew Hoy came from a High Performance program in the 1970s. Andrew actually won Burghley Three-Day Event in 1979. Both Shane Rose and Kevin McNab came from the 1990s High Performance program when Australia was in the middle of winning three consecutive team gold medals – which has never been done before and has never been done since. This period was prolific in producing absolute top-of-the-range Australian riders.

So, in my view none of our successes have actually been developed since Chris Webb has been at the helm. The development of these athletes has come before Chris’ time, however, the longevity enjoyed by athletes in the equestrian disciplines has reached on into the years with Chris at the helm. Maybe not the para-dressage discipline. The High Performance program receives $11 million every four years and that is a lot of money since 2000, which was our last team gold medal. In terms of young riders coming through and plans in place for 2032, which is the Brisbane Olympics, we have very little to show.

Questions need to be openly asked and freely debated about the lack of success enjoyed by Australia since Chris Webb has been at the helm. Based on the lack of success, the administration issues with reserves and the initial no para-dressage team to the World Championships decision, my view is that it is time for Chris Webb to move on. EQ

Cheers,

Heath

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