Category: Training & Trainers

Emma Mansfield has worked with horses all her career but now as Sparsholt College Events Organiser, a large part of her job is working with people. Two horses have made her a successful dressage rider and a  popular show organiser — many more have made her a philosopher.

Difficult, opinionated Pasoa was a passport to five years’ competing at grand prix and grand prix special between at the most prestigious venues across Europe. She established Nikki Barker as one of Britain’s top professional riders and trainers

The Horse That Made Vicki Thompson Winfield. Vicki’s first grand prix partner, Enfant, took her to the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and he is the one who put her name in the history books.

Amy Stovold first hit the headlines winning the Medium Southern Regional Championships riding show-stopper stallion Lenski at Oldencraig in 2004. Lenski was certainly a learning curve, but the horse that got her onto BD’s World Class Development Programme and to the London International Horse Show at Olympia was MacBrian.

“A little horse for my mum to have some fun with”, chosen from a video sent over from Denmark, was the beginning of an epic journey to an Aachen CHIO. That was where Claire Knowles rode a fire-breathing Pendragon of Independence.

“I would probably say Jazz was the horse that made me,” says Sarah Williams. “She taught me the fundamental importance of riding a horse connected because if I could then get her supple and working through the body, I could train her.”

Trainer and List 1 judge Sara-Jane Lanning has achieved around 25 regional and six national titles with various horses in various competitions including freestyles, small tour championships and combined training.

“BOSTON has been the most significant horse in my life,” says List 3A judge and Kent-based trainer Jane Lavington. “He’s opened doors for me that wouldn’t have otherwise opened. We guinea-pigged at a National judges’ seminar — and I wouldn’t have been asked if I hadn’t had a horse like him to ride.

International dressage rider and trainer, Dan Watson: “I’d say to myself, he’s not taking the bit — how can I get what I’m trying to achieve? Some days I’d be on him an hour and a half, just walking, trying to achieve some kind of feeling of connection.”