Staying Your Course When FOMO Hits
Tjornelys Solution DWB—”Beaker,” in the barn—is one of the best talents of my career. Owned by Clearwater Farm Partners, he’s 6 years old, and came into my life in February of this year with a stellar pre-purchase exam, three exquisite gaits, a clear understanding of the connection from leg to seat to hand, and a clean flying change. The FEI 6-Year-Old test is roughly equivalent to third level, calling for collection, flying changes, the third level lateral work of shoulder-in and half-pass.
It was tempting to make that level a priority. He finds the work so, so easy. He is a lovely character, a happy little trier, approaching each day with a smile on his face. He deals well with pressure. And he certainly has the gaits to compete.
There’s also the minor detail that I’m in baby horse purgatory right now. With all of my last round of homemade FEI horses on to other paths, I’m starting anew. And I found myself at a show recently, warming Beaker up for first level, test 3, in the warm-up arena next to the CDI arena, thinking wistfully of how I could be on that side of the perimeter fence.
Read the rest at The Chronicle of the Horse!
Team Sprieser made a triumphant entrance to the 2024 summer show season with nothing but blue! Read all about it and more on 
A million years ago, in a time of much healthier knees, I did triathlons. If you’ve never stood next to me, I’m 5’10” and built like a refrigerator, so when I tell you I did triathlons, I did them slowly, and I did the shortest distance class: a sprint, which is usually about a half-mile swim, 15-mile bike, and 3.1-mile run. I could do one in about two hours. Competition in these things is often by age group, but because I’m no pixie, I competed in something called the Athena division, for female athletes over 165 pounds. (Lest you were curious, the men’s division, for athletes over 200 pounds, is called the Clydesdale division.)
Cadeau, my top horse, has weird feet. They’re small and a little upright, and like everything that comes from Europe, he struggled a bit to adjust to the concrete block that is the ground in a Virginia summer. One of the 10 million reasons I use my excellent farrier Sean Crocker is because he believes in the team approach: He listens to my also-excellent sports medicine veterinarian Dr. Cricket Russillo, and he listens to me when I tell him how the horses are going.
Sometimes my team and I are really rolling, with lots of horses and humans showing and getting somewhere and grinding it out. Other times, the youngsters are all youngstering, and I didn’t book a lot of clinics in January and February because the weather usually stinks, and we’re mostly just logging miles and waiting for something to happen. This is one of those times. But it’s meant that I’ve had time—time to go and watch the warmup at the CDIs, time to get caught up on office work, and time to do some continuing education.
Horse ownership at any level is an expensive endeavor. There are shoes and shots and tack and hay, whether for the compassionate beginner’s teacher or the international superstar. But those international superstars have even bigger costs – FEI passports, CDI entries… the list goes on and on.
Animal abuse is unacceptable, and those who commit it need to face serious consequences. Period. Hard stop.
We’ve all been reading about the sales of international Grand Prix horses to new riders lately because, in order to qualify for an Olympics under Fédération Equestre International rules, a horse has to have at least one owner of the same nationality as its rider by Jan. 15 of the Games year. That deadline was Monday, and many investors both in the U.S. and abroad have made major purchases in the past month or so to bolster their riders’ chances of securing an elusive team spot.