| |
|
| |
Off to a Fast Start
 Jack Graves and Durell Godfrey Photos
|
(8/26/2008) The Hampton Classic got off to a very fast start Sunday as Hillary Dobbs, a 20-year-old Harvard junior who, when she’s not riding on the international circuit, majors in government, ripped through the 12-obstacle $20,000 Nicolock Time Challenge course aboard Marengo in 61.59 seconds.
Marengo, a 10-year-old Holsteiner bay gelding, and Dobbs, who also placed third on Corlett and 12th on Marlo, earning a total of $8,200 in prize money, were fifth to go among the 61 entries in the Classic’s opening day’s featured event. And though most of her competitors, who included such speedsters as Leslie Burr Howard, Todd Minikus, who won the class two years ago on Eltonn, and Molly Ashe Cawley, knew what had to be done to beat her, they could not come close.
“When you’re going early, you have to take a shot,” Dobbs said following the win. “You can’t leave the door open, especially with all the speed demons, like Leslie, Todd, and Molly, in the field.”
“Yes,” she said in reply to a question, “we did leave out strides, even from the walk. He covers a lot of ground.”
John Brennan, who has helped train Dobbs at North Run farm in Warren, Vt., for the past five years, said, “It’s a fast horse, just coming into his own, and she’s a very fast rider.”
 Claire Gaeckle, who rode in the Classic when it was at Dune Alpin Farm in East Hampton in 1979, admired her 2-year-old granddaughter, Emma, who competed Sunday in a 2-4 leadline section that was judged by Joe Fargis, an Olympian.
|
Was it the beginning, then, of a very good week for Dobbs? “Well, we hope so,” said Brennan, who added, with a laugh, “If you don’t win the first one, you can’t win them all.”
Dobbs is coming off a good summer touring in Europe, where she won a two-round derby at the C.S.I.O. Five-Star horse show in Falsterbo, Sweden, on Corlett, and placed second, on Corlett, in the speed final in Dublin, going clean in the first round and dropping a rail in the second. Also, in the past year, she was a member of winning Nations Cup United States Equestrian teams in Buenos Aires, in November, and Palm Beach, Fla., in March.
She and Marengo were the runners-up in last year’s Nicolock Time Challenge to Peter Wylde and Gael Force.
Dobbs said that, assuming he goes well, Quincy B. would be her horse in Sunday’s $200,000 Grand Prix.
The opening day’s events began with 2-to-4-year-old leadliners in the Grand Prix ring under the benevolent gaze of Joe Fargis, who this year became the first active grand prix rider to be named to the Show Jumping Hall of Fame in Tampa, Fla.
 Karen Palmer, of Monroe, N.Y., was reunited on the Classic’s opening day with her 18-year-old former horse, Carnival (now known as Silver), whom she hadn’t seen in six years
|
One of the section runners-up, Emma Gaeckle, 2, of Southampton, was welcomed afterward, with arms outstretched, by her grandmother Claire Gaeckle, who rode in the show when it was at Dune Alpin Farm in East Hampton in 1979. Emma and her 31/2-year-old cousin, Gabrielle Avallone, who was the 2-to-4 leadline champion on Misty Dawn — the same pony Emma rode — are the third generation of their family to ride at the Classic.
Asked what questions Fargis had asked, Scott Gaeckle, Emma’s father, said, “He asks the older ones to name various parts of the horse, but he just tries to keep the younger ones at ease. He asks them what their names are, what their ponies’ names are. . . . Emma said, ‘Hi.’ ”
He and his sister, Lynn Avallone, Gabrielle’s mother, had ridden at the Classic, too, Scott Gaeckle said.
 11-year-old Lexxi Saal, chosen earlier in a judged competition that morning, sang the national anthem at the opening ceremony in the Grand Prix ring
|
Besides uniting generations, the Classic’s opening day served as a vehicle to reunite an 18-year-old horse with its former owner, who lives in Monroe, N.Y.
The former owner, Karen Palmer, said she had come to the Classic on the hunch that the horse she had known as Carnival, a Welsh Arabian flea-bitten gray, might be there.
“He’s like a member of our family; we bought him in Chester, on the night of a carnival,” Palmer said after she had been nuzzled by her former horse, who now is known as Silver and is being ridden by Micaela Zebroski of Quogue. “He roamed around our house and played in the sandbox that our neighbor had for his granddaughter. . . .”
Palmer continued, “He was delivered in a lightning storm. My three daughters, who are now in their 20s, all rode him in competition, under the name of Harbor Lights. We bought him when he was 6, and had him for 6 years. When my youngest daughter got too big to ride him, we bought a bigger horse, and sold him to a girl who rode at our farm in Warwick. She was the one who told me she’d heard he was on Long Island. I hadn’t seen him in about six years.”
 Sonny Garguilo of Elmont had America, a wild mustang from Nevada that he had broken and trained, sit before the V.I.P. tent crowd
|
The reunion was touching, said Joe Owens, Micaela’s maternal grandfather, who lives in New Hyde Park. “The horse nudged her and she teared up. It’s like ‘Black Beauty,’ you know. It’s the kind of thing animal lovers will take to heart. Half of the story is about a long-loved horse found, and then the other half is about the beauty of the horse going into a new chapter. It’s about love passed on.”
Palmer came upon Silver as Micaela was riding him in a warm-up ring Sunday morning. In introducing herself to Micaela’s father, Kevin, and to Owens, she said she thought Silver might indeed be Carnival, who had competed under the name of Harbor Lights.
Later that morning, she said, she had recognized an old scar by Silver’s jawbone, which reminded her of the time she had nursed him through a serious bone marrow infection. When she whistled low, the way she used to, he nudged her. That’s when she teared up, she said.
Kevin Zebroski said that the Quogue Pony Farm was probably the horse’s fourth or fifth owner. “We lease him,” he said. “My daughter loves him. She’s been riding him for the past year, and they’ve been doing very well. They were grand champions at the Hillcrest Show in Riverhead two weeks ago.”
“He was unbelievable,” Palmer said of Carnival-Harbor Lights-Silver during a telephone conversation Monday. “He was a reserve champion. He stopped at a jump. That’s like him. He always was a little mischievous. When my daughters rode him, he loved the cornstalks on the jumps. He always pulled their husks off.”
Had he not stopped at that jump, said Zebroski, “it’s very probable that he would have been the grand champion.”
Palmer would take her daughters down to see him, she said, probably at the Quogue Pony Farm.
 Robin Foster gave a driving exhibition
|
Among the winners in Sunday’s classes were: Oz, owned by Kelly Klein and ridden by Charlie Weaver, in local hunter pro, section A; Compliment, owned by Stephanie Riggio and ridden by Gretchen Topping, in local hunter pro under-saddle, section A; Practical Magic, owned by Samantha Rudin and ridden by Jagger Topping, in local hunter pro, section B; Arsenik, owned and ridden by Alexandra DuPont, in local hunter non-pro under-saddle.
And Then Some, owned by Pamela Allardice and Rolanda Blue Stephanos and ridden by Stephanos, in local hunter non-pro; Renoir, owned by Kelsey Rae Calabro and ridden by Gabrielle Bausano, in local junior hunter undersaddle, section A; Double Cinco, owned and ridden by Paige Allardice in local junior hunter under-saddle, section B; Tennyson, owned and ridden by Stormy Good.
Compliment, owned and ridden by Stephanie Riggio, in local amateur-owner hunter; Lennox, owned by Vanessa Stevenson and ridden by Daisy Freund, in the Robert Hoskins Adult Medal, section A; Rendezvous, owned by Country Lane Farms and ridden by Emma Schauder, in the Hugh J.B. Cassidy, Jr. Maclay.
Quantuck Razzmatazz, owned by Barbara Metcalf and ridden by Micaela Zebroski, in short stirrup equitation 10-12 walk-trot-canter, section A; Blue River’s Twinkle Toes, owned by Alvin Topping and ridden by Sasha McCauley, in short stirrup equitation 10-12 walk-trot-canter, section B; Scout, owned by Wolffer Estate Stable and ridden by Marcus Adolf, in short stirrup equitation 10-12 over fences, section B.
Robin Hood, owned by Christian Topping and ridden by Lucy Silverman, in short stirrup equitation 9-and-under walk-trot, section B, in short stirrup equitation 9-and-under walk-trot-canter, section B, and in short stirrup equitation 9-and-under over fences, section B. And Snow Day, owned by Rose Hill Farms and ridden by Lilly Hymowitz, in short stirrup equitation 9-and-under over fences, section D.
|
| |
|
|
|