Marty Bauman, the Hampton Classic Horse Show’s longtime communications director, was in a buoyant mood early Sunday morning, anticipating as he was a fantastic week. “It’s the first time since Covid that we have a show as we’ve known it. . . . It’s a return to the greatness of the Hampton Classic,” he said.
Now a show with five-star and two-star ratings, thereby covering all the bases, as it were, providing the widest range of competition spanning children’s equitation and international-caliber jumping, the Classic was in full swing from 8 a.m. on opening day in Bridgehampton, with action in most of its six rings, the 2-to-4 and 5-to-7-year-old leadline divisions in the newly redone Grand Prix ring being the biggest draw.
The announcer said after one of the 2-4 sections had been judged by Joe Fargis, the Olympic gold medalist, that it was the first time in his memory that there’d been a tie for first, between Evie Rohn Wolffer of Sag Harbor and Aine Bykov of Patchogue. “For the first time in history, I couldn’t decide which rider to pick,” Fargis was to tell Bauman. “It was a clear-cut tie.”
“I love all these groups year after year after year,” he added. “I love it that they’re all polite, that their ponies and their leaders are turned out so beautifully. And they’re all good sports — it’s the best.”
Later, as they and other section winners were about to enter the main ring again to determine the overall champions, Joey Wolffer, Wolffer Estate Stables’ owner, who was leading her daughter, Evie, said with a smile, “It’s super intense — the Olympics of leadline.” Joey Wolffer was to ride later in the day’s main event, the $30,000 Jumper Challenge, but she had plenty of time to wait, being 47th among 59 entries — a record number presumably.
Fargis adjudged the 2-to-4’s top four to be Sienna Pepa of Sag Harbor, Bykov, Evie Rohn Wolffer, and Charlotte Kim, who rides at Stony Hill Stables in Amagansett and is trained by Michelle Sharma.
Kristina Muse, who trains the 4-year-old Sienna at Wolffer’s, said Fargis’s questions had been tough. When asked what the front of the saddle and the back of the saddle were called, Sienna, astride her pony, Leon, had answered correctly, she said — the pommel and the cantle.
Asked how she felt having won the division, Sienna, whose father, Martin, is an Argentine-born polo player, said, “Happy.”
“Her mother, Paige, won this class when she was 4,” said Martin Pepa. “Unbelievable.”
The top finishers in the 5-to-7 leadline division were Antonia Falco, Carolina Hsu, Ekaterina Jean-Gilles, Gemma Klein, and Addie Wellington.
“You have to be very young to ride . . . 2 or 3,” said Valerie Heller, one of the show’s volunteers. The youngest entrant in the 2-to-4 division was said to be 20-month-old Hayden McGonagle of Great Barrington, Mass., who spent most of the time in her trainer’s arms.
Craig Macnaughton Photo
Bauman said there were more than 1,600 horses entered this year, more than ever, and that the new state-of-the-art all-weather sand and fiber footing in the Grand Prix ring would enable more classes to be held there.
That surface, Shanette Barth Cohen, the show’s executive director, has said, “is what you’d find at the International Arena in Wellington, the Tryon Stadium in North Carolina, and at the 2023 World Cup finals in Omaha.”
The aforementioned $30,000 1.40-meter Jumper Challenge was won in a jump-off by McLain Ward, a five-time Olympian and a seven-time Grand Prix winner here. Aboard his 12-year-old Dutch Warmblood gelding, Faro, he negotiated the pared-down jump-off course in 31.353 seconds, edging Amanda Derbyshire and Wonder If, a 10-year-old Anglo-European mare, by just under a second. Alison Robitaille was third on Diane De Sivry, a 9-year-old Selle Francais mare.
Ward’s other horse in the class, Catoki, his “speed specialist” with whom he’d finished third last year, also made it to the jump-off, finishing last among the 12-horse field, but Faro, he told Bauman, “answered every question.”
“I think the new footing is great,” he added. “I think this arena is going to make for even greater sport.”
Eva Tucci, 13, one of the many competitors in equitation classes that day, was riding a large pony whose show name, she said, was Catch-22, which must mean, her mother, Lori Hawkins, said, that there was no way out — that she had to keep riding.
One thing missing from the showgrounds, early risers were to learn, was the accustomed coffee truck. Dough Daddy, where a long line had formed, had some, though its doughnuts and coffee were reportedly sold out by 2 p.m.