Did you look at the videos?
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The second video of him outside I watched.
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Not used to carrying a rider but that will come. Wind is a great test but Iâve always thought the canter on a windy day was the real test. If this guy had time to develop the right musculature and balance to carry a rider and learned to canter, I bet heâd pass the âcanter on a windy dayâ test.
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Iâm imagining being about 6 miles from the trailhead. It starts raining hard and the footing gets slick so I stay quiet in the saddle, completely give him his head, and he brings us home. No worries.
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This boy is cute! I have a NV Standardbred by Mach Three as well. Also a TB person, so thought Iâd get the STB as gaited trail horse for DH. DH opted to stick to riding the tractor, so I play with the STB. Heâs great but not the brain I expected! Digging into it - Mach Three has a reputation for slightly spicy babies:). Not scary hot but not beginner friendly. My guy is soooo smart, and he really listens to me, but he is hotter than my two TBs:).
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I had a SB as a lead pony at the TB track. He was given to me by his owner/trainer. He was about 13 at the time, and had not been ridden. He had been turned out for a year or so, the owner had been planning on taking him moose hunting, but never had. He was obesely overweight. He was a pacer. He had had about 300 starts I was told, I never looked it up. He had a great trot, when he trotted, but preferred to pace most of the time. He had raced âfree leggedâ. His canter/gallop was ROUGH. His suspensories looked pretty scary, but he didnât limp. EVER. He was always game to work. Amazingly, he was chestnut, with a blaze and one hind sock. His name was âShadowâs Adiosâ. Known as Shadow. I had him for a few years. He ponied in the morning, and worked the races in the afternoon. When I took him to Sandown in Victoria, one of the SB guys there saw him (everyone recognized him immediately) and said, âLetâs qualify him and enter him, Iâve never seen his suspensories look so good!!!â. I said NO WAY. When my TB stake horse made trips across the country, Shadow went along as pony. In Manitoba, someone came up to me and said, âOMG, is that Shadowâs Adios???â Yup. This happened quite a bit. He was pretty famous, as it turned out. And recognizable. He ran off with my DH in the tack on the track there actually, not at the gallop. He couldnât stop him though. I fear I laughed at that little episode. "You think you are gonna slow him down by pulling on the reins??? Um⊠nope.
Then I loaned him to a film crew at Hastings Park⊠they needed lead ponies for a shoot. I wasnât there. It turned out that they didnât need âlead poniesâ, they wanted to film a ârace sceneâ, and the lead ponies were to be dressed up as racehorses. It was for the filming of some incarnation of âThe Black Stallionâ. Shadow was to be âin the leadâ in the race, and the Black Arab Stallion was to pass him to win the race. They had to shoot it several times, because the Black Arab Stallion could not get past Shadow, even with the âjockeyâ pulling as hard as he could.
The following morning, Shadowâs suspensories looked pretty scary. I was livid. I took him home and turned him out to hope to heal from this. He wasnât lame, but⊠he was finished as a lead pony I felt. He owed me nothing. Then the kid who was helping out cleaning stalls at our barn asked if her family could take him home, for her Dad to walk down the trail on. We did that. It was a good home for the old guy. I never saw him again.
Where I live now, a local woman has two standardbred mares, both ârescuesâ of some sort. She has NO horse knowledge, but loves horses. She is âunteachableâ really. But she is safe enough working around these mares, and can ride them recreationally. She has been dumped off a couple of times, but a few tweaks in the tack used has pretty much solved this problem. Neither mare can/will canter. Just walk, trot, and pace. Once the rider was taught how to post at the trot, things improved a bit for her. The trot is so lovely, quite a treat to ride.
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In the late 90s, I did a few summers as a riding instructor at a Girl Scout camp.
Our horses were not ours; they were leased to us by a horse supplier who used to rent horses to summer camps all over the east coast. He would go to auctions all around the country, picking up anything âsafe,â so what you got from him was a total mixed bag. We always had a handful of standardbreds, some of them fresh off the track and probably never ridden. And here we were putting total beginners on them for lessons and nose-to-tail trail rides through the mountains.
Two of them always stand out in my mind-- Chance, a lanky chestnut who would only walk and pace but was the most level-headed horse on the planet. You could ride him through fire and he wouldnât blink. And Coffee, who was a seal brown, rotund mare. She was a total push button for beginners to walk around on, but was a little fiery for more experienced riders. She didnât trot or pace, but would break into this erratic, high-speed gait. It felt like her legs were flying every which way. 
Later in my life I worked with a lot of standardbred breeding stock. Mainly mares and foals, but I did care for the stallion Artsplace for the last months of his life. To this day, he still is at the top of the list of the most memorable horses I have ever met; he was just so cool.
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