Ye Olde Days
They could’ve had two other top riders ride Phillips other top horses! Truluck, The Foreman, and Woodburn. I agree that Kim Severson should’ve been on the team.
I know it’s fiction, but I remember in International Velvet, the coach, (Anthony Hopkins) put a more experienced rider on Sarah’s horse when his horse was put down on the plane.
Are we behind Canada in the standings? Maybe David O’Connor should coach our own team.
I think we should do what college football is doing now with its coaches and hire Chris Bartles away from the Germans for an astronomical sum.
Soooo we should have ridden two injured horses???
The Foreman just had surgery and Truluck did something but I forget what.
~Emily
Oh you mean how Univ of Alabama spent 40 million dollars on their football coach and they still got beaten by Auburn?:winkgrin:
Lolz. WAR EAGLE!
And then have LSU as national champions, without its old coach. Sweet!
[QUOTE=Xctrygirl;3434124]
Soooo we should have ridden two injured horses???
The Foreman just had surgery and Truluck did something but I forget what.
~Emily[/QUOTE]
UM, that wasn’t my point. I didn’t realize that, but what I meant is that it’s too bad when a great rider has two or more great horses and another great rider only has a green horse, it’s too bad that the two greats couldn’t be matched up in time like in the old days.
and THE Univerity of Georgia is currently ranked #1 in the polls…:winkgrin: (the orange smiley is for a reason - Univerisity of Tennessee!!!)
I see what you’re saying… but I don’t think it’s realistic.
Catch-riding is fine but at the Olympic level… the rider and horse need a good deal of time to get used to each other to perform at that level. Especially with eventing, it’s just too risky of a sport to put a rider on a strange horse. They don’t know each other.
Even in dressage, it hasn’t worked pairing a top horse with a top rider at the “last minute”. Like what happened with Robert Dover at a couple of Olympic seasons… He didn’t have an Olympic level horse but he had competed in previous Olympics, so his rich sponsors would scramble to buy him some horse with international level experience in time for the Olympic trials, their reasoning being that Robert had Olympic experience and he ought to be on the team. He would make the team but lo and behold the horse would have a meltdown in the ring with him, he’d score the lowest so his score was dropped anyways.
Yeah, you do NOT want to catch ride Woodburn. While an incredible athlete, he’s not for the faint of heart. Phillip rides him extremely well.
US (7th) is two places ahead of Canada (9th).
But “Catch riding” isn’t how it worked in the “Old Days”. The Team had control of a barn full of horses. In training, most of the riders would ride most of the horses, and the coach/chef would determine which riders rode which horses in the competition. If a horse needed to be substituted a the last minute, the coach already knew which riders would have success on which horses.
If you read some of the things that Jimmy Wofford has written, one of his horse (Kilkenny, I think, but I could be wrong) was donated to the Team when he was in training with the Team. But it was some time before he was allowed to compete on his OWN (his mother’s technically IIRC) horse. If the coach decided it was better for a different rider to compete on Jimmy’s horse, that is what happened.
I think you are right about that Janet. And remember, I believe it was 1964 (Tokyo?) when Mike Plumb’s ride Markham had to be put down on the plane? William Haggard, another team rider, generously offered his own horse, Bold Minstrel, to MP to ride in Markham’s place. Can you imagine that kind of sportmanship happening today? No way!!!
And didn’t Mike have a brilliant ride on Bold Minstrel too–they were medalists, right?
I do think it’s unfortunate that with all of the accidents that happened to the top US horses, we had to go with something that was a little too green for this kind of event. Nothing against Karen and Mandiba, he is a lovely young animal, but he seemed like he would have benefited by another few years of experience under his belt before tackling a course like this. Maybe if the USET had had a stable of its own a more experienced horse would have gone–or maybe those horses ahead of him in the qualification standings would have been injured as well.
This is probably a very stupid question, but weren’t Kim Severson and that lovely Tipperary Liadhnan qualified? Why weren’t they on the team?
Yup, team silver at Tokyo, not bad for a catch ride. I don’t know about Kim, she had a beautiful ride at Rolex this year.
[QUOTE=Janet;3435096]
But “Catch riding” isn’t how it worked in the “Old Days”. The Team had control of a barn full of horses. In training, most of the riders would ride most of the horses, and the coach/chef would determine which riders rode which horses in the competition. If a horse needed to be substituted a the last minute, the coach already knew which riders would have success on which horses.
If you read some of the things that Jimmy Wofford has written, one of his horse (Kilkenny, I think, but I could be wrong) was donated to the Team when he was in training with the Team. But it was some time before he was allowed to compete on his OWN (his mother’s technically IIRC) horse. If the coach decided it was better for a different rider to compete on Jimmy’s horse, that is what happened.[/QUOTE]
Thank you Janet, that’s what I meant. I guess it needed more explanation. I didn’t mean catch ride either.
Ok I did realize what you were trying to say. I trained with Wofford and heard the USET days stories and saw International Vevet so I got the concept.
I acknowledge that you were unaware of their injuries, but intially I couldn’t believe you wanted lame horses at the games!! I am up to speed now.
But just as a side note, Woodburn not being there wasn’t a bad thing in my mind. He’s still green (at this level) and I think in his first ever year at the CCI**** level he should be allowed to progress on a less pressured scale.
~Emily
I don’t think DOC was actually coaching the Canadians, but the one team member that is a client of his. I’m not sure how or why it worked that way, but…
I get what you’re saying, too.
DOC is the Canadian team coach.
Many articles on this.
~Emily
speaking of the old days…
I have been devouring the Chronicle this week with the Olympics preview, and reading the past Olympic riders and horses, I noticed in the very early days one man rode in all three events in the same Olympics! We did this several times in the teens, and twenties. Can you imagine! I cannot tell if they rode the same horses. Anyone else know anything about this?
Mark Todd also won Badminton on a catch ride, so it’s not undoable, just incredibly rare and difficult and… risky.
Was it the good old days? In the good old days sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. If the coach didn’t like you for whatever reason, you had no hope of riding for the Team. Imagine if you owned a great horse and you had a rider who had nurtured that horse around and been successful and some French army guy said I get to put Mike Plumb on it, he’s our best rider and I have nothing else for him to ride. 
If you liked Mike and thought he was incredible, you might be thrilled. If you had taken a dislike to Mike and the rider getting dislodged was someone you loved, you might take your marbles and go home.
Perhaps just as important was the system where riders could go and be resident riders at Gladstone. David O’Connor was the last of those. Maybe OCET is providing a newer version of that kind of intensity, I don’t know.
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