It’s not every event horse that gets its start in life working cattle and dragging logs in a Buck Brannaman clinic, but then again its not every event rider who also competes in cowboy mounted shooting. Princess B and Nancy Elberty are a well-matched (and diversely experienced) pair.

A recent convert to the sport of eventing, it took Elberty and the 9-year-old Princess B (Bella) just four events at the novice level to pull off a win in the novice level classic three-day event at the IEA Horse Trials 3-Day Event (Ind.) on May 28-31.

“I’ve always wanted to event, and the horse I thought I would be able to do it on I wasn’t, she was more of a show jumper,” Elberty explained. “And my next several horses were show jumpers, and then Bella came along and I thought she would be a jumper too, and lo and behold she said, ‘no, I want to be an eventer.’”

Elberty had good reason to think Bella would enjoy show jumping—her dam, the Dutch Warmblood Rheabria Z, was Elberty’s show jumping partner. After the mare was sidelined by an injury, Elberty didn’t want to start her back to work right away the next season, so she bred her to the Dutch stallion Calvados instead. Along came Bella, who earned her princess title early in life.

“I had to wean her at three months because she had a coffin bone injury, so I felt very guilty doing that but the mare was not going to have any part of staying in the stall for stall rest,” Elberty said of Bella’s babyhood. “So I spent the whole time of her recovery every morning having coffee with her, sitting in her stall and just being with her.”

When the time came to start Bella, Elberty didn’t turn to eventing or show jumping trainers.

“I went to a four-day colt starting clinic, and she got started that way with a trainer by the name of Brian Neubert, who clinics all over the country,” Elberty explained. “Probably a year or so later we did a cow working clinic, and that was lots of fun and that was with another trainer, Joe Wolter.”

The pair even cliniced with the horse whisperer himself, Buck Brannaman, when Elberty moved to Lexington, Ky.—where NTSG Inc., the fiber optic cable business she founded and is president and CEO of, is based—in 2011.

“I showed up at Buck’s clinic for horsemanship 2 in English tack, and was the only one in English tack in the clinic,” Elberty said, laughing. “I basically introduced myself and Bella [to Buck] and said ‘I know you’ve got a lot of things that are going to help me help my horse, but I need to learn how to do it in English tack, because she’s a jumper.’ I swung a rope off her, we dragged logs, we didn’t have cattle but we kind of pretended to work them. So that’s where her foundation came from.”

Cow-chasing roots in place, Elberty began teaching Bella to jump, and its no wonder after her exciting start that she wasn’t satisfied with strict ring jumping.

“I was hoping that she would be a jumper like her mother, and she is a very good jumper, but she got a little sticky in the jumper arena early on,” Elberty said. “So just for the heck of it, I took her out on a cross-country course my friend and trainer had at their farm, and the horse just transformed. After the first few jumps she was like ‘Wow, this is fun!’ So we’ve been having a great deal of fun doing that.”

That first fateful cross-country school was in the fall of 2013, and Elberty’s first event was a beginner novice run at Midsouth Pony Club (Ky.) in June 2014. A year later, and the pair is winning at the novice level.  

Nancy Elberty and Princess B won a classic format novice three-day event just one year after they started eventing. Photo by Suzanne Fischer

But enough about Elberty and Bella’s rapid rise to the top in eventing—what’s the story on the mounted shooting picture?!

“When I moved to Kentucky, I moved onto a farm, and decided that for safety reasons I needed to learn how to handle a handgun,” Elberty explained. “And in that process I was participating in shoots on the ground.

“My friends knew I was doing that,” Elberty continued, “And some of my friends said ‘Well, we shoot and ride at the same time, and you like both of those things, so why don’t you come watch and see what we do?’”

What they did was gallop full speed at targets (poles with balloons attached) firing pistils loaded with powder blanks. “Shoots,” as the tournaments are commonly referred to, are scored on time and number of marks hit (five seconds are added for each missed balloon).

“I was a little nervous about it, because I told them I’m nervous enough with my own two feet on the ground shooting a gun, I’m not so sure I could coordinate on the horse going at high speeds shooting at things,” Elberty said with a laugh. “But the more I learned about it and the more I went and watched it got more and more interesting.”

Nancy Elberty on Domino. 

Elberty borrowed horses to shoot from at first, but when she started getting more serious about competing, she bought one of the horses she had been riding, Domino. Both Bella and Domino live with Elberty at her farm in Lexington, where she cares for them herself, finding temporary help when she needs to travel as president of her company, NTSG Inc.

Lengthy barn chores or trailer rides are then in turn put to work by Elberty as business brainstorm sessions, which also serve as horse bonding time—it’s a productivity trifecta.    

“When I’m traveling three or four hours to get to an event or a shoot, my team knows at some point during that time I’m going to call with ideas and thoughts and so forth,” Elberty said. “Especially training for the long format event, you spend an awful lot of time on your horse, or icing your horse, or doing stuff with your horse. That was probably one of the biggest learning experiences I had through this process of preparing for the three-day event. I definitely learned why eventers are so close and tight with their horses, because you just train with them so much. That was a great experience for me.”

If ever there was a grand master of balancing work and a wildly diverse play schedule, it’s Nancy Elberty.