Lexington, Ky.—July 19

When Naima Moreira Laliberte walked down the ramp into Rolex Stadium to ride her young rider individual freestyle on Belafonte, the chestnut Hanoverian had a little bobble. They’d only ridden this particular freestyle once together—at a show to qualify for the Adequan/FEI North American Junior and Young Rider Championships—and Belafonte is known to be a bit of a chameleon, letting a new color of his personality show every day, so Moreira wasn’t quite sure how he’d behave in the bigger atmosphere of the arena.

“With experience, you know how you need to be on that day to compete him because he’s different every day,” said Laliberte, who took the ride a year and a half ago. “There are patterns that come back, but he’s different—you never know. Good days, bad days—he kind of decides which one it is so my riding changes every day!”

But Laliberte, 18, of Montreal, Quebec, values the adaptability she’s had to adopt and the journey of their partnership, took a deep breath, and “felt the groove. I was too green to ride him, so I had to train myself a little bit more to ride him,” she said. “It’s been a rollercoaster, I won’t lie! He’s a very hot, powerful and very studdish horse, so he’s very opinionated, but that’s also what makes me a better rider in the long run. But he’s a strange horse—he makes me laugh all the time, the ways he moves—it’s like, ‘Who are you?!’ “

They put in a flowing, picturesque test that wowed the cheering audience. They scored a 71.82 percent to place first ahead of Hannah Bauer and Trustful (70.00 percent) and third-placed Kerrigan Gluch on Vaquero HGF (69.05 percent).

“I was quite happy with the freestyle, the feeling he gave me,” said Laliberte. “I won’t lie, I haven’t ridden it before, i just know the music and i know the pattern, and just feel the groove, practice every day. It’s no different than another test I would say. You practice a little piece here, a little piece there and you go with it—that’s what makes it interesting i think! it’s much easier when you put the music together yourself so you know when you make the cues, the timing, along with the video. So you know your music and it’s important to do it somehow.”

Bauer, 16, of Purcellville, Va., was ecstatic but exhausted after the long week of competition. “I’m super excited, I just don’t have the energy to show how excited I am on the inside!” she said with a smile.

“[My sister] did the music searching more than I did—she knows me so well she’s like, ‘I think you’d like this!’ and I’m like ‘You’re right! I do!’ ” said Bauer. “And so it fit him well, and we didn’t ride it too much before, and I think this ride was the first time I was actually in control of the freestyle and wasn’t like, ‘Ah, now we’re going to this movement!!’ So I’m really happy with it.”

While Laliberte and Bauer have experience at NAJYRC, third-placed Gluch was a rookie and had never landed on a podium before.

“It was nice to be able to go in the show ring, and I felt everything I’d worked on and talked about over the past week leading up to it—everything came together as much as it could have,” said Gluch, 18, of Michigan. “Right now I’m really excited; this is all new to me! It was nice to watch all the rides today and really think about what I could do to ride better and watch and see how the judges were scoring to make my ride the best it could be.”

She chose to highlight trot work in her freestyle as that’s what she’s improved upon the most leading up to NAJYRC. “I’m learning to ride his actual trot,” she said. “The breed of horse, a Spanish horse, there are so many trots in there that I have to really focus and find the cadence and rhythm that I need, and that was for good points.”

Bebe Davis and Rotano capture gold in the Junior freestyle test

Fractions of a point (.1, to be exact) separated the top two junior riders in the North American Junior and Young Rider Championships freestyle test. Bebe Davis and Rotano took the top spot with a score of 71.825, and hot on her heels were Helen McNulty and Checkmate, the individual gold medalists from yesterday’s junior individual test.

The 15-year-old McNulty has a few more years to return to NAJYRC and try for freestyle gold, but this was Davis’ last shot before aging out of the junior division.

“I’ve been working toward this moment for a very long time, so its amazing to see that my hard work has finally paid off,” Davis said. “All of the hours and all of the long days and early mornings have led to this, so I’m extremely happy.”

Davis’s freestyle on the beautiful bay gelding Rotano showed off their talents with some very challenging canter work.

“This is actually the first time I’ve done my free style,” Davis said with a laugh at the press conference. “I had had a previous one that I won bronze with here in 2013, so I decided to change it and I have all new music and all new choreography.

“I have a very difficult pattern in my canter tour,” Davis continued. “I have a half pass to the left, and then four changes on a twenty meter circle ever seven strides, and then a half pass back to the right to the centerline, and it went absolutely perfectly today. After that movement, I was completely over the moon.”

Davis didn’t medal in the other junior individual test—a score of 68.7 wasn’t good enough to get on the podium. Going into the freestyle test, Davis was focused on improving on her mistakes from the previous rounds.

“Yesterday I had some little bit of issues in the walk, that was an old habit of mine,” Davis said. “He warmed up wonderful, and I kind of resorted back to an old habit that I had had before.”

Davis is one of the top junior riders in the country, so how bad could this habit be?

“I have a tendency to be a little bit, like I lock my legs, and I don’t allow him to walk all the way through the back,” Davis explained. “So he can develop a lateral tendency in the collected walk. It’s interesting, because his collected walk can be a 4, but the extended walk is still an 8, so it’s completely not him at all, it’s completely on me.”

Before her freestyle test, Davis got some advice from the stars on improving her walk work.

“I got to talk with Charlotte Bredahl and George Williams, and they kind of gave me some tips on how to improve it and make it better for today,” Davis said. “So obviously it was much improved.”

McNulty, the silver medalist, estimates she has “redone the choreography seven or eight times” on her freestyle test. A horse McNulty said she had trouble being on the same page with at the beginning of their partnership, they scored a 71.725 to take second to Davis.

A bit of overachievement on Checkmates part may have bumped their scores down.  

“I messed it up today, I picked up counter canter, and when I asked him to do the changes on the quarter line he threw in a couple of one tempis,” McNulty said. “Then that threw off what I was going to do with it, so I sort of had to play along, and I couldn’t really get the changes back.”  

The bronze in the junior freestyle test went to Camille Bergeron and Delfiano. The pair had very fun tribal music for their test—it featured a strong bass and beat that matched Delfiano to a T.