PrintWith a passion for dressage, this young rider has made a name for herself in the FEI Pony division.
Not many 5-year-old girls aspire to be top dressage riders. Even fewer would stick with their original dreams for the next 10 years. But that’s exactly what Isabelle Leibler has done, riding her own ponies up from training level to the FEI Pony division.
Today, Leibler, 15, is a frequent competitor at the East Coast CDI competitions where she competes with Going West and Depardieu, and she’s hoping to compete at the 2010 European Pony Dressage Championship in Hagen, Germany.
Raised around horses—her mother Renee showed hunters—Isabelle started riding around the time she could walk. But she wasn’t introduced to dressage until a trip to the Winter Equestrian Festival (Fla.) in 2000. The Leibler family was living in Connecticut at the time, and they made the trip south for Renee to show several of her hunters on the winter circuit. During the day, Isabelle would wander over to the dressage ring and spend hours there observing the tests.
“The whole time we were in Wellington, she kept disappearing to the dressage ring. My husband and I would be looking for her, saying, ‘Where’s Isabelle?’ ” Renee said. “She would come back and say, ‘I was over there watching the horses dance.’ She never stopped talking about it the whole time we were there.”
When the Leibler family returned home, with Isabelle still clamoring for dressage lessons, Renee began trying to find a trainer for her.
“We did some research,” Renee said. “Lendon Gray’s barn was about 15 minutes away. I said, ‘Lendon, my daughter wants to ride dressage.’ She looked at me and said, ‘How old is she?’ So I told her 5, and she said, ‘Does she know what dressage is?’ ”
A Prodigy
Lendon’s initial surprise over Isabelle’s decision soon waned, replaced by amazement at her motivation and intellectual prowess.
“The first pony she had with me was the classic little Welsh pony, around 12.2 hands, and would run her into the corner. Isabelle was just so determined,” Gray remembered.
Isabelle started taking lessons on the naughty hunter pony, but when she was 7 she got her first dressage pony from Ashley Holzer. The 7-year-old gelding, Get The Picture or “Dreamy,” turned out to be a perfect ride for a still
fairly new dressage rider.
“Her parents got her Dreamy, and he was just as perfect a pony as he could be,” Gray said. “He was just well trained, and he helped her. He was always exactly at her level. As she got better, he became fancier. He was truly a remarkable pony.”
Dreamy and Isabelle moved up the levels together, all the way from training level to second level, and then to the FEI Pony tests. Lendon also had Isabelle do some jumping and trail riding to keep her from getting burnt out on dressage alone, but she said that even at a very young age, Isabelle was most interested in dressage—wanting to know all the intricacies of the sport.
“From the time she was about 7, I basically taught her as an adult,” Gray said. “She’s a very bright young lady and very determined. I was able to explain things pretty much like she was an adult. She has a talent but also a tremendous focus, and she really thinks about her riding.”
