Wellington, Fla. – Dec. 12

How do you top a calendar year in which you compete at your first World Cup Finals, win six consecutive classes at the Adequan Global Dressage Festival, and earn an individual silver medal in your first appearance at the Pan American Games? 

Win your first National Championship, of course.

Under the lights at the Palm Beach International Equestrian Center’s Stadium, with the stands brimming with cheering fans, Laura Graves and Verdades (Florett AS – Liwilarda, Goya) rode a Grand Prix Freestyle routine that clinched them the USEF Dressage Grand Prix Championships at the Festival of Champions. Just 18 months after a breakout performance in last year’s event saw her earn the Reserve Championship and burst onto the global dressage scene, Graves now owns the overall title outright. Steffen Peters, who won the previous three National Championships, was second and third with Legolas 92 and Rosamunde, respectively.

“It’s incredible,” Graves said. “To win my first National Championship, I’ve never even been close to this position, and it’s a real honor. This is a really encouraging place to start 2016 for me.

“He’s phenomenal. He’s still so fun to ride. He’s just an amazingly athletic horse. When he goes like that, the feeling is just unreal,” she said.

Graves and her 13-year-old Dutch Warmblood gelding, whom she cares for herself and has brought up since he was a weanling, keyed off the electric energy in the Stadium throughout their routine, but “Diddy” perhaps fed off the environment a bit too much. The big bay spooked on two occasions, but Graves was always able to bring him back to attention and complete each movement. It wasn’t the duo’s strongest freestyle, but their 75.12% score kept them atop the leaderboard, which they had led from the event’s first test, when they won the Grand Prix on Wednesday (They also won Thursday’s Grand Prix Special). Their total championship score was 76.53 percent.

“We had some mistakes tonight, but I can’t hold that against my horse, and it feels nothing related to our training, so that’s a relief,” Graves said. “It was completely environmental, and that just takes experience.

“We had worked him earlier this morning. He’s been feeling really, really good all week. I think tonight was kind of a demonstration of how much horse I have now, and I’m still on a very sharp learning curve, so [I just have to work on] learning to ride that horse in that environment. It’s our first outing of the year, so a perfect opportunity for us to figure this out now going into our now World Cup qualifiers.”

Graves and Verdades had not competed since July’s Pan American Games in Toronto, where they were part of a gold medal-winning U.S. Team and were runners-up in the individual competition. It’s been a whirlwind of a year for the Vermont native, who finds herself a very different rider and competitor from a year ago.

“I think reflecting, my mindset is totally different,” she said. “I always thought, ‘If I do well, that’s lucky,’ and now I’m thinking, ‘I can do better. We can do better. I can pick up a point here. I can pick up a point there’ and feeling like a good result is tangible versus just going in and getting lucky. Having some security in that and having a trained horse and having somewhat of a clue of what I’m doing too most of the time, it’s just a whole different competition.

“For me, a real highlight was our Grand Prix. That’s always the toughest test for us, and it’s always the first test, so to get that out of the way with a personal best for us, it just makes you feel like you’re doing the right things with your time when you’re not showing. There are so many choices we can make when we’re not here at the competition, and coming to the competition and seeing the results kind of judge what you’ve been doing in your off time. For me, that was really rewarding.”

Graves said next objective for the pair is the 2016 Reem Acra FEI World Cup Dressage Finals in Goteborg, Sweden, in March. She will prepare for that event at the upcoming Adequan Global Dressage Festival (Fla.), a 13-week competition that begins Jan. 13.

“Our plan is still to qualify for the World Cup,” she said. “I love the way he felt tonight, but I have to learn to get a gauge on that and how to ride him like that, so hopefully I have the opportunity to put him in similar environments – really get him geared up and not make mistakes. That will be something we are hopefully are able to set up so when I get to Sweden, I don’t have to walk on eggshells. I can really step on the gas.”

For Peters, Saturday night was an evening of vindication. After earning scores below his average earlier in the week in the Grand Prix and Grand Prix Special, he and his Pan American Individual gold medalist teammate Legolas 92 reminded everyone that they are still among the best in the world with the high-score freestyle of the night (77.67%). Performing to a mix tape of Coldplay’s “Fix You” and Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, Ice, Baby,” complete with a dressage-themed rap ballad, Peters and Legolas brought down the house. Spectators, normally quiet until the freestyle’s completion, could not help but cheer mid-routine at the perfectly executed choreography. At final salute, Peters pumped his fist in the air and tipped his hat to the crowd, a wide grin spreading across his face.

“It was one of his best freestyles,” Peters said. “I’m so familiar with the routine, and I thought, even tonight, I wasn’t just with the music, I was really with the footfall of ever single beat. I liked this one better than [the one performed at the Pan American Games in] Toronto, and he did one in September that was all good. In Toronto, it was an 80. At Epona Farms (Calif.) it was an 81. I’m very, very happy. [U.S. Dressage Team Chef d’Equipe Robert Dover] and I, we talked a little bit, and we weren’t quite in the fighting mode again since the first day of the competition. I managed to get back there tonight with a very clean freestyle and I’m extremely excited.”

It was a great evening. It was very kind of Laura to give me one blue ribbon from these three days. That’s what teammates are for. It’s great.”

Peters also performed a second freestyle with Rosamunde. An 8-year-old Rhinelander mare, she took the bright lights and loud crowd completely in stride, leaving Peters more than impressed when executing a routine he used to perform with former star mount Ravel.

“Tonight was the second freestyle Rosie has ever done in her life,” Peters said. “That she deals with this atmosphere without any problems is remarkable. I got in one of the pirouettes a little too close to the wall and that’s why she got a tiny bit stuck there, but otherwise, her piaffe is improving so nicely and the transitions are coming along.

“We actually had a separate freestyle ready for Rosie, but we were still polishing it and tweaking it a little too much, so I said, ‘Let’s just go with the freestyle that I know.’ It was Ravel’s freestyle, so I asked [owner Akiko Yamazaki] if Ravel would be okay if I used one of his freestyles, and she said, ‘Look, first you have to run this by me, and if you ride it like you used to ride Ravel, you can use it.’ She acknowledged that Ravel said it was okay to use it.”

Dover, who supervised the American teammates during the competition, could only rave about the progress he saw from Graves and Peters throughout the course of the week and was left feeling encouraged about the upcoming year, in which he will assemble and prepare a team for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

“It’s a group of amazingly great riders and horses that we have at various different levels in their journey,” he said. “I was thrilled with Laura in both the Grand Prix and the Grand Prix Special. I thought the Grand Prix Special was right back onto where you see the top few horses in the world doing that quality.

“Steffen with Legolas, I was thrilled again tonight. To me, that showed he is right back at the top of his game […] and Rosie, for me, is thrilling. For me, from the beginning to the end, she just never disappoints. She’s green, and yet there’s this love relationship going on that we’re all going to watch evolve through this next year.

“[From the beginning of the week to the end of the week], everybody started rising up again and sort of remembering why they are who they are and why the horses are what they are. It was gratifying for me day by day to see the progress back up to that spot.”

Championship ‘Destiny’

In 2015, the American rock band Walk the Moon’s track “Shut Up and Dance” led Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs chart for 24 consecutive weeks.

The USEF Dressage Intermediare I National Championships at the Festival of Champions wasn’t quite that long in duration, but Christina Vinios and Folkestone (Fidertanz, El Katulika, Rubenstein) led the three-day event from start to finish, culminating their Championship run with an Intermediare I Freestyle that featured instrumentals from the popular rock ballad.

This woman is my destiny. She said, ‘Ooh-ooh, shut up and dance with me!

Indeed, the crowd was silent as Vinios and her 9-year-old Oldenburg gelding danced from X to their final salute, and one couldn’t help but think that the pair was destined for the championship title. When the final scores were tabulated, Vinios and Folkestone (69.79%) were proclaimed the winners by just two-tenths of a point over Shelly Francis and Rubino (69.59), who moved up from third place overall to earn the Reserve Championship after posting the highest score of the night in the Intermediare I Freestyle (74.35). Jane Karol and Sunshine Tour, winners of the Intermediare I Open Thursday, finished third overall with a total score of 68.18 percent.

Vinios, competing at her very first Festival of Champions, was nearly speechless following her win.

“I’m not even sure how to answer that,” the Wellington resident said when asked what the victory meant to her. “I’m really, really happy. I’ve had a lot of fun with my horse this year, and to end it like this is very nice and special.”

“This is kind of like a reach goal, like when you apply to college and have ‘safety’ and ‘reach’ schools. This was a reach goal.”

Vinios, who has only been riding dressage for a little over four years, captured the Markel USEF Developing Horse Prix St. Georges Championship with Folkestone at the Lamplight Equestrian Center (Ill.) in August before piloting the bay to three wins at Dressage at Devon (Pa.) in October in the duo’s last competition before this week’s show. The pair won Wednesday’s Prix St Georges Open (70.63%), finished second in Thursday’s Intermediare I Open (68.66) and was again second in the Intermediare I Freestyle Saturday evening (71.00). With a 45-40-15 scoring format and a tight race throughout, Wednesday’s victory proved to be a deciding factor in the final standings.

“At Lamplight at the Developing Championships, I was second the first day, and I was sitting next to [rider] Heather Blitz, and she said something like, ‘If you win the first day, you can’t relax too much on the second day, because you’ll make a mistake.’ So, I remembered her saying that, so I said to myself, ‘I really have to step it up the second day,’ and I did the opposite. It was so close. Any of the three of us [the top three] could have won. It was intense, but it was really fun. I loved it!”

Vinios and Folkestone are in Wellington to stay. Vinios plans to contest much of the upcoming Adequan Global Dressage Festival to gain more valuable ring experience.

“I’m schooling the next level, but I really just need many more times down the centerline,” she said. “I feel so confident at home, but sometimes when I go in the ring, it doesn’t always go exactly as planned. I think I just need to keep getting more and more showing experience. That’s my plan.”