Scanning down the list of entries for the CDI***** at the Adequan Global Dressage Festival last weekend, one name caught my eye. Ellesse Tzinberg, riding for the Philippines, was competing the oldest horse in the Grand Prix and Grand Prix Special—Pavarotti, who’s 19.

It’s not often you see a rider from the small island nation of the Philippines competing at the highest levels of the sport, and I’m always impressed seeing older horses doing well, so I tracked down Tzinberg and found out she’s had quite a journey to get to the top level of the sport.

While she may not have won at AGDF, Tzinberg was just excited to see her name sandwiched between those such as Lisa Wilcox and Steffen Peters, and proud to bring attention to equestrian sport in her country. She also stands out as a rider who finances her pursuits by modeling. 

“The start list… the night before I was sitting in my bed, white [as a ghost],” she said with a laugh. “I’ve only dreamt of it. Just to be in the same list, to have my name next to those people is unreal.

“We’re still making silly, inexperienced mistakes that are expensive, so to think that we can be doing much better and getting even more points makes me want to go more and do more and compete more and see what we can do,” she added.

Born to an American father with Russian roots and a Filipino, Spanish and Chinese mother, Tzinberg grew up in Malaysia. When she was 3, her family was given a retired race horse and her father picked up riding for fun. She and her sister soon followed suit, and before long, they were bringing along their own racetrack rejects.

Tzinberg brought her first Thoroughbred up from a 3-year-old to Prix St. Georges, then decided to go attend college. She earned a scholarship to Kansas State University where she rode on their NCEA team.

But during her freshman year, she was involved in a car accident that left her with a fractured spine. After several surgeries, Tzinberg decided to transfer to the University of San Diego and focus on her rehabilitation and academics. 

Unable to ride, unsure if she’d ever be able to run or exercise comfortably again, and scared to drive, Tzinberg went through an emotional seven months of recovery.

As she got better, Tzinberg tried riding again. She bought a young horse and trained with Rebecca Rigdon out of Steffen and Shannon Peters’ farm, but found she wasn’t as serious about riding, so she sold it.

During college, Tzinberg, 24, picked up modeling and acting to help pay for school. She’s been in several music videos and walked the catwalk in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Paris, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Her Instagram feed is a mixture of horse photos, fitness and healthy eating tips, and modeling shots. 

Upon graduation though, she decided she needed horses back in her life and bought Avident, a full sister to Carl Hester’s Utopia, to campaign in the adult jumpers with help from trainer Everardo Hegewisch.

“I started from the very beginning with her, like I originally started riding—for fun, going around the field, then I started jumping,” she said.

But Tzinberg’s first love had always been dressage, so she came up with a plan to sell the mare eventually and buy herself a nice dressage horse.

“I think it comes from my dancing background,” she said. “I danced for a long time for a ballet company when I was younger, but I stopped before I left for college. Dancing and acting has been such a strong part of my personality. I love that dressage is a little bit like that. It’s so beautiful, and it’s really about the grace and the harmony between the horse and rider. When you see a horse and rider just click in the ring and everything is smooth, you get chills. It’s the most perfect feeling.”

In 2014, Tzinberg decided she wanted to move to Europe to pursue her riding. After Googling trainers, she narrowed down her choices and ended up in Sweden training with Rasmus and Charlotte Haid-Bondergaard. 

Rasmus found Pavarotti, a Dutch Warmblood gelding (Ferro—Gaente, Saros), who’d been previously campaigned to the Under-25 Grand Prix classes by Victoria Michalke.

Pavarotti had been retired and wasn’t technically for sale, but he didn’t seem ready to live the easy life.

“They had said that whenever she would leave for shows with her other horses, he would get really stressed out and get really upset that he wasn’t going, so they knew it wasn’t time for him to retire,” said Tzinberg. “I knew going into it buying an older horse was going to come with some extra things that weren’t the same for a younger horse, but he’s keeping up with the pack. He is the old veteran, but I think he looks fantastic. When the vets here look at him, they say he looks better than some 12-year-olds. I think it’s just how you take care of them. We do a lot to keep him happy. He’s a lucky horse!” 

Pursuing A Dream

Unfortunately, two weeks after Tzinberg brought Pavarotti home in November 2014, he was injured. She thought her dreams were over before they even started.

“We think he fought with a stallion in the stable, and he ended up knocking his front leg. We had to stall rest him for six months,” she said. “There were many times where I thought to myself, ‘OK, it’s a sign. I shouldn’t do this. I should just stop and go home and get a real job.’ ” Tzinberg supports her riding through her modeling career, and just buying another horse to help further her equestrian dreams wasn’t possible.

But she got lucky—Pavarotti came back strong after six months of rest and they debuted in the dressage ring together in the summer of 2015. Tzinberg rode her first FEI Grand Prix in September in a two-star CDI. 

“You need to learn their buttons, and you need to be able to make their buttons work for you. You need to really get their trust. We’re asking them to do things that really challenge their athletic ability. Just getting that trust and learning about each other just takes time,” she said. “The injury kind of forced us to get to know each other from the ground. I think that was very important. I can go through almost every single judge’s score sheet, and they’ll say something about the harmony between me and my horse being beautiful. That to me is really special, that the judges notice that. I want people to watch us and say, ‘Oh wow, they look so beautiful together.’”

Ellesse Tzinberg and Pavarotti competing at the Adequan Global Dressage Festival. Photo by Lindsay Berreth

The pair competed at Tzinberg’s first CDIs last summer and fall and made the last-minute decision to come to Florida to help with world rankings.

Tzinberg’s hopeful that if she can become the top-ranked rider for her FEI region, she might have a shot at an individual Olympic spot.

Getting invitations to big shows has proven a challenge, but with some extra work, Tzinberg’s gotten there. “That’s a really huge thing in Europe, getting invited to shows. They don’t often think to invite a Filipino rider,” she said. “We’re begging a lot! We write so many hand written personal letters to the organizations.”

Above all else, she’s happy to bring attention to dressage in the Philippines and uses her experience as a model, which she continues to do to help pay for her horse, to connect with people.

“It’s really great because I think it connects me with a lot of interesting companies. I’ve connected with a lot of health and fitness companies because of the sport and the modeling,” she said. “I’ve been able to talk at a lot of events about health and fitness with young girls. The sport is both male and female, but there are a lot of young women in the sport, and I think with my modeling background, it’s a really good opportunity to reach out and do something else besides just competing.” 

She and Anne Rita Bertschy, who also rides for the Phillippines, continue to help riders who are based in the country find horses and travel there to help organize clinics and teach.

“They really have a great up and coming team. We just need a little bit more push,” she said. “I think for me, representing a country that has so much potential, you get a lot more out of it. I think it’s nice to bring up some people that have the opportunity to come to these types of shows.

“A lot more of the top riders in jumping we have are now all trying to bring people over to the U.S. or Europe, and we’re trying to bring horses to them to try and get the quality and the level to come up,” she continued. “Because it’s there. People are there, and they love what they do, they just don’t have the same opportunities being in Southeast Asia. We don’t have a circuit of our own. We have to travel.  [But] there’s no reason why we can’t be a strong Asian country and get up there.”