So yes, it’s very cool being at the Mitsubishi Motors Badminton Horse Trials and interviewing Michael Jung. But another of my favorite things about covering a competition away from home is talking to other people who usually aren’t on our radar in the United States.
Like, say, Denmark’s Hanne Wind Ramsgaard.
Most of the riders who enter the Badminton stadium do so with game faces firmly on. Maybe they look at the crowd briefly—or they don’t at all. They do their work outside the ring, and then they enter at A. If they’re excited to be here (and I sure they are!), they’re mostly concealing it with an excellent poker face until at least the final halt.
But Ramsgaard entered under the Badminton arch with a grin. She trotted around the outside of the ring, still grinning. And she entered at A and halted with just a slightly muted smile.
She was having a nice test, and then she went off course during the final canter sequence. But even that didn’t deter her cheerfulness as she smiled at the judge at C, nodded in realization of her error and kept going. She finished with, yes, you guessed it, a big smile, patting her horse profusely on the way out.
When I’m taking photos and covering an event alone, I generally head to the mixed zone—the area where you interview the riders—for U.S. competitors and the leaders. It’s just too complicated to exit and then enter the stadium before the next test to do it for every rider.
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But the lunch break started after Ramsgaard’s test, so I thought, “I should go talk to her instead of rushing back for my sandwich.”
And woah, am I ever glad I did, because hers is a story you rarely find at a competition like Badminton.
Ramsgaard’s an amateur rider, with a day job for the maintenance department of a factory in her home country. She explained that she gets up at 5 a.m. every morning for work, and then she rides her four horses when she gets home, usually finishing up in the stable around 9 p.m.
She bought her Badminton horse, Vestervangs Arami, when he was young. She bought him to do dressage, because dressage was her main discipline then and also because not many people in Denmark breed eventers. Now that she’s switched to eventing with all of her horses, she buys show jumping prospects and then converts them to eventers.
But almost more amazingly, Ramsgaard only did her first event ever in 2007, and she competed at the FEI level for the first time in 2010. She moved the now-11-year-old Vestervangs Arami up the levels; he did the FEI World Breeding Eventing Championships for Young Horses at Le Lion d’Angers in France as a 6-year-old, and they’re now serious competitors for Denmark. They did their first four-star at Pau (France) in 2014, and then she rode on the team at least year’s FEI European Eventing Championships in Great Britain.
“He was clear at Pau, though not inside the time at all,” she said. “He’s a bit anxious sometimes but otherwise quite careful and quite well-behaved.”
Ramsgaard selected this competition as her horse’s second four-star with the idea of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
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“I was second in the race for Rio in my group, and I told the national federation that this should be something big, and I’d love to go. Everybody wants to go to Badminton,” she said.
Even having been on a few teams and up for consideration for the Olympics, Ramsgaard felt a little starstruck heading into the main ring here.
“It’s absolutely amazing,” she said. “Usually I don’t get nerves, but I did a little.”
And one more thing. When you ask a lot of riders about the cross-country course somewhere, they give you a serious answer about which complexes look tough, how they think the length or terrain will impact their horses, and about if they think the time will be tough. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that kind of answer, and in fact it’s what you need to write a story about a cross-country course.
But Ramsgaard had possibly my favorite response of all time when asked about the Badminton course. She looked back over her shoulder at the part of the course visible from the mixed zone, and then she looked back at me—big grin—and said, “I love it.”
