Saugerties, N.Y.—Sept. 7  

As Aaron Vale and Dress Balou jumped the first few jumps of the final round of the $500,000 Diamond Mills Hunter Prix, people at the in-gate watching sucked in their breath. I heard a few “Wows.” Dress Balou cantered up to the jumps, then fired off the ground with a round, stylish jump that inspired comment.

The judges expressed their “wows” with scores in the 90s, and as the class drew to a close, Dress Balou’s owner, trainer Don Stewart, was holding the replica of a prize money check for $150,000. In his inimitable, effusive way, Stewart hammed it up with the check in the awards ceremony.

His classy, consistent trips over four rounds for the top title at the HITS Saugerties Championship weekend might have earned him big money, but Dress Balou was an unknown coming into the competition. In fact, the horse had only shown a few times as a hunter.

It was three weeks before the class that Stewart dialed Vale’s number and said, “I’ve got a horse you can win the hunter derby in Saugerties on,” Vale recalled. “I went and rode him, and I wasn’t so sure after that first day!”

Dress Balou, listed by the U.S. Equestrian Federation as a 5-year-old, was as green as they come. “He was wobbly and his legs kind of went everywhere. You’d pull on the left rein to turn and he’d keep going right and vice versa,’ Vale said. “Whatever distance you saw, he’d bulge out and you’d have to add another one. We’ve been working feverishly on that for the last two weeks and got it just good enough to do this.”

Dress Balou spent two weeks at the HITS-on-the-Hudson venue with Vale, showing in the pre-green and Adequan hunter divisions and the level 0 and 1 jumper divisions. “He’s gotten lots of trips in the ring. He’s a fabulous jumper. We did a lot of classes to practice and it paid off. Don was right!” Vale remarked.

Dress Balou’s greenness almost caught up to Vale in the second round, run over the outside course at HITS-on-the-Hudson. The course included a curved wall of hay bales. “Turning to the hay bales. I saw a good distance to the left side of the jump and he just kept drifting out, so we ended up jumping the right side. That jump was 40’ across, so we faked it well,” Vale said. “The jump was always there. We’ve done a lot of classes to catch him up, and he has not lost one iota of crispness to his jump. It’s just ‘bing,’ right there every time.”

Vale and Stewart—who are both based in Ocala, Fla.—have been close friends for decades and Stewart has owned horses for Vale in the past. “We’ve had a lot of fun together; we haven’t have a lot of monetary success until now, but we’ve had a lot of fun. This is the first big check we’ve won together,” Stewart said.

And while Vale might be more well known for his jumper successes, when Stewart needed a rider to shape Dress Balou into a winner in an incredibly short amount of time, he knew Vale was up for it.

“I looked at the jumps [for the $500,000 Diamond Mills Hunter Prix] and thought ‘This is maybe a little over this horse’s head.’ But Aaron can instill confidence in any horse, and he’s got so much depth of experience in his riding,” Stewart said. “There’s no substitute for experience. I can’t say enough about the job he did. I’m pretty comfortable in saying that I don’t think there’s anybody else who could have done what he did with that horse in that short amount of time.”

Stewart saw Dress Balou—whose former name is Quin Balou—in April. Kyle and Kathy Dewar had him at their farm in Ocala. The brown gelding had shown one week with Kathy during the HITS Ocala Winter Circuit—in the training and baby green hunters.

Stewart bought him and Megan Wexler showed Dress Balou in two 2’6” classes at the Atlanta Summer Classic I (Ga.) in June and then in the pre-green division at Atlanta the next week. Then Stewart decided to leave the warmblood gelding at home in Ocala—still in work but not showing—when he went on the road for the summer. It wasn’t until a few weeks before the $500,000 Diamond Mills Hunter Prix that Vale started getting him ready for the ring again.

Dress Balou is listed with the USEF as a warmblood of unrecorded breeding, but his name would indicate some relation to the horse he dueled with for the win. Amanda Steege and Balou also notched scores in the 90s during the $500,000 Hunter Prix rounds, but they finished up just shy of Vale’s final total, taking second place. Balou is by the Baloubet du Rouet son Balou du Rouet. While Balou is a compact, pony-looking type, Dress Balou is more leggy and tall. They have very similar heads, however.

A scoring error meant that Hunter Holloway and Lyons Creek Bellini were pinned in second place in the awards ceremony, with Steege and Balou third, but the error was discovered and the placings corrected to give Balou the red ribbon.

“I was happy with him and we had a good time out there. Balou belongs to [amateur rider] Lisa Arena Davis and she’s pregnant, so he’s been on maternity leave since Florida,” Steege said. “She sent him back to me a month ago with the goal of doing this class. Normally he lives with Lisa at her farm in Fairport, N.Y., and I just see him at shows, so it was nice to have time to get him organized for this class as a goal.”

Holloway, 16, was thrilled to join veterans Vale and Steege—along with former class winner Patricia Griffith—in the top four of the class. “I was fourth last year, so I was hoping to come back and improve on that and we did. I’ve had amazing help this year working with Don and Anne Kursinksi and my mom and Mike McCormick. I have an amazing horse right now and he’s just so consistent. I’m very lucky to have the ride on him,” she said.

Holloway survived a very scary moment two days before when while competing in the $30,000 Wild Card Grand Prix on her Yolo. In the air over the first element of the triple combination, the horse’s shoe or stud got caught in the ring on his girth where the breastplate or martingale attaches. As he folded his legs up, it caught, and as he went to unfold his legs, that leg couldn’t straighten to meet the ground. Yolo tumbled head-first into the ground in a scary looking fall. “It was a freak accident. The horse and I are both fine,” Holloway said.

But Anne Kursinski, for whom Holloway is working as a working student, broke her collarbone when the exact same thing happened in the warm-up area as she was riding Yolo. When he fell with Kursinski, he pulled the shoe of, so they thought he had just stepped on the shoe. It wasn’t until the same thing happened with Holloway in the ring and they watched video of it in slow motion that they realized Yolo was catching his foot on the girth.

Other Championship Action

• Kimberly Maloomian ride her mother’s Urlala to the top of the $250,000 Platinum Performance Hunter Prix. The class, run in the same four-round format as the $500,000 Diamond Mills Hunter Prix, is open to amateurs and juniors and over 3’ jumps.

• Danielle Cooper topped the $250,000 Bayer Legend Junior/Amateur-Owner Jumper Prix riding her own Calantus over Canadian Jaclyn Duff on Pater Noster. Find complete results of that class here. 

See full results for the last two rounds of the $500,000 Diamond Mills Hunter Prix.

For all the HITS Saugerties Championship Weekend results, see the HITS website.