Christopher Hickey’s been knocking on the door in dressage for the last 20 years, but  now he’s finally on
his way to represent the United States after a  big victory in the Collecting Gaits Farm/USEF National Interme-diaire I Dressage Championship in Gladstone, N.J., June 14-17.

This year the Intermediaire Championship served as the selection trials for the U.S. team that will compete at the Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro, July 14-29. Hickey’s win with Brenna Kucinski’s Regent puts him squarely at the top of the list for his first international team championship.

Pending the final word from the U.S. Equestrian Federation, reserve champion Lauren Sammis with Sagacious HF and Katherine Poulin-Neff, who placed third with Brilliant Too, will join him in Rio. Susan Dutta and Pik L are the traveling reserves.

“I’m a little emotional,” admitted Hickey after his big win. “I have had a lot of things happen at the last minute when I’ve been close to being near a big thing. This means a lot.”

And Hickey insisted he couldn’t have done it without his large support team including his partner Richard, his employer Jane MacElree, his owner Kucinski and his sponsor, Shawna Dietrich of Dietrich Insurance Company.

“Those people and all my students have been behind me, supporting me, pushing me to go on and go out and do well,” he said. “That is the most emotional for me. I’m finally able to give them what they’ve been pushing for, for so long.”

Hickey, 38, started working for MacElree in January of this year as the Director of Training at Hilltop Farm in Colora, Md. In addition to qualifying for the Pan Am Games, he’s earned the right to ride at the World Dressage Breeding Championships in Verden, Germany, aboard Hilltop’s Cabana Boy this summer.

Hickey and Regent, a 9-year-old Dutch Warmblood gelding (Flemmingh—Jenny), won their place on the Pan Am team with three strong performances. He rode first in the order on Thursday in the Prix St. Georges test but didn’t let that turn into a disadvantage.

He handily won the class, which was the most heavily weighted of the three, with 71.15 percent.

A confidence booster under his belt, Hickey decided to take a few more risks in his Intermediaire I test.

“I felt like we were in a good enough spot to add a little more power,” he said. “But there were a few places where I did too much risk. Too much risk in the extended canter—he started the change at the end ahead of me. Too much risk in the two-tempis—the twos got a little bit too big for my own good, and I had a mistake in the last change. But that’s what’s fun about this sport. To bring your score up higher, you need to ride with the risk.”

His mistakes opened the door for Sammis and Sagacious HF, an 8-year-old Dutch Warmblood (Welt Hitt II—Judith). They placed second in the Prix St. Georges (70.15%) and led the Intermediaire I (72.65%).

But Hickey came back with a vengeance in the freestyle on the final day of competition. He paired
flawless execution with a difficult freestyle to win the class (74.50%) and the overall championship.

“The way the freestyle is designed, so much of it comes up so fast,” said Hickey. “Tempi changes on curved lines to a pirouette out to a half-pass, extended canter, collected two-tempis, pirouette with changes on the diagonal in between, another pirouette. There’s just no time for me to mess up.”

The judges agreed, and Anne Gribbons, who sat at C, awarded him a 9 for difficulty.

Hickey’s music included techno for the trot work and an orchestrated piece by bond, the British all-female classical quartet, for the canter. “I’m totally aware that the trot music is very dangerous music because of such a strong beat,” he said. “I feel like 70 percent of the time I can pull it off.”

They’ll Improve Each Other
Although Hickey and Sammis joked about their friendly rivalry, in the end, Sammis couldn’t have been happier to finish in second place.

“I think that we are going to push each other, and that we’re going to be a great team,” she said. “We’ll just work together and keep egging each other on.”

Sammis, 36, who splits her time between Wellington, Fla., and South Orange, N.J., started riding Sagacious at the beginning of 2006 for Hyperion Farms.

“The whole horse has changed so dramatically over the last four weeks,” she said. “He feels really, really great. He learned how to passage. When your horse can learn to passage, you can kind of put it into your test a little bit. It’s amazing to get that feeling that you can really collect him and start to get that cadence.”
Sagacious’ new and improved abilities actually ended up as a bit of a liability in the freestyle, which turned out to be too easy for him.

“I have a horse now that isn’t the same horse that he was two months ago,” said Sammis. “Two months ago that was a pretty hard freestyle for him. Now it’s not looking hard enough. I need to improve that a
little bit.”

She rode to a medley of Billy Joel songs and plans to increase the difficulty of their performance before the Pan Ams.

Gribbons commended the entire field of small tour riders. “The I1 was a strong field altogether,” she said. “Some of them were very young. The 8-year-olds have a lot of pressure going to a competition like this. That was a strong field and not so easy to judge.”

Some of the country’s top small tour horses were missing in action due to concerns over quarantine and health certificates for traveling to Brazil.

“For a while, [officials in] Brazil told us that if any horses went there and got any kind of disease, they couldn’t leave again. This scared owners and riders off. That ban has gone away,” said Gribbons.

“There were a lot of questions about the health certificates they were using for the horses. We’ve been working for almost nine months to get the health certificates to be realistic for North America,” added Gil Merrick, the USEF Dressage Managing Director.

“Also we had to make sure that we were going down to compete on good footing, so we weren’t going to put the horses at risk. Until we had the reassurances from the organizing committee that we would, we weren’t willing to make a commitment to all the riders to say we’re absolutely going,” he continued.

But everything seems to be worked out now, in large part to many trips down to Rio by Tim Dutta of the Dutta Corporation International Horse Transport.

He’ll Be Shipping Out Too
Steffen Peters isn’t traveling to Rio this year, but he has another big journey planned. He and Akiko Yamazaki’s Lombardi 11 will head to Aachen, Germany, for the CHIO Aachen, July 4-8, after winning the Collecting Gaits Farm/USEF National Grand Prix Dressage Championship.

This is Peters’ sixth win at the Festival of Champions. “This arena has so much history,” he said. “It’s always a great accomplishment to win here.”

Peters’ victory was especially gratifying because when he first started riding Lombardi four years ago, he didn’t believe the horse would ever do Grand Prix.

“He came as a fourth level horse,” said Peters. “I thought he would be a good small tour horse. The one-tempis took a long time because his canter was so big. I thought, ‘If he makes it, that’s awesome.’ So we grew together, and that makes it very special.”

Lombardi, a 16-year-old Holsteiner gelding (Locato—Baroness X) showed expressive half-passes, brilliant extended gaits and a great talent for piaffe and passage, although Peters had to work for the piaffe at times.

“He has a beautiful piaffe and the first five or six steps are really good enough for an 8, but that’s when he sometimes gets a little bit less motivated,” said Peters. “It takes strength, and sometimes he thinks it’s just a little bit too much effort to do another seven or eight steps.”

So he worked on asking Lombardi to piaffe from a very light aid in the warm-up. “If he didn’t respond at that time, then I asked him for an extended trot,” said Peters. “It worked, and it was something I practiced when I came into the ring. I walked him and clucked a little bit with my tongue and asked him to pick up the piaffe just because of that aid.”

It was no surprise that Peters, 42, didn’t come all the way from San Diego, Calif., to take second place, but Courtney King, who trains with Peters occasionally, made him work hard for the win.

King and Peters actually wagered before the competition that the other one would win. The championship winner would owe the loser $50.

And had King’s mount Idocus had a slightly different preparation, she might’ve had to hand over the money.

King, 29, has had a stellar spring with Christine McCarthy’s 17-year-old Dutch Warmblood stallion (Equador—Eretha), including a sixth-placed finish in her first Rolex FEI World Cup Final in April.

But Idocus’ achievements have made him very popular in the breeding shed, and he was feeling a little sore as a result, which showed with a sub par performance in the Grand Prix test.

“He was having trouble [passing manure], so the vets felt he was a little bit dehydrated,” said King. “They gave him fluids. They did a lot of massage, bodywork and some chiropractic adjustments to try to relieve what was bothering him from breeding. They did a stellar job and made a big difference.”

King came back in the Grand Prix Special (71.76%) and tied Peters for first place, although he ended up the eventual winner when the tie was broken with the collective marks.

“[In the Grand Prix] try as he might, he just couldn’t do it,” said King. “[In the Special] it was hard, he wasn’t himself, but he could do it.”

Their performance further improved in the freestyle, which King won on 78.00 percent. They rode to music from The Wizard Of Oz, Cats and Fiddler On The Roof as well as a tiny piece of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” from a tape that her mentor, Lendon Gray, used 20 years ago.

“I thought Idocus was a little bit better than yesterday so that made me really happy,” said King. “We had one mistake in  the twos to the one-tempis, but we have several lines of one-tempis, so I think that was made up for pretty well. And he felt like he had a good motor and was expressive, so I was very happy.

“When I did the Grand Prix, I thought I wasn’t going to make it through the end of the competition, so to get better each day—I couldn’t have asked for more,” she continued.

King had planned to take Idocus to Aachen with Peters, but she wasn’t so sure at the end of the competition.

“The owner was here today, and she was really excited,” said King. “She’s going to try as hard as she can to limit the breeding. But she’s made contracts, and Aachen was not in her plans. So if she can’t get out of the contracts to breed him, then there’s no sense in taking him over if he’s going to have to go through everything that he just went through.”

Like Father, Like Son
Elisabeth Austin gave breeders one more reason to choose Idocus when she repeated her win in the Brentina Cup with Olivier, an 11-year-old Dutch Warmblood sired by Idocus.

Austin even practiced riding her Brentina Cup test for King the week before the championship.

“It was amazing,” gushed Austin. “She said, ‘Oh, Idy does that. I know where that comes from.’ She gave me a few really good pointers.”

The 22-year-old from Williston, Vt., won the inaugural championship for riders between the ages of 18 and 26 last year on “Fizzy,” and she hadn’t intended to come back to defend her title.

“I really had wanted to try him for the Grand Prix championships this year,” she explained. “He felt ready. But at the first qualifier he didn’t feel totally secure.”

So equine masseuse Sal Salvetti and Austin’s current trainer, Arlene “Tuny” Page, convinced her to come back and do the Brentina Cup again.

“We have the rest of our lives to do Grand Prix,” said Austin. The pair was the convincing winner again, taking home blue in both the Intermediaire II (67.31%) and the special Brentina Cup test (71.43%), a slightly simplified version of the Grand Prix.

Austin reflected that both the sponsorship opportunities and the training opportunities that had come out of her win last year were incredible. Part of her reward for winning was the opportunity to train with U.S. Dressage Coach Klaus Balkenhol.

“It’s helped my riding tremendously,” she said. “Getting to watch Klaus ride and most importantly getting to sit on my horse after Klaus had ridden him—there’s nothing like it.”

She plans to take her Fizzy back to the Grand Prix level after this competition and hopefully contest the Saugerties CDI (N.Y.) this summer.

“The judges here recommended that I try him for the selection trials next year for the Olympics,” said Austin. “We’ll see. I know he’s special, and I know that he will be as good as I can make him. I’ve got a big
job ahead of me, but I know that we’re on a good track.”

Sara Lieser

Barteua and Efird Take The Spotlight In Young Rider And Junior Divisions
Last year Kassandra Barteau was prepared to take the Young Rider world by storm when her top mount Gabriella turned up pregnant in the middle of the show season.

“I noticed that she wasn’t bending well in Florida at the Heidelberg Cup in March,” said Barteau. “When we got home a few weeks later I found that her udders were full. The vet came out and told us she was due shortly. She’s a huge mare and so sweet and willing, so we just didn’t notice. I felt so terrible!”

This year Barteau isn’t letting anything get in her way. She and Gabriella won the inaugural Collecting Gaits/USEF National Young Rider Dressage Championship in Gladstone, N.J., on June 14-17. Her fluid
riding and exceptional canter work earned her the blue ribbon in both phases of the championship: the FEI Young Rider Team Test and the FEI Young Rider Individual Test.

At 18, Barteau is already a professional, having spent the last three years training and showing full-time for her parents, Kim and Yvonne Barteau, of BKY Dressage in Gilberts, Ill. She has competed through Grand Prix level, and earned her U.S. Dressage Federation Gold, Silver and Bronze medals. Coming to Gladstone for the championship offered Barteau a welcome respite from her hectic schedule of riding 12 to 13 horses a day.

“Normally I have five FEI horses at each show,” said Barteau. “I have learned so much riding all the different horses, but it’s nice to be able to come here and just focus on me and my mare.”

Having pocketed the win at Gladstone, she now turns her attention to the upcoming North American Junior and Young Rider Championships in Lexington, Va., July 31-Aug. 5. She’s already earned two team medals at the Young Rider level of the event: a gold medal with Gabriella in 2005 and a silver medal with Bentley in 2006.

Barteau borrowed Bentley while Gabriella was out of commission, and though the pair certainly had their share of success, Barteau knew something was lacking.

“For me it’s really about the partnership with your horse,” she explained. “Bentley was completely opposite Gabriella, and although I learned a lot from him, we didn’t have as good of a partnership. I really know my mare, and I think that’s a real benefit.”

Junior rider Bonnie Efird also suffered a rough year in 2006. She’d been steadily moving up the junior ranks, earning her Bronze medal the year before and working up to the Young Rider ranks. But Efird was forced to shelve her plans when her horse, Nebel Laureate, foundered and had to be euthanized.

Luckily, Efird was able to find Magie Noir in October of 2006, and the two spent the last eight months getting to know each other while picking up wins at fourth level and the FEI Junior classes.

The pair earned their biggest victory to date at the first-ever Collecting Gaits Farm/USEF National Junior Dressage Championship. “My goal for the year was to get here,” she said. “I never dreamed that I would actually win.”

Efird, 18, made attending the championship at Gladstone a priority this year, trying to capitalize on her last year in the division before she ages out and moves up to the Young Rider classes.

“I feel so proud of Magie and of myself and so thankful to have the opportunity to compete here,” said Efird, of Waxhaw, N.C. “Coming to Gladstone is incredible. It’s a much bigger show than I’ve ever ridden at, and there’s so much positive energy.

Mollie Bailey