With seven major equitation finals wins and 18 finals ribbons total, Grappa’s tenure in the equitation ring is unmatched. He dominated that arena from 1996, when he won his first final with Lauren Bass, until his retirement in 2009. 

And for Sarah Willeman Doran, he was the magical partner with whom she won the 1998 Washington International Horse Show Equitation Final (Maryland), the 2000 Eisers & Pessoa/AHSA Medal Final (Pennsylvania) and the 2000 BET/USET Talent Search Final—East (New Jersey), among other major equitation classes. 

“I learned so much from Grappa,” said Doran. “The thing about him was he had so much style and class, and such a beautiful, dynamic way of going, and tons of feel. He was not easy to ride. 

“He did not have the biggest stride,” she added. “He could, but you had to ride at pace. He wasn’t a big, lopey equitation horse that you hand canter the course, and he was going to eat up the ground. You had to gallop and jump, which is part of what made him so brilliant to watch. He was smooth and had this incredible liveliness to him at the same time. He had this brilliance, which was partly the way you had to ride him and partly his very exuberant personality.” 

Kicking Off A Partnership

Grappa joined the equitation scene in the spring of 1996 when Joe Norick pulled Missy Clark aside at a horse show at Old Salem (New York), saying he had a jumper from California he thought would make a good equitation horse. Clark watched Heather Caristo ride the Hanoverian (Grossmogul—Sally) in a schooling jumper class and thought he looked good, but she wanted to be sure, so she sent Peter Wylde to ride the horse and give a personal report. 

“We had Lauren [Bass] ride him in one class, and I immediately knew he was a great match for her,” said Clark. “She ended up buying him, and the rest was history with her.” 

Bass and Grappa won the Rolex/ASPCA Maclay Final (New York) that year in a horse swap. The next year, as the finals were drawing closer, Clark started thinking about Grappa’s future. Bass was aging out, and Clark’s mind went to Doran, then 15, in her barn. 

In Bass’ last year she was fourth at Talent Search Final with Grappa, and after Clark got home from Gladstone, New Jersey, she picked up the phone and called Anne Meyer, Doran’s mother. Clark convinced her that though her daughter already had an equitation horse, she needed to get “one of the best ones who ever existed.” 

“The next week [Bass] won Medal Finals, and everyone was knocking down the door,” said Clark. “But Anne had stepped right up and bought him for Sarah.” 

Doran had joined Clark’s program a year or two earlier, having graduated from a local show stable near her hometown of Hamilton, Massachusetts. Clark knew shortly after she started coaching Doran that the girl was a big talent. 

“I remember in Florida, I’d just started riding with Missy a few weeks earlier, and we were walking the course for some equitation class, and I asked her about the 12-14 equitation,” said Doran. “She’s like, ‘Wait, you’re still eligible for the 12-14?’ and I’m like, ‘Yes.’ She turned to me and said, ‘Yippee skippy, we’re going to win the finals.’ ” 

Doran’s first show with Grappa was that year’s Maclay Final—since Bass had already won it, Grappa was available—then they spent three full years in the ring together. 

“I’m sure I had some lessons on him the week prior [to the Maclay Final], but I would not have ridden him prior to that,” said Doran. “I don’t know if I ever tried him. I think Missy was just like, ‘This will be your horse,’ and I was like, ‘OK.’ She always has been so good about matching horses and riders.” 

A Tricky Partner 

Despite Grappa’s remarkable record, one thing was clear: He was no push-button ride. He required finesse of his riders, said Doran, and he would tattle when someone rode incorrectly. 

“All the finals I won were in horse swaps—every single one,” said Doran. “I think it surprised people because they thought, ‘Oh Grappa, perfect.’ One of the horse swaps he cross-cantered around an entire corner. One of them someone landed a bit too heavily after a fence, and he put his nose straight up in the air, nose above his ears and shook his head for four strides.” 

Once, in a group lesson, Clark was explaining the evils of ducking and asked Doran to demonstrate to some newer students. Clark instructed her to ride the first part of a course normally then duck over each element in the triple combination. Doran followed instructions, and Grappa had all three fences down then took off. 

“Missy was like, ‘Perfect demonstration, thank you,’ ” said Doran. 

Grappa had plenty of energy, and Doran said riders of her era got used to seeing her galloping around the schooling areas with him on show mornings to take the edge off. Sometimes he’d use it to spook at shadows he’d seen a dozen times before; sometimes he’d use it to show off a brilliant gallop around courses. 

“I don’t believe that horse was ever afraid of something he spooked at,” said Doran. “It was more just he thought it was entertaining. That horse, he was bold. I never knew him to be afraid of anything. He jumped the natural obstacles better than any horse I’d ever ridden. He was so brave. Unloading from horse trailer in NYC in the middle of the night, he was like, ‘Cool, let me check out that bodega in the middle of the city.’ He was just into it. 

“He bucked me off in 1998 before Medal Finals,” added Doran, who finished sixth that year. “We’d been at Harrisburg in the middle of the night schooling; we’d been in final four at the USET the week before. We were schooling in the middle of the night in the arena, and we jumped this line that I’d jumped a couple of times already. I was like, ‘All right, he feels good. I can land and soften my hand here.’ The moment I did it, he launched me. He saw his opportunity and took it. I was like, ‘OK, I guess we’re not show ready just yet.’ ” 

Big Wins

In 1998 Doran was called back on top for the final test at the Medal Final aboard Grappa. The announcer read off a hugely complicated test, then the riders were excused out the back gate and forbidden from watching one another ride. When it was her turn to go, Doran jumped a wrong jump. 

“I remember I was in the air over the last jump, and it was crickets in the arena,” recalled Doran. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, what did I do?’ and I realized before I’d walked out the gate that I’d jumped the wrong jump. That was so devastating, of course.” 

The next week at the Washington Final, Doran jumped a good first round that put her just outside the top 10. 

“We were walking the course for the jumper phase, and Missy turned to me and said, ‘You can still win this,’ ” she said. “After the jumper phase, I was called back second or third, then after the horse swap I was on top. That was kind of a cool thing, and it gave me a lot of confidence. Once you win one at that level, you realize you can [win more].” 

The next season Grappa spent a few months out of the ring with a minor injury, but he came back in time for finals season, finishing fifth at the Maclay, eighth at the Medal and sixth at the Talent Search. He was Doran’s mount when she won at the Calvin Klein Equitation Classic (New York) and the New England Equitation Championships (Massachusetts) that year. 

“Every time I got on him, I just felt how incredibly lucky I was to have that horse.”

Sarah Willeman Doran

Doran was excited for what 2000 would bring, but she never could have anticipated the year that followed. And the season started perfectly. 

“We qualified [for finals] quickly, so I didn’t show that much,” she said. “That year of 2000, in terms of regular season classes—the Maclay, Medal and USET classes—we won every class we entered.” 

But in August disaster struck. Doran’s jumper fell on her side during a class, and the stirrup bar crushed her foot. Multiple surgeons said they didn’t think they could fix it; one said it would require two surgeries, the first inserting pins and rods, with eight weeks in a cast between—a plan that would have prevented her from riding in the finals in her last junior year. After several more consults, Doran finally found a surgeon who rebuilt the badly damaged joint using sea coral and absorbable screws. He gave her a removeable cast but forbade her from bearing weight or going anywhere near the barn in an effort to keep dust out of her foot. 

Doran was a good patient, icing the foot and undergoing acupuncture treatments. She arranged to switch her Maclay region so that she could compete in the last regional qualifier available. By then she had matriculated at Stanford University (California) and commuted back and forth, hobbling through the airport on crutches. 

“I got back on a horse four days before regionals without stirrups,” she recalled. “I was still on crutches. I was riding without stirrups and put on my left stirrup just to walk into the ring. Someone had to catch me getting off a horse, because it was too treacherous to land on one foot and be unsure of what would happen next.” 

Doran won her regional and continued to nurse her healing foot through the rest of finals season. But there were some problems. At the Talent Search Final after she progressed to the final four, she knew the rules required her to jog her horse. She couldn’t properly bear weight on her left foot—let alone run on it—but after some tense conversations she was allowed to let someone else jog Grappa, and she went on to win the class. 

She ran into trouble again at the Medal Final. There she was called back for the final test into the ring, when the judges asked the riders to dismount and swap horses then remount. 

“I was standing there dumbstruck, trying to figure out what to do,” said Doran. “By that time, I could get off unassisted, but there was no way I was going to get on without a mounting block or without a leg-up. I just stood there staring at the horse, thinking, ‘What am I going to do? I’m going to lose Medal Finals because I can’t get on.’ After a few minutes they said, ‘You can get a leg up from the ringmaster if you need it.’ I don’t know if they realized my situation because they just offered that. So I got a leg up.” 

Doran swapped onto Jenny Jones’ horse Pik Trump II and handed Grappa’s reins over to Jones. Doran won the class. “Jenny rode him beautifully,” she said of the rider with whom she shared 2000 The Chronicle of the Horse Hunter Rider of the Year honors. “She rode him the best of anyone who swapped onto him in my era, which is not surprising because she’s such a talent. It could have gone either way; she rode great.” 

Later Years

When Doran aged out, she and her family decided to keep Grappa. She worried that it would be tempting for a new rider to overuse him, and she wanted to make sure he had the best retirement possible after his career ended.

She leased him out for the balance of his career, always stipulating that he had to stay with Clark and limiting the number of shows he could do a year. Brian Walker took over the ride the next year, winning the Maclay Final and finishing second at Washington. In 2002 Maggie Jayne won the Medal Final with him, and in 2003 Sophie Coppedge earned a Talent Search ribbon. 

Clark had an intuition about who would gel with Grappa. 

“He wasn’t as easy to ride as he was portrayed,” she said. “They had to have the ability to gallop and jump, which made him so exciting to watch but made him more sophisticated to ride. Brian took a minute to learn to ride him. Maggie [clicked] with him early on. He was a cool horse, just really exciting to watch.” 

During the summers Doran would return to the East Coast and ride, enabling her to watch Grappa in action. (In 2001 she borrowed Otter from Clark and rode him to her 20th Talent Search class win, earning her USET Talent Search gold medal.) In 2005 she reunited with Grappa, tacking him up to compete in some amateur-owner hunter classes. When he turned 20 in 2009, she decided to retire him in a ceremony at the Washington International, then he headed to her family’s farm in Connecticut. He lived out his days in a field with Otter, where he kept his spunky personality until he died at 34. 

“They loved each other,” said Doran. “They would scratch each other’s withers all the time. It was so sweet to see them in the field side-by-side, always next to each other. 

“His whole life he would get this look in his eye where he’d put his head way up in the air, standing stock still like a statue,” she added. “His head would go up in the air, and his eyes would be enormous. He’d be staring at something in the sky with his ears pricked forward, clearly not attuned to the human realm. We called that ‘communicating with the mothership.’ When he did that, we were like, ‘Oh no, very bad sign. What might he do next?’ In his later years, he still did it. When he was elderly, any time he did that I was like, ‘I love to see that! That’s my boy.’ ” 

After aging out and winning the 2006 USEF/Cacchione Cup at IHSA Nationals (Pennsylvania), Doran, Annisquam, Massachusetts, spent time in the reining world. She’s out of the show ring these days, though she still works with horses as a practitioner of natural lifemanship, a model of equine-assisted learning that helps people build relationships and overcome stress and trauma. 

Now 42, she still reflects on how important Grappa was to her life. Her blog—GrappaLane.com—is named after him, and she sponsored the Grappa Trophy, awarded to the best horse at Talent Search Finals. 

“He and I were a team for my most important junior years and obviously the things I accomplished with him were transformative for my riding career,” she said. “He was a complicated horse, and I appreciated that about him. I think that a lot of the great ones are. It was very satisfying that—of course Missy did get on and tune him up on certain occasions—but the vast majority of the time I got him ready, and we were a team, and I learned from her how to do that. It was very satisfying. He and I just had this thing.” 

According to Doran, Grappa taught her how to pick her battles with quirky horses and form a partnership so they could excel together, as she never wanted to dampen his spirit. He also taught her about handling stress. 

“It’s a lot of pressure to have a horse that comes to be seen as such a special, amazing show horse,” she said. “People are watching and think that you should be winning because you have Grappa. In the early day of internet chatrooms, people would go on there and have all their theories. ‘Oh, that horse is so easy to ride.’ It is a lot of pressure, so I had to have a strong mental game too, [and I] did some sports psychology. 

“And I think also my personality is such that I never took it for granted. Every time I got on him, I just felt how incredibly lucky I was to have that horse,” she added. “Every day I felt like, ‘This is not a right, it’s a privilege.’ [I would think], ‘Every day I ride him I need to earn the privilege of riding this horse.’ That’s how I naturally felt, because I felt the gravity of having such an incredible animal.” 

---

This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of The Chronicle of the Horse. You can subscribe and get online access to a digital version and then enjoy a year of The Chronicle of the Horse. If you’re just following COTH online, you’re missing so much great unique content. Each print issue of the Chronicle is full of in-depth competition news, fascinating features, probing looks at issues within the sports of hunter/jumper, eventing and dressage, and stunning photography.