There’s not much McLain Ward and Sapphire haven’t won. They have a myriad of grand prix titles, Olympic team silver and World Equestrian Games team bronze on their resume. But now they can add what Ward called his “biggest personal win” to date—the $399,541 CN Worldwide Florida Open Grand Prix.

“Sapphire always feels amazing—sometimes I just get in her way. She’s a great horse, and now very seasoned. As long as I don’t make a major error, she’s going to perform well. She’s a horse of a lifetime,” Ward said.

Ward and the big chestnut mare topped a field of 50 starters in the concluding event of the eight weeks of Winter Equestrian Festival competition in Wellington, Fla., during the CN Worldwide Wellington Finale. The list of riders included many international stars, since it was the first event of the international Global Champions Tour series.

Course designer Guilherme Jorge built a true test for the two rounds of competition. “The second round was final-day championships kind of jumping. It was as big as you’re going to jump at Calgary [Spruce Meadows] and the World Cup Finals or anywhere,” said Ward. Only four combinations answered all of the questions in both rounds to jump-off for the top check.

Ward faced off against Canadians Eric Lamaze, on Hickstead, and Frankie Chesler-Ortiz, on Picolien Zeldenrust, as well as fellow U.S. rider and amateur Danielle Torano, on Vancouver d’Auvrey. Torano had
the unenviable task of going first and setting the pace.

“I didn’t think I could be as fast as Eric or McLain. I really wanted to go clean, but I didn’t want to crawl! I thought if I could do as much as I felt like I could do, I might be able to be in it,” said Torano.

She and the powerful, bay stallion bounced around the jump-off and shaved the turns to go clear in 37.48 seconds.

Lamaze set off at a quick clip on Hickstead and really sliced the angle on the FTI Rider Challenge oxer, cutting inside the water jump to get there. The gutsy move saved time, but Hickstead just barely clipped the back rail with a hind toe, and it fell. Lamaze’s 4 faults in 37.96 seconds would put him fourth in the end.

Lamaze could be consoled, however, by winning the FTI Rider Challenge, a bonus of $100,000 that was awarded to the rider collecting the most points in the grand prix classes during the WEF.

Ward knew what he had to do. “I had seen Danielle go, and she didn’t go crazy, but it was fast and neat. I was a little relieved to see Eric have that fence down since that’s a very fast horse. My goal was to go a little bit faster than Danielle and try and put some pressure on Frankie, and it worked out,” he said.

Sapphire ate up the ground with her huge stride, and Ward was able to turn her gallop into economical turns that counted. “You can roll back very tightly with her because she jumps the fences so easily. I wanted to shave the turns just a little tighter than I’d seen Danielle do,” he said.

Ward took a gamble to the influential FTI oxer, swinging out instead of cutting the angle, but Sapphire’s speed carried them to a clear round in 35.25 seconds.

Not Quite
Chesler-Ortiz and Picolien Zeldenrust, another big chestnut mare, struck up a good gallop. “When I started warming up today, she felt really good, and I knew she was on her game and if I rode well she’d produce for me. When I was getting ready for the second round, I was dreaming about winning,” said Chesler-Ortiz.

But Picolien Zeldenrust, 10, doesn’t have quite the same turning radius as Sapphire. “My horse is fast across the ground and over the jumps, but the turns are still a little tricky with her. If I turn too tight to an oxer, or roll back too tight to a vertical on a bit of an angle, she’s still a little green,” said Chesler-Ortiz.

She took the time to bow out and get straight to the FTI oxer, taking valuable seconds. Her clear round in 37.32 seconds put them second, relegating Torano to third.

“I was a little hesitant coming on too much of an angle to the one oxer and went a bit wide. And I should have left one step out going to the last jump. But I think I made the right choice for her, because she left the ring really confident and happy,” said Chesler-Ortiz.

The betting public might not have picked Chesler-Ortiz and Torano to place and show, considering the star-studded field that started. Olympic individual gold-medalist Rodrigo Pessoa of Brazil, Canadian legend Ian Millar, World Cup final winner Markus Fuchs of Switzerland, and British veteran Nick Skelton all vied for the win, among the cream of the U.S. riders.

But Jorge’s Round 1 whittled the field from 50 to the 15 designated to compete over Round 2. Pessoa, Fuchs and Millar all took themselves out of the running with rails. Just 12 jumped clean in Round 1, and would be joined in Round 2 by Daniel Deusser of Germany, who collected just 1 time fault, and the two fastest four-faulters from Round 1—Beezie Madden on Judgement and Ken Berkley on Carlos Boy.

Neither Madden nor Berkley jumped Round 2 clean. Jorge built a shorter course—just 12 efforts—but massive jumps. Deusser put the pressure on all of those who had first-round clears by finishing clean on Pristanna, to finish the two rounds with just the 1 time fault. He held on for a lucrative fifth place.

Big Futures
Chesler-Ortiz may have been dreaming of winning the class, but second certainly wasn’t a disappointment. “This is definitely my biggest result—I’m so proud of my horse and myself and my team,” she said.

She planned her WEF carefully with this class in mind, and Picolien Zeldenrust placed third in two of the $25,000 WEF Challenge Cup series classes, in weeks 4 and 7.

“My horse jumped amazingly all winter. I used her enough—I didn’t do so much that she’d be tired, but I wanted her to be ready for this week,” she said.

Chesler-Ortiz bought Picolien Zeldenrust (by Indoctro) three years ago. The lanky mare had been a broodmare and hadn’t shown much. “I think she made leaps and bounds getting to this level so fast. She gives you a really good feeling going into the ring,” said Chesler-Ortiz.

“She’s really careful and a real trier. She’s definitely very scopey. And through the years I’ve been riding her, she’s gotten really rideable. She gives me confidence going around the course, which I think is a really big plus,” she continued.

Chesler-Ortiz plans to compete in the selection trials for Canada’s Pan American Games team with Picolien Zeldenrust.

Torano has the same faith in Vancouver d’Auvrey, which is quite welcome since Torano took most of the fall last year off, pregnant with her first child. She gave birth to Natalia on Dec. 8, and was back in the saddle three weeks later. She started showing at WEF in late January.

With that in mind, Torano was semi-shocked with her big finish. “Basically, this circuit, I wanted to have respectable rounds and get back in the groove again. After my first few schools, I thought ‘I don’t know about this.’ It took a few schools to remember, having to think about where my leg is and where my hand is,” she said.

But she found it easy on Vancouver, a 9-year-old stallion. “There’s just something that I think we have together. I really feel comfortable on him,” she said.

“The closest thing I can compare it to is that you feel like you’re riding a rubber band. You get to the jump, and you feel that if you leg him a little bit, there’s turbo there. There’s an extra gear that a lot of horses don’t have,” she explained. “He just snaps off the ground and makes me feel like he can jump anything.”

Torano and her husband, Jimmy, bought Vancouver in the spring last year. Danielle showed him in the amateur divisions starting in April and then moved him up to 1.50-meter classes in the summer. But once she announced her pregnancy and stopped showing in June, Vancouver didn’t do much.

“He rested in the fall and we bred him a little bit, and he came out the first week here. He had to grow up a little bit fast with his experience,” she said.

The Grass Isn’t Greener
The Internationale Arena at the Palm Beach Polo & Equestrian Club—where the Wellington, Fla., portion of the Winter Equestrian Festival spends eight weeks—is known as one of the best grass fields to jump on. But this year the footing in the ring became a very contentious issue as it fell apart. By the last week of the circuit, there were only sparse islands of grass in a sea of sand. And the riders weren’t happy.

“I think that from week 1 it was terrible footing—worse than every other year,” said grand prix rider Lauren Hough.

Footing issues were obvious even to the spectators, with horses slipping and tripping on turns, and even falling, and riders going slow in the jump-offs.

“I don’t think that they maintained it at all throughout the year. It looked pretty in the beginning, but it got bad really fast. I went to go fast the other day, and I slipped on the straightaway. I think for the amount of money that we spend to be here and the cost of our horses, it’s ridiculous,” said Hough.

“I will not defend the footing—it was not good,” said Steve Stephens, course designer and Stadium Jumping Inc., competition manager. “But I worked my butt off trying to fix it. The riders saw that I was doing that, that I was trying. Obviously, the grass didn’t hold up for us.”

Stephens explained that the old-growth grass in the ring had developed a problem. “There was a slippery layer under the grass, which was technically ‘organic build-up.’ The field is about 19 years old, and over the years the organic material has gradually built up. When the grass is planted every year, the roots die and you get organic material forming—it’s a black, slippery substance under the grass,” he said.

By the third week of the circuit, it was obvious that they needed to take drastic measures to attempt to improve the footing. “We were desperate the night before the third grand prix, and we sanded the whole field. With a grass field, you have two choices—water or sand. You can’t do anything else. We added sand, and it helped us out for that grand prix,” said Stephens.

“But we were dealing with three layers—the sand we’d put on, the little bit of grass that was there, and then the black organic material under it all. They weren’t working together. We tried to preserve the grass, keeping the green in mind. So, with the next application, we put in green sand from the golf course, but it was almost too fine of a sand. It wasn’t coarse enough to solve our problem. The green sand was basically a failure.”

The night before the American Hunter Jumper Foundation Hunter Classic Spectacular on Feb. 24, Stephens and his crew aerated the grass and then sanded it. That didn’t solve the problem, however, and for the Idle Dice CSI-W on Feb. 25, the footing still wasn’t right.

“We tried to do everything we could without destroying the grass, but we got to the point where we were whipped,” admitted Stephens. “It just wouldn’t come around. We only have from the end of the horse show one day to the start of it the next to fix it—we didn’t have a week. We knew we couldn’t fix it completely—all we wanted to do was help it. Before the CN Nations Cup [on March 9], we did all we could to help it. Where it was really tearing up was in the four corners of the ring. We rotor-tilled the four corners up and mixed it all up and it started to hold a little bit better.

“It needs moisture to hold it together, and the Friday night before [the $399,541 CN Worldwide Florida Open], we had a torrential storm, and everything we had done out there kind of set. We couldn’t do that with our sprinklers,” he noted. “We irrigated, but we couldn’t put that much water down that hard. So, by Saturday afternoon, it was OK. It wasn’t good, it wasn’t even satisfactory, but it had improved thanks to Mother Nature.”

Despite all of his frustrations, Stephens doesn’t believe that the days of jumping on grass fields are over.

“But they shouldn’t be there for a competition that has almost 10,000 horses running over it—with 16 efforts in a course, that’s well over 150,000 take-offs and landings. It’s just one of those things when there’s too much traffic. I don’t care where you are, grass can’t hold up to that,” he said.