As more riders and horses queue up, I see that the amateur riders are of all ages. I’m told that the more mature riders not necessarily more experienced, in that they could have taken the sport up at a later date. Manning tells me that the show grounds at HITS are one of the few places where amateurs can co-exist beside the professionals, and have the opportunity to ride and compete in such a beautiful setting.
The competition takes place in the multi-level ring, new to HITS this year and built into the hillside. From the rider’s point of view, as Manning explains, the ring affords more options in how the course can be designed. From the spectator’s view, it gives a greater perspective that goes further back into space. We get both the foreground and a distant view, which is very pleasing to the eye. Horse and rider are seen in the distance against the backdrop of a lushly wooded area, seemingly effortlessly sailing over hurdles.
After our guide returns to work, my friend and I are left to our own devices. We head for the snack bar to buy a bottle of water, amused as we watch a horse in line ahead of us help himself to a carrot on display, his young rider distracted buying her own bottle of water. There are a number of vendors selling merchandise here, some offering choices that strike me as curious, but then, this is a world with which I’m not familiar. The man selling saddles makes perfect sense to me, but I’m surprised to see options like the haberdasher selling expensive tailored jackets.
We head over to the main ring, the Grand Prix Arena, to see the big event of the day: the $50,000 Grand Prix. This is a jumper event, based on speed and agility. The course is festive-looking, each obstacle painted a different bright color, and festooned with floral arrangements. As we watch some riders walking the course beforehand, it’s clear that these horses will be jumping very high indeed.
When the event begins, 18 riders complete a course meant to take about 83 seconds from start to finish. In order to move on to the final round, a rider has to have one of the fastest times as well as a flawless ride. Points are taken away for every bar knocked down, and two “refusals,” where the horse pulls up short and refuses to jump, eliminates the rider. Some of the obstacles, called “oxers,” are wide, and have bars at multiple levels, making them more difficult to clear. Others have a narrower opening which the horse and rider have to be especially precise to navigate over.
As the competition proceeds, only one rider gets eliminated for getting two refusals. Eight riders score well enough in that first round to move on to the final, a shorter version of the same course calculated to last about 34 seconds. Even for someone like myself, not particularly attuned to sporting events in general, it was exciting to watch these gorgeous horses and highly skilled athletes perform what seemed to me to be impossibly high jumps. I got completely caught up in seeing where some riders made the sharp turn faster, and predicting which would be able to shave those fractions of seconds off their time.
My friend knows horses, and he explained some of the finer points of what was happening to me. Even without knowing anything about horses, I found it easy to follow the action and very entertaining.
The winner was Margie Engle, a U.S. Olympic-hopeful who, as the announcer informs us, is the top female rider in the country. On this day, she took home $15,000 as her share of the $50,000 prize for clearing the course on her horse Royce in 33.36 seconds. The time of the second place winner, Darragh Kenny, was just a bat of an eye slower, at 33.94, showing how close the competition can be.
Kristen Vale-Mosack, the office manager at HITS and another lifelong rider-competitor, offered a helpful analogy about the difference between the hunter and jumper competitions I’d seen. “The hunter competition could be seen as being similar to ice skating,” she says, “where obviously there’s strength and ability involved, but they’re also being judged on grace and style. Jumpers are more like downhill skiers: you want to be the fastest one, but there’s a course to follow and you can’t skip any of the gates, and how you look doing it doesn’t affect your score.” She tells me of another discipline that can be experienced at HITS, too, called equitation, which is judged solely on how the rider manipulates the horse.
I ask what type of horses make the best competitors. The shows used mostly to feature American-bred thoroughbreds, but now the horses are often warmbloods bred in Europe. “Their mindset is a little calmer,” Vale-Mosack says, “than the thoroughbreds, who can be a little high-strung.”
It depends, too, she continues, on what sort of jumping they’ll be doing and how often. “If you’re a part-time rider like me,” she says, “who has a job and can only ride a couple of times a week, you’re going to look for a different kind of horse than you would if you were looking to show in the Grand Prix at the highest level. In that case I’d want a horse with a little more energy and spark.”
For information, visit www.HitsShows.com or call 246-8833.
