November 2021 Issue

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For permission please call (717) 509-9800 or email steph@eastcoastequestrian.net EAST COAST EQUESTRIAN November 2021 Page 31 Young American Endurance Team Finishes Fifth in the Netherlands She was never left alone except on the stable property. “I was in online school, so my parents said as long as I got my work done, I could stay.” She stayed for three months, then went back the following year for five months. “It’s crazy how many horses they had, and how many were really talented,” she says. In 2020 as the world con- fronted a pandemic, Shampoe’s odyssey in Dubai ended. “With COVID, I ended up coming home early from Dubai, and we were waiting to hear if there were go- ing to be any races last year,” she says. “I worked for a few people in October and then I decided to stay in the US and work for Val.” Val is Valerie Kanavy, the 1994 and 1998 World Endurance gold medalist and 1996 silver medal- ist. Kanavy’s Gold Medal Farms in Fort Valley, VA is at the intersection of the Venn Diagram where Shampoe, Dugan and Wert came together in the months leading up to the FEI competition in The Netherlands. Kanavy had been working with the three teammates, on trails, in the ring, in the mountains—get- ting them ready for The Nether- lands. The Team Comes Together “Charly came here and brought her horse here for two or three months,” Shampoe says. “We stayed in the same house and rode together every single day and spent a lot of time get- ting to know each other.” Wert, the youngest of the trio, arrived later. “Meghan is only 14, so she couldn’t spend as much time as Charly,” Shampoe says. “But we spent a lot of long hours togeth- er.” Endurance is in Dugan’s DNA. Her mother, Sally Jellison, has been competing in Endurance for years. Dugan started com- peting in Endurance about three years ago, and has ridden along- side her mother in numerous rac- es, from 25-mile races in Florida, to the Big Horn 100 in the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming. Wert has been riding for six years and got hooked on Endurance after she entered a competitive trail ride sponsored by 4-H. “There is a competitive trail ride every year and I just had my horse for a cou- ple of months,” Wert says, “and my instructor thought it would be good for us to try. I tried it. I loved it. My horse loved it.” And so it goes. Surprises and Success in Ermelo The young equestrians arrived in Ermelo in The Nether- lands eager for the competition. It was a big stage, but they focused on their horses right from the start. “It was really exhilarating,” Dugan says. “I was really happy when we landed, and we went to the stables to see my horse.” Besides being a major change of scenery for the riders and their horses, the weather was a lot cooler, with temperatures in the low 60’s. “The horses were great,” Wert says. “They handled the trip well. It was fun riding them in a place so different from home.” Wert says that they prac- ticed a lot before the competition started. “Every day leading up to the competition we rode in the morning for one to two hours. We did a day where we cantered, and some days we would find a nice big open stretch and do lateral work.” All the days of practice and nerves led up to the start of the race. “The mass start was claus- trophobic,” Wert says. “There were a lot of people and a lot of horses. That many horses togeth- er can get pretty squished.” “I was nervous at the start because it was a mass start with 75 plus horses,” Dugan says. “But the terrain was identical to what we have in Florida. That was a huge surprise to me.” The terrain in Ermelo sur- prised Shampoe, too. “The terrain was supposed to be flat and fast and not a lot of sand. It turned out that most of the trails were good, but we had to go onto a military base,” she says. The trails at the military base were deep sand. “Almost every loop we had to go through there once or twice. It was not what we expected so we had to slow down and think about what we were doing.” She said that during their training in Virginia, the team worked mostly on good trails. “We got there 10 days early and rode the horses ev- ery day,” she says. “We took the horses to the venue a couple of days before the competition, and the training track was deep sand.” On race day, she said the team all started out together. “We got to a pretty deep sand section and Meghan pulled off to slow down. It was hard to slow our horses down,” she says. But critical for their safety. Dugan says that she knew she could have ridden faster, but it was a risk she wasn’t willing to take. “There’s nothing I could do differently, looking back,” she says. “But I did the best I could and rode my horse as well as I could.” She says it was his first championship, so “he doesn’t have as much of a base as the other horses out there.” In the end, Shampoe finished 14th overall on Promissin Gold in 6:23:44. Dugan was 32nd on Southern Justice in 7:27:40, and Wert was 34th on Dude Free Gold in 8:01:50. Reflecting on an Extraordinary Adventure International competition on this scale can be a dazzling experience. Dugan says the open- ing ceremony was breathtaking. Her mother says that it was an amazing show. “They had a huge indoor ring,” she says, “and they had drivers with Friesian pairs pulling buggies. Everyone was wearing traditional Dutch cloth- ing.” Each team’s Chef d’Equipe was brought into the ring on one of the buggies and dropped off in front of their cheering teams. “As the Chefs were brought in, the teams were presented,” she says. “Our team was one of the smallest there, so we decided we were going to be the loudest at cheering. We just exploded in cheers.” Dugan says she met so many competitors from other countries, young riders just like her who are horse crazy. They exchanged hats and shirts and stories and vowed to get together again to ride and bridge the differences in cultures and languages. She has been accepted to the National Honor Society, and in the months ahead she’s going to focus on school and her other activities, as well as achieving elite status. In her junior year in high school, Dugan is already thinking about college. “I’ve had a crazy Idea for the last several years, of going to a college in Scotland, Glasgow Caledonian University,” she says. “They do events and they also have a really nice field hockey club.” Wert is in ninth grade and has lots of competition lined up in the near future. She says that most of her fellow students don’t under- stand her sport, “because it’s not a sport that’s well known,” she says. “I’m sure a lot of them don’t even know what it is. My close friends do take an interest in it, though.” As for the future, Wert has plans. “When I grow up,” she says, “I want to be an English professor, or something that involves English,” she says. Shampoe says that she has a lot of races in her future, along with her work with Kanavy at Gold Medal Farms. She says she has been hiking a lot, getting in shape for some Ride and Tie competitions in Virginia. Ac- cording to that sport’s governing body, “Ride and Tie is a fun and challenging sport combining running, riding, endurance and strategy. Teams consist of two runners and one horse who com- plete a 20-100 mile trail course by ‘leapfrogging’ one another. Partners do this for the entire distance and each team learns to maximize the different members’ strengths and weaknesses to their advantage.” The perfect way for endurance racers to relax. These three young women, each following her own path to the future, exemplify how athletic competition amplifies the qualities the world values. These young women are taking different paths, with one thing in common: horses. (Continued from page 26) Learn more at horseworldexpo.com Horse World Expo returns March 3-6, 2022! Farm Show Complex, Harrisburg, PA