Israel’s Oded Shimoni Aiming to Compete in 3rd WEG
15 years ago StraightArrow Comments Off on Israel’s Oded Shimoni Aiming to Compete in 3rd WEG
WELLINGTON, Florida, Mar. 1–Oded Shimoni has his sights set on competing for Israel in his third World Equestrian Games, after being offered the ride on the 14-year-old Swedish warmblood gelding Granada.
Oded, 47, has entered the chestnut by Granit and owned by Sam Grunkorn of Bedford Hills, New York in this week’s Palm Beach Dressage Derby CDI-W and the Winter Equestrian Festival Classic CDI3* Mar. 18-21 with the aim of acquiring the two qualifying scores.
Oded was offered the ride late last year as a prospect for the Alltech FEI WEG in Kentucky at the end of September.
He competed in the 1998 WEG in Rome and again in 2002 in Jerez, Spain, and the European Championships in 2001 and 2003. He became the first Israeli to qualify for Olympic dressage but the Israeli Olympic Committee did not allow him to compete in the 2004 Games in Athens.
Oded is also the dressage coach for the U.S. Eventing high performance squad through the WEG. He holds training sessions at Stillpoint Farm in Wellington, Florida, where he is based, as is Robert Dover, the Canadian dressage coach, and U.S. Olympic and WEG medalist, Lisa Wilcox, and in Aiken, South Carolina.
The first major competition at which he will be the American coach will be the Rolex Kentucky Three Day, the only four-star event in the Western hemisphere, in April.
