Dressage-News

By KENNETH J. BRADDICK

WAYNE, Illinois, July 24–Caroline Roffman, just out of Young Riders, won the U.S. five-year-old championships on Bon Chance Saturday, her first national championship and on a horse she trained herself.

Caroline, 21, of Wellington, Florida, and the Belissimo M stallion, were reserve champions in the four-year-old division in 2009, but dominated the five-year-old division this year by winning both the preliminary test with a score of 8.34 and the championship class with a score of 8.58 for a final result of 8.484.

Willy Arts of Hanford, California, who won the four-year-old championship, was second on the Jazz gelding Adje with a final score of 8.116 while Karen Monks-Reilly, of Unionville, Pennsylvania, and Aesthete, who won last year’s four-year-old title, was third on 8.112.

Caroline acquired Bon Chance, who came with the nickname “Moto,” two years ago. The horse came from the Warrenton, Virginia-based Marefield Meadows but was out of a breeding in Germany so does not qualify as an American-bred horse.

“What’s really exciting about him is that this is only his third show this year,” Caroline told dressage-news.com.

“He just knows how to do this. He already knows 90 per cent of the six-year-old test.”

“Moto,” she said, has a “beautiful talent” for collection and she believes that he will get better each year through to Grand Prix.

But he has a personality–“a redhead with a white eye,” is the way Caroline describes it.

She hopes next year to qualify him for the World Young Horse Dressage Championships in Verden, Germany. Caroline, who placed second behind Kassandra Barteau to compete at the World Young Rider Championships in 2009, her last year at Young Riders, is now focused on competing Bulgari, her Young Horse partner, at the U.S. Intermediaire Championships in Gladstone, New Jersey next month. She will be the youngest competitor in the I-1 championship, possibly the youngest ever.

Caroline has started teaching a few adult amateurs–“I love teaching”–and sees a career for herself in horses.

One of her hopes is that the United States will receive an invitation to the Under-25 team competition that was launched with squads from six European nations at the World Equestrian Festival CHIO in Aachen, Germany, this year. If that happens, she said, she is confident that some of the top American riders will join her in raising funds to cover transportation expenses.

Footnote: Dozens of horse stalls at the Lamplight Equestrian Center where the championships are being held were flooded in heavy downpours overnight. In a rare case of generosity but characteristic of the people in the Midwest of the United States, Lloyd Landkamer’s DressageShowInfo.com that is managing the event organized 150 bags of shavings and crews of workers before dawn Saturday to clean out the stalls and replace all the shavings. Grooms and riders who arrived at the show grounds expecting to have to deal with flooded stalls were greeted by horses in dry stalls with deep, fresh footing. No extra charge, all part of the service!

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