Dressage-News

By KENNETH J. BRADDICK

WELLINGTON, Florida, May 10, 2017–My Lady, a Danish Warmblood mare bought for fun to share between owner Janne Rumbough and Big Tour rider Mikala Münter Gundersen but went on to become the top ranked Danish combination in the world, has been retired from competition.

Now aged 17, My Lady is starting on what Janne and Mikala describe as “our next adventure”–to have foals and be weaned off the high maintenance program required for top sport so she can “go out with other horses and be a horse.”

My Lady and another Danish Warmblood mare, Mariett ridden by Olympian Lars Petersen, grew to dominate Florida at the birth of the Adequan Global Dressage Festival in Wellington, offering prize money previously unseen in dressage of a total of $700,000 in seven CDIs over winter.

Janne Rumbough, a Dane who became an American and still competes on the Florida circuit she helped start in the 1970s, originally bought My Lady (Michellino x Ritterstern) in Denmark in 2011 for her and Miakala to have “fun and to make beautiful dressage” together.

All that changed a year after the start of My Lady’s Big Tour career, as recalled by Janne.

“When she rode the horse in the Masters CDI5*,” Janne laughed of the Jan. 25, 2013 performance. “Then I had no place to ride that horse. She goes and wins the Grand Prix Special. And I thought, ‘Wow, wow! Where is she going.’ It’s unbelievable.

“In our wildest dreams who would ever have thought it would turn out the way it has .”

Over five years, Mikala, the mother of two children, started 93 times, winning 13 of them.

Winnings of more than $200,000, most of it earned in Wellington including at the top of the money standings for two successive years, enabled the pair to travel to Europe to compete in major events for Denmark.

Among them the 2014 World Games in Normandy, the World Cup Finals in Lyon, France in 2014 and Las Vegas in 2015, the 2015 European Championships in Aachen, Germany as well as four Danish Championships and five Nations Cups on both sides of the Atlantic.

By the fall of 2015, Mikala and My Lady were the top ranked Danish pair on the world rankings.

The pair helped Denmark qualify a team for the 2016 Olympic Games and though ranked high enough to make the squad of four for Rio de Janeiro were passed over.

The iconic Central Park Horse Show in New York wrapped up the duo’s trans-Atlantic show schedule in 2016 before returning home to Wellington and one last Global appearance.

“This is the beginning of something new,” Mikala said after the decision was made to no longer compete My Lady..

“We’ve been on this road trip. We’ve been everywhere; we’ve done all these amazing things.

“We can’t just end it so we want to breed her and let her be a mom now.

“That is going to be our next adventure.

“You can’t just put her away. She’s doing well and feeling good.

“This horse has been nourished and taken care of. All the stuff we do with these horses. You can’t just kick them out in the field. She wouldn’t understand that. So we’re slowly weaning her off. We hope that once she gets pregnant her hormones will change and she’ll start thinking in that direction. And then when she’s ready she’ll go out in the field with horses and be a horse.”

That retirement field will be with well known breeder Judy Yancey in Ocala, a friend of Janne’s for decades and close enough to Wellington for regular visits.

My Lady will be bred by frozen semen to Vitalis, the 10-year-old KWPN stallion owned by Paul Schockemöhle. The horse was previously owned by American Charlotte Jorst.

Last December, Vitalis was ridden by Isabel Freese of Norway to the Nürnberger Burg-Pokal title, the German championship for Prix St. Georges horses seven to nine years old.

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