Sabine Schut-Kery Rides Sanceo in 1st Senior Grand Prix, Winning National Class at Temecula, California
7 years ago StraightArrow Comments Off on Sabine Schut-Kery Rides Sanceo in 1st Senior Grand Prix, Winning National Class at Temecula, California
By KENNETH J. BRADDICK
TEMECULA, California, Jan. 5, 2018–Sabine Schut-Kery rode Sanceo, her 2015 Pan American Games team gold medal mount, to win their the first competition Grand Prix Friday at the Adequan West Coast Dressage Festival.
Sabine and the 12-year-old Hanoverian stallion scored 70.326 per cent in the national level class that was the first competition at home in California since training and competing in Germany last year.
Sabine of Thousand Oaks, California plans to ride in the first Big Tour CDI at the World Cup event in Del Mar in two weeks and stay for the other two West Coast Dressage Festival events before heading to Wellington, Florida for the Adequan Global Dressage Festival.
The last time the pair were in the international arena was on U.S. Pan Am team when the duo rode at small tour in squads of mixed levels at the championships. In 2016, Sanceo was approved as a Hanoverian stallion.
Then a training grant enabled her to take Sanceo to train in Germany with Jan Nivelle, an experience she found beneficial. By the end of the year, the pair had competed at Intermediate II and the small Grand Prix, both national classes, and did not include the zig zag that’s a requirement in the senior Grand Prix.
“I was very happy with the ride even though we had never ridden through the test in a competition before,” she said afterward. “He is a cool horse and quite reliable. But in the end he is a stallion.”
Sabine has had Sanceo for nine years and competed the stallion when he was six years old at the 2012 World Young Horse Championships in Verden, Germany.
The owners are Alice Womble-Heitmann and Dr. Mike Heitmann, of the Houston area in Texas.
“I know him better than my husband,” she joked. “He’s a good guy.”
“The first thing I have to say about him is he is honest and kind, truly honest in his work and tries hard. He is definitely intelligent and obviously talented.”
However, Sabine prefers to let the results speak for themselves and is reluctant to declare her goals, or as she puts it, “work hard and be quiet.”
Marques, a black P.R.E. stallion that she competed at the 2016 Del Mar World Cup placing second in the Grand Prix Freestyle to Steffen Peters and Legolas, did not go to Germany with her so she is preparing the horse to return to the competition arena.
She also bought a four-year-old mare named Joy while in Europe and is looking forward to the journey to develop the horse as far as she will go.
