Dressage-News

Aug. 13, 2024

By KENNETH J. BRADDICK

When Alice Tarjan graduated from law school she looked for a horse to compete at beginner levels without needing to qualify as her time was limited battling life-threatening cancer.

Two decades on from a clinical trial that saved her life, Alice has horses she has trained performing at top sport this year—10-year-old Jane that was ridden by her long time coach Marcus Orlob at the Paris Olympics and the five-year-old Orado, a stallion, that she will compete at the World Young Horse Championships at Ermelo, Netherlands next month. She competed her American-bred mare Serenade MF at last year’s World Cup Final in Omaha as well as on U.S. Nations Cup teams in Aachen, Germany and Rotterdam, Netherlands.

She has several more in her barn at Oldwick, New Jersey and in Florida for the winter-long Global Dressage Festival in Wellington, some of which are at or close to Grand Prix, acquired as youngsters by Alice scouring the Internet and through contacts built up over the years on both sides of the Atlantic.

Alice has created a special niche in America’s dressage world—applying money she has earned as a lawyer and businesswoman as well as other funds to become a successful trainer of numerous horses in a pipeline to top sport. Her emphasis is training.

Alice, who turns 45 years old this month, graduated from Seton Hall University’s law school in South Orange, New Jersey and just 35 miles/56km due east from where she is based with her husband Dennis Sargenti whom she worked with in their trucking and rigging business and in real estate.

“I was lucky,” she said of the diagnosis. “I’d gone to a clinical trial; they saved my life. And I haven’t relapsed, so, yeah, I got lucky.”

While undergoing treatment she wanted to get back into riding that she’d done “back yard pony” style since the fourth grade.

“The easiest way to ride and the cheapest is to ride three-year-old materiale because you don’t have to qualify,” she said, “you just need a trained horse. So I figured if I bought a foal and I waited three years, I could go ride at Devon,” a major show on Philadelphia’s Main Line. “So that’s what I did.”

At the same time she took the bar exams so she could practice law.

Over the years, she has developed a rare ability to search the Internet for horses—she estimates maybe a total of about 40—that fit the criteria for her training. She buys the. horses without traveling to see them.

Her first international Grand Prix horse was Elfenfeuer, an Oldenburg mare that she competed at Big Tour in 2015. Lars Petersen, the former Danish champion who has been a long-time resident of Florida, took over the ride the following year.

Sales of the horses Alice has trained to compete at Big Tour include Serenade and Donnatella M, an Oldenburg mare that she competed at Grand Prix as an 11-year-old in 2022 and sold later the same year.

Current competition horses aside from Jane and Orado include:

—Candescent, 14-year-old Hanoverian mare that she has shown at Grand Prix in the U.S. and Germany;

—JJ Glory Day, eight-year-old Danish Warmblood stallion that Marcus competed through CDI Small Tour in 2023;

—Harvest, a. Dutch stallion that was successful in Wellington’s Lövsta Future Challenge for developing Grand Prix horses as a nine-year-old in 2021.

—Summersby II, a nine-year-old Oldenburg mare that was ridden by Alice on Florida’s 2023 winter circuit to also win a Lövsta Future Challenge qualifier;

—Gjenganger, an eight-year-old home-bred mare that Alice rode to the U.S. championship as a four-year-old in 2020, and

—Maximus, a KWPN that was top scoring ridden by Marcus at the 2021 North American Stallion Sport Test as a four-year-old.

Why does Alice do what she does?

“I just love training the horses,” she replies. “That’s the motivation.”

Her method in buying young horses is straightforward that she followed from when she started her equestrian journey after graduation.

“I felt like every penny I have I should put into talent because I figure I can provide the training myself,” she said.

“So you want to put all your money into potential, right? Certainly back then, I would just buy foals because that’s where the potential is the best.

”If you buy a trained horse then you’re going to untrain it. The prices got astronomical. So, I always thought that I should put all my money into the potential. And then the training’s on me.”

She has a realistic view of horses, pointing to all different types in her barn. Some horses, she notes, are completely downhill, but move in an uphill manner, “so it doesn’t really matter.”

“Every single one of my horses, there’s no perfect horse,” she explains. “You’d be like, I want this piece from that horse and that piece from that horse and this piece from that horse.

“So that’s kind of what makes it fun and interesting is the person at your job to try to figure out how to bring the strength out of the horse and improve their weaknesses to a point where you can’t really tell what their strengths and weaknesses are from the outside, right?

And she has sold a lot of her horses along the way to help pay for the business.

Alice has received offers to buy Jane when competed by Marcus in Europe and at the Olympics.

A sale of Jane would not be life changing for Alice.

Marcus, she said, is having a great time with Jane and she wants him to “have some fun for a while.“

Most of Alice’s young horse competitions over the years have been at national championships, staged most recently in the Chicago area, a program she thinks has been the right direction for development of horses in the U.S.

Now, however, she may place more emphasis on competing her high performance horses in Europe.