PrintThis middle-aged mother from Northern California will be taking the ride of her life on her horse of a lifetime.
Kristi Nunnink’s default facial expression is a smile.
It doesn’t matter how hard she’s working, what level she’s riding or how the horse under her is performing—her mouth curls faintly upward, unforced.
It may just be a coincidence of facial structure, or it may be a product of years of habit. But either way, the expression fits her, because Nunnink may very well be the happiest rider at Rolex Kentucky. At 48, she’s heading to her first CCI**** with her horse of a lifetime.
“I think it’s going to be really incredible,” said Nunnink, Auburn, Calif. “I’ve been quite often over the years to watch, and I’ve always thought, ‘Oh, I want to be here.’ And now I’m going. I’m just so happy.”
For the past five years, since she got her Holsteiner mare R-Star (Riverman—Marisol) as a barely-broke 4-year-old, Nunnink has believed they’d eventually make it to Kentucky, but the journey has transformed her in ways she never expected.
Nunnink lives on an 8-acre farm in rural Northern California between Sacramento and Reno, Nev. In her younger days, she ran a large boarding facility and trained students full time, organized the American Valley Horse Trials for eight years with her husband, Randy, and competed up to the three-star level on the East Coast in 1990.
But life slowed a bit a few years ago. In 2004, Kristi had to euthanize her best horse, Stars And Stripes, after his diaphragm burst at a small combined test just a week before his first CIC***.
“It was just devastating to her,” said Erin Spohr, who’s been Kristi’s live-in student and adopted daughter of sorts for almost a decade. “That was the horse she loved. He was so sweet, and she bought him from England, and that was supposed to be her big-time horse. After that she always said over and over again that she’d never find another horse like him.”
But a young gray mare was about to enter Kristi’s life. From almost the moment she saw “Rosie,” who’d been bought by another rider in her barn at the time, Kristi knew she wanted her.
“We’d moved to the Auburn area to be closer family, and ‘Rosie’ just kind of fell into my lap,” Kristi said. “And then Mia Eriksson, whose family owned the barn I’d been at before, tragically died at [the 2006 Galway Downs CCI** (Calif.)], and it was kind of just a wake-up call—you’ve got to do what you want to do with your life. So I started to transition more over to the riding again, just seizing the moment.”
From Gardening Back To Galloping
When she re-devoted herself to upper-level competition, Kristi didn’t quite know how much of a whirlwind the next few years would really be. She moved Rosie up one level per year, hitting intermediate by the time the mare was 7.
“Then I realized I hadn’t done some of my homework well enough,” Kristi said. “She didn’t quite come back and do the technical stuff well enough, and it became a lot more important. We had some control issues to deal with, and we ended up tipping over in her first two-star.”
Neither horse nor rider was seriously injured, but for the remainder of 2008, Kristi focused much more on her riding and worked to establish a safer, more balanced gallop on cross-country.
