Muente Makes The Most Of The Grand Prix Of Roanoke

Even if you couldn’t hear the announcer relaying his winning time to the crowd, you would have been able to tell that Pato Muente smoked the jump-off course to win the $50,000 Grand Prix of Roanoke. Muente’s exuberant celebration in the ring would have tipped you off.

“What the crowd wants is a good show,” the 32-year-old native Argentinean, now based in Middleburg, Va., said jubilantly following the win. “I am Argentinean, and we are a little bit of a show-off. I admit it.

“But seriously, these horses, they do so much for us. The best thing that we can do is to celebrate. And I think it is good for the sport,” Muente said while signing autographs for his fans after riding As Di Villagana to the top of the feature class of the Roanoke Horse Show, June 18-23 in Roanoke, Va.

Muente’s was one of only two clear rounds in the jump-off that brought five of the 13 entries back into the ring. As always in Roanoke, the size of the ring was a major factor for the riders as they mapped out their strategies.

“The course wasn’t humongous, but because of the size of the ring, the jumps come really fast,” Muente said.

With 11 fences, including a double and triple combination, the Salem Civic Center was a sea of rails. “If you don’t have a horse that focuses really well, you will have trouble. The horses don’t know which jump comes next,” Muente said.

Muente purchased As Di Villagana three years ago after the stallion had been imported from Europe. Since then, the pair has jumped 30 clear grand prix rounds both in this country and abroad.

“He’s allergic to wood,” Muente said with his impish grin, “and that’s good. But I believe the horse is 80 percent of the team, and the rider has to be the other 20 percent. In the first round, he saved me [after a huge effort over a triple bar jumping into a combination]. But quality horses have to save you sometimes. I saw one thing and he saw the other and made it happen. If he were an average horse, I would have had a rail down.”

Muente plans to show As Di Villagana for two weeks in Lake Placid, N.Y., after which the stallion will spend a month in quarantine in order to ship semen to Europe. As Di Villagana has 260 offspring registered in Europe, of which Muente owns four—all carbon copies of their sire.

Tracy Magness on Tarco Van Ter Moude made a concerted effort in the jump-off to best Muente’s time, but Tarco Van Ter Moude had his own ideas about the order in which the fences ought to be jumped and only a quick reaction from Magness kept the pair from jumping the wrong fence. The miscommunication cost them valuable time, and Magness finished clear, but more than a second slower than Muente.

“My horse tends to be really strong,” Magness explained. “He gets spooky and instead of backing off, he goes more forward. He does that more indoors than outside in a big ring. Tonight he was sighting in on the jumps saying ‘let me at them,’ but not at the right place.

“It caught me by surprise,” Magness admitted about her line, which was supposed to take her just to the left of one jump on the way to the next fence. “I was totally looking at where I thought we were going, which was supposed to be on the inside of the jump. Instead he thought we were supposed to jump it, which I thought for a second we were going to do! So I was just happy when we went around it.”