New Stars On The Rise In FEI Young Riders World Cup Final

U.S. rider Laura Noyes makes her second trip to the prestigious competition and holds her own.

A Dutch rider, Diederik van Silfhout, took center stage at the FEI Young Riders World Cup Final, held during the Frankfurt CDI in Frankfurt, Germany, Dec. 17-21.  And after a disappointing trip to the competition in 2006, U.S. rider Laura Noyes returned to try her hand again, finishing third in the B final.

Van Silfhout started the weekend winning, topping the warm-up competition on his 11-year-old Dutch Warmblood mare, Ruby, and going on to win the individual Prix St. Georges test (70.85%) and the freestyle A final (74.95%).

He showed the Garibaldi daughter in good contact, with the nose always a bit ahead of the vertical, with active hindquarters in good self-carriage, and with very correctly performed movements.

A team gold medalist at the 2008 European Young Riders Championships (Portugal), van Silfhout manages a training barn with his father, trainer and Grand Prix rider Alex van Silfhout. Diederik’s sister, Jarissa, won team silver in the 2008 European Junior Championsips. Diederik plans to advance to showing at Grand Prix in 2009. In 2006, Noyes made the journey to Frankfurt from her home in Falmouth, Maine, for the Young Riders World Cup Final only to be left out of the competition when her horse, Syncro, came up lame upon their arrival.

Noyes decided to try again this year and returned with Syncro, traveling two weeks before the Final and staying with Klaus Balkenhol for some fine-tuning training. She also spent two days at Ann-Kathrin Linsenhoff’s farm; a patron of the FEI Young Riders World Cup Final, Linsenhoff invites all the participants to her Schafhof barn in Kronberg, Germany.

In the warm-up competition, Noyes and Syncro put in a solid test. The 15-year-old, bay, Trakehner gelding went with a lot of expression and elasticity, with good drive from behind and in general a good connection between the mouth and rider’s hand. But Syncro wasn’t comfortable in the impressive indoor ring.

Crossing the diagonal, he looked up at the screen hanging over X, which was transmitting video of the ride. This resulted in a loss of rhythm in the extended trot on the diagonal and not very round tempi canter changes. The canter half-pirouettes and the extended canter, in which Noyes risked a lot, were highlights of the test. The combination, which is trained by Georges Williams, finished with 63.73 percent in ninth place of the 12 competitors.