Lexington, Ky.—Aug. 16

Tori Colvin’s Saturday night didn’t start out very auspiciously. While warming up her first horse for the handy round of the Platinum Performance USHJA International Hunter Derby Championship, she took a tumble. She withdrew that horse, Southern Night, and whether she would ride Dicoblue PS, with whom she led the class after Friday’s classic round, was questionable for a while.

But the young professional showed just how gritty she could be by not only rallying to ride while injured, but by doing it in style to win her fourth derby finals.

“It was a bit of a fluke accident in the schooling ring, and I fell off, but everything is all right,” she said. “It was a little painful at first, but it’s OK now.”

Colvin is only the second rider to win the championship four times—Hunt Tosh was the first—but she’s the only one to have accomplished the feat on four different horses.

“I think it’s also quite incredible that [Tosh] did it four times, and now we can be teammates in that department,” she said. “But all the horses I have shown in this are amazing. And Dicoblue was especially special tonight; he did a lot of the work.”

“[He] took me around beautifully, and he’s an incredible horse,” she said. “I give it all to him.”

While Colvin and the 11-year-old Oldenburg gelding (Diarado’s Boy—Chactine, Chacco-Blue) had a comfortable 5-point lead after Friday’s classic round, Jennifer Hannan put the pressure on them with best score of the night (303) aboard Cellestino—a round that gave Hannan the top spot with just Colvin left to go. So Colvin did what she’s been known to do since she was a teenager: She raised the bar.

“Every time he walks in the ring, he wants to win, and he has rarely ever put a foot wrong,” she said of “Blue.” “I think the worst thing is maybe a rub. He’s a very talented horse and wants to only do good.”

Using advice from trainer Tom Wright on the track to take, Colvin piloted Blue to the top-scoring handy round of the night with a 309. Added to her classic score (299), her winning total of 608 gave her an 11-point winning margin over Hannan. As her scores were announced, the crowd gave her an extra loud cheer of recognition for her accomplishment under adversity.

Course designers Meghan Rawlins and Ken Krome set quite the track for the 39 pairs qualified for Saturday night’s handy round. The course included a bounce, a pair of logs set as an option (in addition to the height-option fences) and the “Churchill Downs pen,” which required riders to negotiate three elements, but in any direction they chose. While most riders negotiated part of the obstacle as an in-and-out, a couple of riders chose to slice the fences and jump them individually in a figure-eight pattern.

“It was difficult. I felt like I was back to my equitation days,” Colvin said. “There was a lot of unique options that you could have, which was super fun, and everybody could kind of take their own route. Evan Coluccio—I don’t know if anybody else did it—but he did that slice for the in-and-out, which I thought was very unique. I don’t know if I’d be brave enough to do that, but … [there were] a lot of options.”

For Hannan, who finished second on Cellestino—a horse that just started doing the international derbies this year—it was about picking the right option for the 10-year-old warmblood by Cornet Obolensky.

“I was lucky to go towards the end and be able to watch some other people’s tracks and what worked best,” Hannan said. “And certainly the goal of tonight was to do what was best for my horse and myself, so I think that worked out well.”

Though Cellestino is new to this kind of atmosphere, Hannan said he has matured across the season and was ready to go Saturday.

“When he felt ready, I tried a national derby, and then went out on the grass,” she said. “And every big event, he’s just walked right in. He walked right into Devon [Pennsylvania] and was excellent. He was second at Upperville [Virginia]. So it’s been a really nice sort of trajectory for him to lead up to here, for sure. This is his biggest class, and he’s never gone under lights, so I was really proud of him.”

In third place was two-time winner John French, who reunited with his old friend Milagro for derby finals. Though he has a long history with the 10-year-old warmblood of unrecorded breeding, “Johnny” had been on lease in California, so the last time French showed the gelding was at Devon in 2024. He wasn’t sure what to expect when they reunited, and he could certainly tell that Johnny had been focusing on his junior hunter job rather than the derbies when he first got back on him. But they rode in two high performance classes this week and won both.

“I didn’t really know what to expect, because he hadn’t been doing these kind of classes or jumping these kind of jumps for a while, but I knew he was good at night, and he really proved that it didn’t take long to get back in the swing of things,” he said.

French has decades of experience in top hunter classes and has ridden in international jumper classes, but even he was surprised by the course’s tests. Seeing how the track rode for others and then getting on course himself forced French to alter his plans for the Churchill Downs question.

“I had thought that I could jump the straw bales [at 8], and then go directly to that green jump [which was the middle section of the Churchill Downs question],” said French. “And then when I was on the course, I was like, ‘What were you thinking? You’re never going to be able to do that!’ So at the last minute, I was like, ‘All right, think of something else.’ So I just did what Evan did in slicing the jumps. And I thought, at least that looked, you know, a little bit handy. I’m not sure I could have done the other turn, so it worked out.”

Coming in fourth and taking the win in the Section B championship for Tier II riders was Michael Britt-Leon and Catch Touch This HS. Britt-Leon was celebrating his one-year anniversary with the 10-year-old Holsteiner (Cassall—Canturana), but it was only his second derby with him, as “Hammer’s” main job is in the amateur-owner hunter ring with Mark Dorfman. They sat 10^th after the classic round, so he knew he had some ground to make up to win Tier II and have a good finish in the overall championship.

“I was on top of Tier II with [my other horse] Prime Time, and then Brady [Mitchell] went in and one-upped me and did a great job on his horse, so I knew I had to bring it, because I really wanted to at least win that,” said Britt-Leon, who also finished sixth on Prime Time. “[I’m] ecstatic that I did; so proud of the horses and grateful to Mark and excited to be here.”

Results

Be sure you’re following along with the Chronicle on Facebook and Instagram @Chronofhorse. You can also read full analysis of hunter championship week in the Sept. 26 issue of The Chronicle of the Horse magazine.