As a household name in elite dressage competitions, Anna Buffini usually challenges herself by riding canter pirouettes and piaffe/passage transitions in front of international judges. 

But for one ride last month, the Grand Prix competitor traded her shadbelly for a safety vest at Boyd and Silva Martin’s inaugural eventing training camp at Windurra USA in Cochranville, Pennsylvania, when she tried her hand at cross-country for the first time. 

The Martins invited Buffini to help coach eventing athletes of all levels at the camp, and while she was there, she got the opportunity to try eventing for herself. In a video that has since gained over 6,000 likes on Instagram, Buffini tackled a mini course aboard Hudson T, a 17-year-old Percheron-Thoroughbred gelding owned by Natalie and Mike Smith. Buffini’s excitement was palpable—“You guys get to do this all the time?” Buffini asked the clinic auditors at one point—and the experience had an impact on her. 

“I mean, honestly, it made me question my whole life,” she said. “I didn’t know what I was doing when I started riding horses. I just knew I had to be around them. I happened to ride dressage, partly because it was very similar to gymnastics, which is what I did before. So, dressage was naturally what I clicked with. But if I started with eventing, I honestly might be doing that now.

“Like I said in the video, cross-country is one of the most fun things I’ve ever done on horseback,” she continued. “Of course, I know the higher up you go with anything, it gets a little bit less fun, and it becomes more intense and high stakes. But oh my gosh, I totally understand why eventers do what they do. The whole Windurra staff came to watch and cheer me on. I’m not joking, it was one of the most fun rides of my entire life.” 

Buffini, who uses the same brand management agency as the Martins, Incanto Sports, was invited to the weeklong camp as guest dressage instructor to teach alongside the Martins and Olympic show jumper Peter Wylde. Along with lessons, the participants got unmounted educational sessions covering nutrition, physiotherapy, fitness and veterinary medicine. 

“I couldn’t have said yes faster,” Buffini said. “I was so honored to be asked. I just cleared my entire schedule, everything I had planned that week, and I flew out to Pennsylvania.” 

Prior to the clinic, Buffini had minimal jumping experience, with fewer than five jumping lessons under her belt. 

“It’s not like I never jumped before, but I mean, jumping a few times doesn’t exactly get you ready for Boyd Martin’s cross-country course,” she said. 

Getting out on cross-country herself allowed her to practice what she preached to students over the week in dressage lessons. 

“I told people in my dressage lessons, if you can be a good dressage rider, you will be a good rider period,” she said. “Because it’s all about having control and harmony with the horse, and being able to move the horse up, bring the horse back, turn the horse more, turn the horse less, et cetera. If you want to be a good rider at anything, get better at dressage.”  

Having a willingness to try new things isn’t just fun, she said, it’s helpful even for athletes that focus primarily on one discipline. 

“I encourage everybody to do it, to do other disciplines, to go out and try something like reining or barrel racing or jumping or cross-country,” Buffini said. “It’s so good. We say that keeping the training varied is so good for the horse’s brain, but it’s so good for the people’s brains, too.”

Mental health has been a priority for Buffini as of late. After being shortlisted for this year’s Olympic Games with her 14-year-old Danish Warmblood mare Fiontini (Fassbinder—Rapitala), the California athlete did not make the Paris team. Learning to overcome the intense disappointment that comes along with high performance sport has been a journey for Buffini. 

“I definitely am still heartbroken, for sure, and training out of a place of heartbreak has been more challenging than I realized,” she said. “Setting new goals has been slower than I anticipated, because it’s hard to get your hopes up for something again and work towards something for it to be crushed. That fear is in the back of my head now more than ever.” 

While she missed out this year, Buffini hopes that she and “Fio,” a phenomenon of a mare who won the gold three consecutive years at the Longines FEI/WBFSH Dressage World Breeding Championship for Young Horses with Spain’s Severo Jurado Lopez before going on to a Grand Prix career under him, Andreas Helgstrand, Patrik Kittel and now Buffini, will be able to make another Olympic bid in four years, when the Games will be hosted by her home state. 

“It took years and years to be able to acquire a horse like her, and I will never be able to get another horse like her,” Buffini said candidly. “She was kind of our once-in-a-lifetime shot. I’m praying that she can make it to Los Angeles, because she will be 18. 

“But honestly, she’s so healthy. She’s on fire right now,” she added. “If anyone’s going to go to the Olympics at 18, she will.”

In the meantime, competitions including next year’s FEI World Cup Finals, to be held in April in Basel, Switzerland, and the 2026 FEI World Championships in Aachen, Germany, are on Buffini’s mind as she thinks about her future with Fio. But she isn’t quite sure what will be their next step. 

“What I do know is that I get to chase my dream with my best friend, and that is really what I’ve been pouring myself into,” she said. 

And, she added, she appreciates the career that allows her to spend her life with these animals.

“I just love horses,” she said. “I love doing anything with them. Even if something crazy happened—all the riding was taken away, and I had to clean stalls for the rest of my life—as long as I’m around a horse, it would be a blessing.”