Most grand prix riders would give their eye teeth to have a horse good enough to jump onto the short list for the World Equestrian Games team. Margie Engle not only has two on that list, but they also accomplished the remarkable feat of finishing one-two in the WEG selection trials, a grueling five-round affair held over four days, March 21-25 in Wellington, Fla.

“She’s in the catbird’s seat, in a very enviable position,” U.S. Chef d’Equipe George Morris said of Engle’s accomplishment.

Engle rode Quervo Gold to the top of the list, with just 11 total faults over the five rounds, and Hidden Creek’s Wapino to second, with 17.

Engle’s performance assured her of two spots in the 10-member roster of the WEG short list. Morris and the WEG selection panel–Lisa Jacquin, Eric Hasbrouck, and Michael Endicott–split the short list’s horse-and-rider combinations into two teams of five, which will compete in Europe this summer under their careful eyes. After the conclusion of the Samsung Super League events they’ll contest, Morris and the selectors will name the final five-member team for the WEG, to be held Aug. 20-Sept. 3 in Aachen, Germany.

Before the trials began, 2004 Olympic gold-medal teammates McLain Ward on Sapphire and Beezie Madden on Authentic were named to the short list subjectively and didn’t have to contest the five rounds. Accord-ing to the selection procedures, the six top-placed horses from the trials automatically made the list. So third-placed Laura Kraut on Miss Independent, fourth-placed Lauren Hough on Casadora, fifth-placed Candice King on Tarco, and sixth-placed Christine McCrea on Promised Land joined Engle’s mounts.

Then the selectors had two more subjective choices. They chose to fill those with Jeffery Welles, on Armani, who placed ninth, and Molly Ashe and Neuville, who finished in seventh.

Then, Morris and the selectors divided that list into two teams to send to the first five Samsung Super League events in May and June. (See sidebar for Morris’ evaluation of the selection process.)

Quervo Gold Shines Through
Quervo Gold might have surprised many with his relentlessly consistent performances–having just two rails and 3.0 time faults over the five rounds. But Engle wasn’t surprised at all.

“I’ve always felt like the horse has a lot of scope. When you’re sitting on him, you feel like you could canter down to a house,” she said.

“Whenever they have a huge combination, it’s a nice feeling to know that I can just hand-canter down to it and not have to press him hard to get out. I used to have a little problem getting him back after the fence, but he’s getting much more rideable. When you’re jumping him, you never feel like you’re at the bottom of his scope. He’s jumped around a few World Cup-qualifying classes, so he’s jumped around some big tracks. And he’s probably one of the best water jumpers I’ve ever sat on.”

“Quervo” started off the trials with just 1 time fault in Round 1 and then jumped clean in Round 2. Round 3, over the same course as Round 2, brought a light rub and a rail for the flashy chestnut, while his Round 4 score was marred by just a time fault. In the final round, Engle shaved a turn to a vertical and he caught the top rail, and she collected a time fault.

Engle has ridden Quervo for the past year, but she’s competed him lightly because of the size of her string. A 13-year-old son of 1996 Olympic individual gold medalist Jus de Pommes, Quervo won the $50,000 HITS Culpeper Grand Prix (Va.) and the $25,000 Lexington Classic (Ky.) last summer. And just before the trials, Hidden Creek Farm joined Wyndhurst Stable as co-owners of Quervo.

Although Quervo won the trials, Engle and the selectors chose to put him on the B Team for the European tours, since Engle also won the East Coast League of the FEI World Cup standings and will take him–along with Hidden Creek’s Alibi–to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for the FEI World Cup Final on April 27-30.

And that puts Hidden Creek’s Wapino on the A team for Europe.

“He’s felt like he’s gotten more and more relaxed in the ring, and he’s gotten better each day,” Engle said. “He’s had a light winter. We were planning for the trials. I didn’t do him at all indoors, because he’s kind of funny about small schooling areas. He’s very panicky about horses coming at him.”

Wapino, an 11-year-old, Westphalian gelding, started off with 5 faults in Round 1 but then had just one rail and a clean go in Rounds 2 and 3. Then his four-fault rounds over the last two courses kept him second behind Quervo.

“Wapino felt fantastic the first three days, but I think today the ground was getting to him a little bit,” said Engle on the last day, when the horses jumped two tough tracks back-to-back.

“He felt a little bit stingy in his feet today in the second round. He felt great in the schooling area, but then on course, he kind of hung back at the second fence a little bit more than he usually does. He was trying to jump high, but he was a little bit cautious about the landing. Quervo didn’t feel that way at all.”


Moving Up And Down
Lauren Hough’s Casadora also felt the effects of jumping multiple days on the sand-based grass footing at the Palm Beach Polo Equestrian Club.

“It wasn’t as good a day today,” Hough said after Rounds 4 and 5, where Casadora had nine-fault trips in each.

“My horse felt quite footsore today. I think she jumped that way because of it. The feeling I had in the schooling area compared to what I had in the ring was quite different. She’s a flat-footed horse. For as well as she performed the first three days, I didn’t really feel like I was riding the same horse today,” said Hough.

“She still gave a good effort. I don’t think she could have jumped the triple combination any better. That’s the way these things go,” she added.

Until those final two rounds, Hough and Casadora had been tied for the lead with Engle and Quervo. The results were all the more remarkable considering that five days before the trials started, Hough wasn’t sure Casadora would even be able to compete. The chestnut mare was running a fever of 105.4 degrees from a viral infection. Aggressive round-the-clock treatment brought Casadora, a 10-year-old, Dutch Warmblood mare, back to form quickly.

“It was very touch and go if we’d get to jump, but her last three blood-work tests came back clear, so it seemed like we were out of the woods. I was the most nervous for the first round, to see how she’d react after having been sick for a few days. But she felt like her old self,” Hough said.

Casadora’s two nine-fault scores in Rounds 4 and 5 dropped Hough to fourth overall and left the door open for Kraut and Miss Independent to move up into third. Five- and one-fault trips on the last day accomplished that neatly, following up a great clear round over Round 3 two days before.

“I got off to kind of a rocky start, but I thought it was all better today,” Kraut said. “The first day, I thought I had a cheap 4 faults. She jumped clear all the way to the second-to-last fence and then just touched it. I didn’t even think it had come down. [In Round 2], she was fantastic, and I overrode the triple. I blame myself. [But in Round 3], I sat still and didn’t get in her way, and she figured it out all on her own,” Kraut said.

“I’ve spent the entire winter gearing her for this. I hardly showed her. She’s a reliable horse,” Kraut said of Miss Independent, a 9-year-old Dutch Warmblood.

“She’s not spooky–she walks into any venue in the world and is confident. I felt good about letting her have the down time. What’s nice about this horse is that she conserves her energy. She’s a really lazy horse until she arrives at the ring, and then she’s full of energy and blood.”

Big Opportunities
King and McCrea accomplished the two biggest moves up the ladder. King and Tarco got off to a rough start, collecting 15 faults in Round 1, run as a speed round. But they rebounded, adding just two rails and a time fault over the next four rounds to finish with a 24-fault total.

“I knew that it would just depend on how everybody who went ahead of me performed. Going into [the last day], I knew my horse has the scope and ability to do it. He’s a little bit young and inexperienced, so my goal all fall and Florida was to make the B team, so I’m very happy with the results,” King said.

King found Tarco, a Belgian Warmblood by Darco, five years ago. He’s a product of Belgian rider Ludo Phillipaerts’ breeding program.

“I’ve had really nice owners [Joan Kalman] who’ve supported him through the highs and the lows. He’s 10 now, and he’s just started to come into his own,” King said. “This is a real endurance test. Leopoldo Palacios’ courses asked a lot of great questions, and my horse came out of it a much better horse for the experience.”

For McCrea, clean and four-fault rounds over Rounds 4 and 5 vaulted her into sixth place and onto the B team.

“I kept accumulating little faults and mistakes the first few days, and I was a little disappointed and kind of down about it,” McCrea said.

“I decided to keep going and just ride the horse. Honest to god, the jumps today were big enough that it felt like he had to try and pay attention the whole time,” she added. “He’s kind of a funny horse–when the jumps are low, it’s too easy for him, and he doesn’t focus. He plays and bucks and does stupid things. Today he was totally into it, and he felt like he was having fun. I’m just absolutely ecstatic.”

Nothing To Prove
Notably absent from the WEG selection trials was Hidden Creek’s Perin, Margie Engle’s stalwart international mount. Her partner in the 2000 Sydney Olympics and the 2003 Pan Am Games, Perin has vast international experience.

But when the WEG selection panel couldn’t grant Engle a wild-card spot or a guarantee that Perin could jump his way onto a subjectively chosen spot on the WEG team without jumping all five rounds, she decided to leave him at home.

“Perin has done a lot of trials–probably as many as Perry Mason,” Engle quipped. “To put him through these five rounds over five days I thought was a lot for him. At this stage of the game, it’s not fair to ask him to do all those trials. He has nothing to prove to us, and I think in six years, he’s done Nations Cups all over the world–in the Olympics, at Spruce Meadows, the Pan Am Games–and I can’t remember him ever being the drop score.”

Engle credited Mike Polaski, the man behind Hidden Creek Farm, with accepting the decision to sit out the trials with Perin. “Mike’s been really good about doing what was best for Perin, and I’m glad he stood behind me,” she said.

“He put the horse’s welfare first, and he’s a businessman first, not a horseman, so for him to do that was huge. I think as an owner, it took a lot of strength to do that, and I really appreciate that he was brave enough to do that. I’m really happy, too, that the other horses [his Hidden Creek’s Wapino, and Quervo Gold, whom he owns half of] rewarded him for it too. He’s been through the ups and downs with me, and he’s stood behind me when I was hurt during the Olympic trials. He’s been very loyal, and he should be commended for that.”

George Morris: “A Very Good Experience From Time To Time”
The riders who contributed to the U.S. team’s historic win in the Samsung Super League series last summer heaped praise upon Chef d’Equipe George Morris’ leadership and guidance. Following the WEG selection trials, he now has 10 horse-and-rider combinations to prepare to defend that Super League title and from which to form a strong WEG team.

Team A–McLain Ward/Sapphire, Beezie Madden/Authentic, Margie Engle/Hidden Creek’s Wapino, Lauren Hough/Casadora and Jeffery Welles/Armani–will compete at the CSIOs at La Baule (France) and Aachen (Germany). Team B–Engle/Quervo Gold, Laura Kraut/ Miss Independent, Molly Ashe/Neuville, Christine McCrea/Promised Land and Candice King/Tarco–will show at the CSIOs Rome (Italy), Lucerne (Switzerland) and Rotterdam (the Netherlands).

Morris was pleased with the outcome of the trials. And even though an increased element of subjectivity has been introduced into the selection process, he still believes that the trials are an essential element. “This was a very good exercise for all our horses and riders, even the best of them. It’s a very good experience to do from time to time,” he said.

“The Europeans are used to showing in several big classes at a horse show. They’re used to doing Nations Cups and then having to produce grand prix results a few days later. Last summer, I was rather disappointed in our grand prix results. We had great performances in the Nations Cups, but then the horses and riders sagged in the grand prix at the end of the week. As good as our Nations Cup results were, our grand prix results certainly could have been better.

“At any championships, you have to perform over many days, and the trials do well at replicating this. It was a pressure cooker of a week, but that’s the secret of the German successes. They’re constantly under the gun.”

Morris, together with the selection panel of Lisa Jacquin, Eric Hasbrouck and Michael Endicott, exercised the subjective aspect of the selections. “I didn’t sit with our selectors to watch the rounds. I sat separately, and they came up with a list, and I came up with a list. At the end of each day, I would sit down with them, and we’d discuss. We were totally in sync,” he said.

Jeffery Welles came into the trials having made a strong impression on Morris on last year’s Super League tour, where he clinched the U.S. team’s second place at the Super League Final with a double-clear. “He was one of the big reasons we won the Super League series,” Morris said.

But the trials didn’t go quite as well. Armani made a few uncharacteristic mistakes, and Welles finished in ninth with 27 faults. “It wasn’t that the horse was sloppy, or lacked scope. In each round, he had fluky faults.

None of the faults had anything to do with the horse’s jumping–the horse was jumping magnificently. After last year’s tour, you just can’t envision going to Aachen this year without him,” Morris said.

So Morris and the selectors named Welles to the A team, the five riders most likely to be tapped for the WEG team, although the selection process will be very fluid, and they also have the option to name horses and riders from the B team.

“That was our big subjective move; everyone else–other than Beezie and McLain–was in the exact order of their score. This is the type of thing that you have to be able to do. You have to have that flexibility,” Morris said.

That flexibility again came into play when they–in consultation with Hough and Kraut–named Hough and Casadora to the A team and Kraut to the B team with Miss Independent, even though Kraut placed above Hough.

“Because Laura wanted to take Anthem to the World Cup Final [on April 26-20 in Malaysia], she preferred to do the Team B tour. I’ve seen Miss Independent at Aachen, and she doesn’t back off any fence there. Casadora and Lauren haven’t been to Aachen, and I wanted to see them at Aachen. I was happy, and the selectors were happy, and Laura and Lauren were happy, to flip-flop them,” Morris explained.

“I think the tours shook out very well. I’m very excited for Molly Ashe. [Neuville] is a relatively new horse for Molly, and the second tour is the perfect place for them,” he continued. “Christine Mc-Crea was excellent in Europe last year, and her horse jumped just beautifully. Candice’s horse got better and better during the trials, and that’s the spot she should be on, on the second team, because he’s greener.”

One glaring aspect of the trials starting list was that every one of the horse-and rider combinations had been competing in Wellington, Fla., all winter. Not one West Coast rider flew in. Morris put the onus on them for not making the team.

“I think the West Coast riders need to upgrade themselves. They have the venues, they have the owners, they have the young talent. They have to jump-start themselves,” he said.

“When we took the trials out to California [in 2000, 2002 and 2004], and they were superbly run by Robert Ridland and R.J. Brandes at the Oaks, I thought that would jump-start the West Coast, but it did practically the contrary. I was very disappointed that we didn’t have a West Coast starter, but that’s their responsibility.”

And while European-based Peter Wylde, the individual bronze medalist at the 2002 WEG and a member of the 2004 Olympic team, had made it known that he was interested in one of the subjectively chosen slots, the selectors bypassed him.

“[Wylde’s 2004 Olympic mount] Fein Cera doesn’t have a good recent record, and he just doesn’t have the credentials with his young horses,” Morris explained.

A Course Design Maestro
While the selection trials for the last three major international championships (2000 Olympics, 2002 WEG, and 2004 Olympics) have been held in California, this year they returned to the East Coast, held on the grass field at the Palm Beach Polo Equestrian Club in Wellington, Fla., just one week after the conclusion of the seven-week Winter Equestrian Festival.

“[U.S. Chef d’Equipe] George Morris felt very strongly about the timing of the trials, because of the World Cup Finals [April 25-30], and then the beginning of the first tour the week after that. This was the only weekend we could do the trials,” said Sally Ike, USEF director of show jumping.

And while many doubted that the grass field–battered by the weeks of WEF competition–could provide a viable surface for the trials, “The week that the field had off it really resurrected itself,” Morris said. “The footing wasn’t perfect, but it was satisfactory. It came back, perhaps not 100 percent, but 80 percent.”

And course designer Leopoldo Palacios built courses that the riders had to tackle with determination. “Leopoldo is just an unbelievable course designer. There are subtle questions throughout the whole course,” said Lauren Hough. “There isn’t one fence where you think,, ‘Oh, this is a gimmee, I can take a breath here.’ You really have to be on your toes, and the horses have to try that extra little bit, and it makes us all that much better.”

Palacios mirrored the format of the World Equestrian Games. Round 1 was over slightly smaller jumps, but with a wickedly tight time-allowed, to mimic the initial speed round at the WEG. Round 2, the next day, was over a big, technical track. Round 3, on day 3, was over that same track, simulating a Nations Cup. After a day off, the riders jumped Rounds 4 and 5–two big, testing tracks–on the last day, just like the two-round format on the last day of the WEG to decide the four finalists who switch horses to jump for individual medals.

“Leopoldo is a maestro second to none as a course builder,” said Morris. “He uses a great variety of fences. Every fence is different. There’s nothing bland or repetitious about his courses. And he’s not afraid to ask a scope question. A lot of course designers today are reluctant to test scope. He’ll ask that scope question just to the edge–not past it.”
(For daily reports and more photos from the selection trials, go to www.chronofhorse.com and click on Archives.)