And the Carol Lavell Advanced Dressage Prize is making it possible.

Jan Brons left his home in the Netherlands more than 23 years ago to advance his career as a dressage rider, and this summer he’s going home. But he won’t be staying.

He’s returning to Europe to further the education and competitive experience that he’s received on this side of the Atlantic Ocean for the past two decades. And he’s able to it because he’s the first recipient of the $25,000 Carol Lavell Advanced Dressage Prize, bestowed by The Dressage Foundation.

Brons, 45, applied for this grant because “continuing to try to get better depends on the amount of money that you have available, and this was a very big opportunity.”

He expects to spend the late summer and early fall in Europe, and he plans to spend at least part of that time training with Ernst Hoyas, with whom he worked last winter in Florida.

“I hope to see how he works with his horses on a day-to-day basis and to see how he puts the finishing touches on the Grand Prix horse,” said Brons, who’s lived in Wellington, Fla., for the past three years.

Although the Carol Lavell Advanced Dressage Prize is a sizable sum, it only allows Brons to take two of the 10 or so horses he usually has in training. He’s planning on taking Teutobod, a 9-year-old Dutch Warmblood currently winning at Prix St. Georges/Intermed-iaire I and nearly ready to show at Grand Prix, and Zonneglans, a 5-year-old Dutch Warmblood now working at second level.

Teutobod is one of the top qualifiers for the Collecting Gaits Farm/USEF Intermediaire I Championships in June in New Jersey, and Brons plans to step him up to Grand Prix after contesting that championship and working in Europe.

“It’s very competitive to be a member of the U.S. team,” said Brons, who became a U.S. citizen in 2001 and contested the 2004 Olympic Selection Trials on Fernando. “I still do try all the time to get better. I don’t think that because I’m riding at Grand Prix that I don’t need to learn more.

“By winning this award and making this journey, I hope I will become a better rider and a better trainer,” he added.

Lavell’s Dream

Presenting this award to Brons, at the Palm Beach Dressage Festival (Fla.) in early March, represented a goal achieved for Carol Lavell, who on Gifted sealed the U.S. team’s historic bronze medal at the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games.

“I’d been thinking for some time that we would need to do more to ensure a future of Olympic successes,” said Lavell. “To me, ‘more’ meant: We know we need better-educated riders, better-trained horses and more high-quality competitions to train them both. Read: dollars and more dollars!

“The difficulty is that not every rider becomes a trainer, and not every trainer can identify international potential,” added Lavell. “So, I decided that I would go looking, trying to find a rider with a young horse that is already attracting attention, rising through the national levels with victories and ready to embark on an international-level career, perhaps already doing well at Prix St. Georges and Intermediaire I. This rider would be at the place where I once was with Gifted.”

Lavell asked John Boomer of The Dressage Foundation for help raising and investing the money and with the logistics of determining the annual winners. In 2005, Lavell and her father, Gordon Cadwgan, began the process of raising the $500,000 they needed to fund the prize from friends and supporters.

Although they’re still just a bit short of the financial goal, last fall Lavell and Boomer decided they had the funds they needed to hand out the prize for the first time, and Lavell was thrilled that 14 dressage riders applied for it. To learn more about the annual $25,000 grant, go to The Dressage Foundation’s website (www. dressagefoundation.org).

“I think I’ve found a way to give back to this sport,” said Lavell.

And she said that Brons is more than just an excellent competitor.

“Jan’s horsemanship is very evident in the warm-up arenas and in the stables, where he puts the welfare of his horses first. He has a solid record of achievement from Grand Prix to Prix St. Georges and Intermediaire I, and he has two young horses who are advancing through these levels.

“Jan recognizes that the education of the trainer, rider and horse is an ongoing and often expensive process,” added Lavell. “And he has let us know that the gift doesn’t end with him.

He’ll be sharing his knowledge to help others to fulfill their dreams by giving back to those who’ve helped make his dream possible.”

The Land Of Opportunity

Brons started down the road to his dreams by studying at Duerne, the Dutch national equestrian college. After he finished at Duerne, Brons decided to try out the equestrian life in North America.

“Basically, I wanted to see how things worked in the U.S., and I gave myself a three-month cut-off to decide if I liked it,” Brons said. “Obviously, I liked it.”

He added, “The land of opportunity is totally true here. If you work hard and put in the effort, you can make it, you can be successful. And I wasn’t convinced that was the case in Europe, so I stayed here.”

Before leaving the Netherlands, Brons had worked for a horse dealer and had met quite a few American show jumpers. Among these contacts were Joe Fargis and Conrad Homfeld, the individual gold and silver medalists at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Brons worked for them for the first two years, at their barns in Petersburg, Va., and on New York’s Long Island. He started their young horses, developed their competing horses on the flat and taught lessons.

Working in the United States, for Olympic medalists, was a big jump from his youth in the small city of Kampen, in the center of the Netherlands. No one in his family had any kind of equestrian connection, but when Brons was 9 or 10 his mother told him he had to participate in something—a sport or hobby—besides schoolwork. He chose between tennis and riding, while his brother played soccer and did bodybuilding.

Brons started taking a lesson once a week at a nearby riding school. And then he started mucking stalls and grooming horses to ride even more. “It just kept evolving, and at 15 I got my first horse,” he said.

After high school, he entered the equestrian college at Duerne, “and then it was pretty clear that this was what I wanted to do.” He rode jumpers initially, but “as I got older, I felt pushed more to dressage.”

Brons left Fargis and Homfeld in 1988 and spent the next eight years freelancing on Long Island and in the Richmond, Va., area and then managing Two Trees Stables in Bridgehampton, N.Y.

In 1996 he became a partner in a training business called Kilmore with Mary Anne McCaffrey, and in 2001 he started his own training business, which he calls JBDressage. He usually has 10 to 15 horses in training, from just started to Grand Prix, and teaches riders at all levels. He also teaches clinics in Florida, Illinois, Ohio, New York, Tennessee, Maryland and elsewhere.

Ebb And Flow

In addition to his successes at the FEI level, Brons rode Fino to the reserve national 6-year-old championship in 2005 and Up To Date to the 5-year-old national championship in 2006.

“I absolutely love the range of horses that I have to work with,” he said. “I like to be able to train them all the way up. It’s very rewarding to do that, and it’s much easier to bring them on yourself. Because then they know you and you know them—it’s like a comfortable shoe that goes right on.”

The year’s training and competition schedule basically revolves around the winter season in Florida. From December through April, he concentrates on the horses he’s showing and the riders and horses he’s preparing for this high-pressure competition season. But during the summer he travels to teach clinics about three times a month and at home concentrates on getting the young horses going.

“There’s an ebb and a flow to the year,” said Brons, who for the past 12 years has spent countless hours training with Robert Dover to advance his own training and competitive education. “It’s hard for me to really train the horses and to keep clients going in the winter. The riders and horses I have cruise a bit through the winter unless they’re showing.”

Brons said that the students he has seem to like his system.

“I’m very fortunate to have people who are loyal supporters. I go through my work, and I hope they like what I do,” he said. “I think the biggest challenge to a professional trainer is to have clients who are both loyal and who believe in the system that you have. If they do, it makes the situation so much more relaxed and productive.”

Those are exactly the qualities that Charlotte Bredahl-Baker, who rode with Lavell on the 1992 Olympic team and is now an international judge, noticed while stabled near him in Florida a few years ago and when she’s judged him.

“Whenever I judged him, his rides were always very harmonious, which is the most important quality I look for. His horses look very happy to work for him,” she said.