Saturday, Feb. 8, 2025

USEA Adult Amateur Of The Year Arden Wildasin Is Planning Her 5* Debut

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Which of your favorite vices would you give up, if it helped you achieve a dream of competing at the Defender Kentucky CCI5*?

For Arden Wildasin, the U.S. Eventing Association’s 2024 Adult Amateur Rider of the Year, the answer is easy—but the challenge hard: sugar.

“Come January 1, I won’t be eating any sugar,” said 31-year-old Aiken, South Carolina-based rider, interviewed before Christmas, predicting she’d enjoy the holiday season with cookies and ice cream before quitting cold turkey. “I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t have any tattoos. Sugar is my Achilles [heel]. But if I don’t have sugar, I’m more alert, more focused, more attuned.”

Last year, she gave up refined sugar while she trained for the 2024 Cosequin Lexington CCI4*-S, where she competed her longtime partner Sunday Times (Cult Hero—Lackaghbeg Crest, Sea Crest). She’s avoiding sugar again this year, with her sights firmly set on being in the best physical and mental shape possible for the weekend of April 24-27 when she hopes to realize a dream by making her CCI5* debut at Kentucky with 18-year-old “Mumbles.”

Wildasin and the grey Irish Sport Horse finished 22nd in the CCI4*-S last year. Waiting for them after they finished their stadium round? Horse cookies for Mumbles and a well-deserved ice cream sandwich for Wildasin, her first taste of her favorite treat in several months. 

Arden Wildasin and Dr. Chad Davis toasted with ice-cream sandwiches, while Sunday Times opted for some fresh Kentucky bluegrass, to celebrate Wildsain and “Mumbles’ ” 2024 Cosequin Lexington CCI4*-S finish. Wildasin hopes to make her five-star debut this spring with Mumbles at the Defender Kentucky CCI5*. Photo Courtesy Of Arden Wildasin

“When I finish the five-star, there’s going to be an ice cream celebration,” she adds with a laugh.

While Wildasin has been competing at the four-star level for years on a number of horses, she’s planning her five-star debut with the one she’s known the longest; she’s had Mumbles for more than a decade, taking him to his first show back in 2014.

“He and I have built a partnership from the ground up,” she said. “We can read each other inside and out, and I trust him. I brought him up to advanced, and every step of the way, he just kept saying, ‘Absolutely. I love this.’ ”

She described Mumbles as a character who struggles to “keep a lid on it” in the sandbox but shines in the jumping phases.

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“He’s phenomenal on cross-country,” she said—though she’s bit nervous thinking about the drop into Kentucky’s iconic Head of the Lake water complex.

“We sometimes get wet. He likes to go swimming,” Wildasin said with a laugh. “We’re trying to get better about jumping into water. I don’t really know what to expect, but again, I’m going to leave the start box with Mumbles being fit and ready to run. If he tells me it’s not for him, I’ll pull up. But I don’t think he will. I think we’ll get to the end, and he’ll be, like, ‘Uh, that’s it?’

The duo earns a pair of fourth-place finishes at the CCI4*-L level last year, at Bromont Horse Trials (Quebec) in June and Morven Park Fall Horse Trials (Virginia) in October.

Wildasin said that at Bromont, she was nervous as she and Mumbles waited on the countdown to leave the start box. However, focusing on her longtime partner’s gallop as they headed out on course eased her nerves. Wildasin doesn’t wear a watch when she goes cross-country, instead preferring to concentrate on how her horses are going to gauge how fast they can go.

“I like to feel what’s under me. I think it’s an art form,” she explained. “I like to let the horse relax, and then I feel what’s underneath me. I’ve learned how to feel each horse’s gallop. I am a speed demon, but my fast isn’t kamikaze fast. It’s what I’ve got underneath me, and what they can give. They’re the athletes. I just get to ride them, and it’s a blessing. I always want them to have a voice and let them speak.”

Mumbles relaxing at home with his buddy Rocco. Photo Courtesy Of Arden Wildasin

That ability to listen to, and communicate with, her horses is what makes Wildasin a strong rider, said Heidi White, who has trained Wildasin for the past three years.

“She’s a very talented rider,” White said. “Her confidence is what we had to work on. When she came to me, her confidence was a bit shook. She was missing a couple of basics, but she’s scrappy, so she’d gotten away with it.”

The two women have talked a lot about what it takes to make it as an elite athlete, and while they joke about Wildasin’s ice cream habit, it points to a larger aspect of the training and preparation that she has embraced.

“She realized [sugar] affected her system, and quite dramatically, like coffee and other things do to other people. But she’s quite disciplined, and it did make a difference,” said White, a five-star veteran who helped the U.S. finish fourth at the 2006 World Equestrian Games (Germany). “You have to be beyond fit, and she realized the importance of that. She did it last year, and I do think it was a game changer, as much as we joke about it. Like with your horses, you have to figure out how you prepare yourself. She’s figured out what she has to do to prepare for big competitions.”

In 2024, Wildasin’s competitive success with Mumbles and a string of other FEI-level horses helped earn her the USEA Adult Amateur Rider of the Year title.

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“We knew what our placings were and where we could end up, but we were never trying to achieve that,” she said. “I always just have the same goal, which is going out with each horse and enjoying it and having a blast. There are so many adult amateurs out there that should get a shout-out. They’re all doing their best, and everyone supports each other.”

With a successful 2024 season behind her, she’s thinking ahead to continued progress in 2025. She has several horses in her competition string that she’ll continue developing this winter. Just behind Mumbles, at the four-star level, is Billy Beaufort (My O My—Huntstown Clover, Clover Hill), a 13-year-old Anglo European Sport Horse gelding she bought last year. “Hero” won the CCI3*-L at Bromont (Quebec) in June, then was third in the CCI4*-S at Morven Park (Virginia) in October.

Arden Wildasin and Billy Beaufort at the Morven Park International CCI4*-S (Va.) in October, where they finished third. Annan Hepner Photo

“Hero has been fantastic,” she said. “He definitely has his personality quirks. He has a buck and a bronc to him, but he’s playful. I would also call him a bit ADD because he wants to figure out where everyone and everything is, but when the hard questions come to him, he’s focused and game, and he tries his heart out. He was awesome at Morven. For each harder question, he was, like, ‘I got this.’ It’s going to be an exciting 2025 with him.”

There’s also her three-star mare, Tokyo Drift, a 14-year-old Irish Sport Horse (Obos Quality 004–GTI Diamond, Glidawn Diamond) and 10-year-old Holsteiner Dance Monkey 7 (Duke of Hearts–Wahts Up Wap, Butler), a new ride in 2024 who finished the year by running his first CCI3*-S. She said “Tokyo” likely will remain at the three-star level, but that the upper echelons of the sport are well within “Monkey’s” reach.

“I think he’s a Badminton horse in the future,” she said. “He’s giving me confidence in knowing I can ride dressage, and he’s getting stronger at galloping. He’ll open his stride up to 18 or 20 feet, and I have to reel him back in.

“I never thought of myself as wanting to ride on the Olympic team, but I think it’s possible that [the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games] could be something I aim for, without really aiming for it,” she added.

She’s got a few other horses, including Page Six, a 10-year-old full brother to Mystery Whisper, Phillip Dutton’s 2012 London Olympic Games mount who Wildasin later competed in straight dressage, contesting the 2013 North American Young Rider Championships (Kentucky), and Southern Sun, a 15-year-old Irish Sport Horse with whom she won the 2021 USEA American Eventing Championships Preliminary Amateur title, but who’s had to take time off from eventing. 

“He was just not acting normally. He had the fight to keep going but finally just said, ‘I can’t do it anymore.’ His back lit up like a Christmas tree,” she said of his X-rays. Sunny underwent kissing-spine surgery in September 2022, and she’s slowly easing him back into competitions. They ran at the novice level and then recently moved up to training. The duo won the unrecognized training division at the Stable View Eventing Academy Horse Trials (South Carolina) in November, but Wildasin is more focused on appreciating her time with him than achieving a specific competitive goal at this point.

“Getting on and doing dressage is a highlight of my day, or jumping a small jump,” she said of “Sunny.” “Every time I jump him through a gymnastic, it’s a blessing.”

In the midst of winter training, she said she’s thinking about Kentucky—an event in which she’s long dreamed of competing—without letting her focus take away from the simpler joy of being with her horses.

“I just want to spend each and every day with a horse,” she said. “I have a barn of horses that I love, and I want to go to events and let them all shine. I never want to forget the journey that each horse is on and why I wake up each morning. You wake up to go to the barn and see how special each and every one of them is.”

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