These classes are not only good training, but they also provide owners and riders with an incentive to be involved with young horses.

There’s a buzz in the air about the hot new jumper on the winter circuit, but you won’t find him in the grand prix. Instead, this talented athlete is contesting the young jumper classes and distinguishing himself among his peers as a rising superstar of the future.

This scenario wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago when there weren’t specific classes for young jumpers after futurity age.

If an owner or rider wanted to get a young talented prospect into the show ring, the only choice was to ride against herds of horses of all ages in the preliminary and intermediate jumpers.

“The babies would get lost in the crowd. You had no way of knowing if it was a horse that was perpetually in the preliminaries or if it was a young horse with some talent,” said Cheryll Frank, the director of the International Jumper Futurity and Young Jumper Championships.

But today all that’s changed after the creation of the young jumper championships with qualifying classes for 5-year-olds, 6-year-olds and 7- and 8-year-olds. Most A-rated shows offer a young jumper division, and the classes are popular with riders and owners and draw large crowds and sponsorship.

“I think that just after the grand prix, the most important division at the jumper shows is the young jumpers,” said Sergio Campos, winner of the 6-year-old Young Jumper Championship Invitational (Fla.) aboard Mill Creek Sandhya (by Silvio II).

“If you do have a nice young horse, it will definitely be noticed,” agreed Phil Henning, owner of Mill Creek Stables. “You wouldn’t have any exposure if it wasn’t for the young jumpers. It would just be another preliminary horse. People know who won the young jumpers.”

The mission of the young jumper championships is to “identify the most promising young show jumping prospects competing here in the United States.”

Horses qualify with clear rounds instead of points for three league finals, held at the Hampton Classic (N.Y.), the Kentucky National and Showpark All Seasons (Calif.), as well as the Young Jumper Championship Invitational held at the National Horse Show (Fla.).

Not only do the young jumper classes provide a place to showcase young horses, but they also actively help riders develop their mounts’ talent.

“I think it gives them a stair step development program that says at this age you need to start introducing these features–whether it’s open water or a liverpool in a combination–it gives them a roadmap. It helps them prepare,” said Frank. “When a horse graduates, generally at age 7, if it has the ability, it’s prepared to go on to grand prix. It’s seen all the questions. Otherwise, it’s fully prepared to go into the juniors, amateurs, children’s or wherever it’s destined to go from there.”

Campos noted that just the existence of the young jumper classes helps train the horses. “It keeps the horses jumping at the height that they’re supposed to,” he said. “You get a talented 4- or 5-year-old and you want to rush and get the horse jumping the higher levels. The young jumpers gives you enough prize money to develop your horse the way it’s supposed to, do it slowly and jump the same height for one year. Then you move to a little bit higher level the next year.”

The emphasis on clear rounds is another way that the young jumper classes focus more on training than open jumper classes for more experienced horses.

“Our finals are really tough to win because there are three rounds and the faults are cumulative,” said Frank. “After the first two rounds we cut them down to the top 15, and those top 15 advance. At the National Horse Show they start again from 0, but at the League Finals they carry all their faults forward. We generally have enough horses that we need a jump-off after three rounds.

“If you’re looking to develop an Olympic or Nations Cup or World Cup horse, it must be careful and jump clean round after round after round. The focus is on training the horse properly to keep it off the jumps,” she continued.

“I’d rather do the young jumpers because it keeps me and all the other riders from rushing the horses,” said Campos. “The owners might want a blue ribbon in a speed class or want the prize money, so you end up rushing the horses in the regular open classes. For the horses it’s the best thing to happen when they created the young jumpers.”

A New World Of Opportunity
The young jumper classes benefit the owners by creating more opportunities for up-and-coming horses to earn significant prize money. “The owners really love their young horses,” said Frank. “A lot of the owners only want to do the young horses. Riders are getting these horses, sometimes as young as 3 years old, and they’re developing them up through the ranks to be their horses for tomorrow.”

Debbie Stephens, an international grand prix rider, was one of the initial proponents of the young jumper classes and was responsible for bringing the Eastern League Final to the Hampton Classic.

“It’s opened a huge marketplace for people who couldn’t afford the high dollar horses,” she said. “We could get people in the industry to spend $20,000 or $30,000 and have a goal at the end of the year for that horse to go to the finals. They think, ‘I can’t be in the grand prix, but my goal is to make it to the Young Jumper Championship Finals at the Hampton Classic, which is very prestigious.’ “

And getting a horse to the League Finals at a horse show like the Hampton Classic was often eye-opening for the owners. “A lot of times it gives owners that wouldn’t have access or appreciation of the quality riders, access to the top riders in the sport,” said international grand prix rider Richard Spooner. “If you have an owner outside of the mainstream who has worked only regionally, it gives him or her an opportunity to see the top programs. If the person has a horse that is top quality, then he or she can see the bigger picture. If a horse comes to the regional finals and has some success, then as an owner you might decide that this horse is good enough and I want to go ahead and give it the best shot I possibly can.”

Best of all for the owners is the exposure that they get when their young horses win. “We get a lot of interest because of competing in the young jumpers in Canada and in the United States,” said Henning. “We get a lot of coverage, and people see it and look for us.”

Henning currently has 17 horses in training with Campos in Florida and three of them, including Mill Creek Sandhya, are being aimed for the championships.

“The riders are starting to speak pedigrees. They’re paying attention,” said Frank. “We have quite a few full and half-siblings out there. That’s not lost on everybody when they start realizing that these have all come from the same place, and we should go there to look for another one.”

Ideally, the young jumper ranks will become a place to look for grand prix prospects. “I do look for my grand prix horses out of some of the young jumper rings because I’m there showing,” said Spooner. “It gives you an opportunity to see quality horses.”

But Spooner is also in favor of bringing his grand prix prospects up through the young jumpers. “You have to start from the beginning if you want to have quality,” he said. “Too many times as riders we think about next year or next month instead of four, five, even 10 years down the road. I find that when I start horses as 4- and 5-year-olds, then by the time they’re 8 or 9 I know what their strong suits are and what their weak points are. I don’t have to start the exploration with an older horse that I spent $1 million on.”

Spooner has brought many horses up through the young jumper program. One of these is the Holsteiner Cristallo. “Cristallo is getting ready to do the World Cup Finals this year if we qualify,” said Spooner. “He’s already won two World Cup qualifiers.”

Another noteworthy young jumper who is currently showing in the open classes with Spooner is the American-bred Apache (Mezcalero–Escada), owned by Doug White. “Apache won the 5-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and had the fastest time at the 7-year-olds with one down,” said Spooner.

Room To Grow
The popularity of the young jumper classes and the ever-expanding numbers competing in the qualifiers–more than 750 last year–speak to the success of these classes, but there’s always room for improvement.

“The part that I’m the happiest about is that the qualifying classes are at virtually every show that has a full jumper division,” said Linda Allen, one of the original forces behind the creation of the young jumper classes. “The bad part is that we still have a big discrepancy in what the horses are asked to do.”

A course designer herself, Allen said that sometimes the courses for the young jumpers aren’t consistent between shows or are not built with a green horse in mind. “It’s very difficult to find the time to make changes,” she said. “They just lower the course from another class. The class that was just right for the open jumpers might be a little too complex for the 5-year-olds.”

She said course designer education is in the works, but it will take time. “It’s a new concept from a course design standpoint, where the other classes with smaller jumps are built for very experienced horses. The challenge is to keep those horses from going clear. With the young horses the aim should be to teach them what they need to know to give them the best opportunity of jumping higher down the road.”

Allen also hopes that the young jumper classes will continue to grow and gain the same presence in the United States as in Europe, which is where the idea for the program originated.

“I wish they had more classes,” said Campos. “Sometimes the shows only have one day for the young jumpers. I think they could have a little championship at every show, a three-day competition like they have at the finals. Most of the shows only have one class per week.”

And expanding the program is definitely on the agenda. “We need to keep the program increasing, try to increase the prize money at all of the horse shows and keep the entry fees down,” said Stephens. “We need to encourage people in the United States to develop the best horses in the world instead of buying them from Europe.”

Roots In The International Jumper Futurity
The young jumper program is set up to promote talented athletes, no matter their origin. But the International Jumper Futurity, which preceded the young jumpers, is intended specifically to encourage breeders and reward U.S.-bred horses.

Stallions and young U.S.-bred horses are nominated for the IJF. IJF-nominated young horses may compete in 4-year-old classes over basic courses. Those competitions are judged subjectively by experienced horsemen who are looking for a type of horse that should go on to succeed in the jumpers. All of the horses that compete in the IJF classes earn money if they complete the competition.

“You have to focus on getting these young horses in the ring,” said Cheryll Frank. “With many of our American-breds, that’s where the gap is–from foal to the ring. I think there has to be an incentive for owners and breeders and trainers to dedicate the time that’s necessary to bring these young horses to shows.”

But the real benefit of being IJF-nominated comes later in the young jumper classes. If an IJF-nominated horse does well in a young jumper class, then the owner receives prize money from both the class and from the IJF.

“They can continue to win bonus money,” explained Linda Allen. “It’s a little reward for people to shop in this country. You’re going to win a lot more money if the horse is U.S.-bred.”

Is Optimum Time Optimal?
Only a few ways exist to judge a jumper class if there is more than one clear round. Either the horses have to jump-off against the clock, jump-off over higher jumps, or the judging must be subjective. Running young horses, particularly 5-year-olds, for speed over smaller fences, may leave the class with a winner, but it doesn’t quite fit into line with the goal of the young jumper program to develop young horses for the higher levels.

Until this year, 5-year-olds jumped off with an optimum time–the horse closest to optimum time won instead of the fastest round. But that too had its drawbacks.

“Optimum time was horrible,” said Debbie Stephens. “It’s unfair to the horses that go near the beginning. All you have to do is watch two or three horses go and you can figure out what you should do.”

She said that regulating what speed people ride is difficult. “If they want to go faster than we think they should with their horses in a jump-off type competition at the 5-year-olds, the optimum time really didn’t stop that,” she pointed out.

So, as of Dec. 1, 2006, organizers of shows with 5-year-old classes may now use speed to determine the winners, although optimum time is still an option.

While Linda Allen wasn’t a huge fan of optimum time either, she wasn’t so sure that the rule change was going to be a good thing. “We have top riders who are capable of going very fast on young horses,” she said. “By the time they go against the clock over low jumps enough, they don’t turn into grand prix horses.”

Allen wasn’t against the occasional speed class for a young horse, but she said that at that age it’s important to teach horses to jump big and round, so that when the jumps go up, they have the scope and experience to clear them.

“[German horsemen] spent decades with young horse classes going against the clock,” said Allen. “Yet, when they made the move to a more subjective format for every young jumper class, except the last round at the national finals for 6- and 7-year-olds, that was when they began producing horses that continued on to their winning international teams, sell all over the world, and populate our hunter classes. I’m discouraged that we’re now going the other direction, with even our 5-year-olds being asked to run in every class in order to get a ribbon.”

Sergio Campos agreed that speed wasn’t in the best interest of 5-year-olds. “I don’t believe they should be running a 100 miles an hour,” he said. “A lot of horses get ruined when they’re 5 because they’re doing too many speed classes, and then they don’t have the time to develop their career and jump bigger classes later on because they become flat jumpers–they jump too flat because of the speed.”

However, even though riders may not want to run their young horses for speed, they are often under pressure to win for their owners.