Guelph Mercury
ROCKWOOD โ Keean White of Angelstone Farms is hoping that this week’s meet at the impressive Rockwood-area facility gets simply known as Champions Week.
“I really believe that The Champions is going to become one of the tour spots for everyone in the world in the coming years,” White said Friday.
Highlight of five days of competition is to be Saturday night’s $100,000 Champions Grand Prix Presented by Eric Lamaze.
A field of about 35 horse and rider combinations is expected to compete, including riders like White, Canadian equestrian legend Ian Millar, three-time Canadian show jumping champion Yann Candele, U.S. Olympic gold medallist Leslie Howard and Liubov Kochetova of Russia.
White is also hoping that having knowledge of the main stadium for the feature event will offset their young age. He will compete with a pair of eight-year-olds in the main event.
“With a young horse, what they don’t have is the experience of travelling to all kinds of new venues and seeing everything,” he said. “Usually with a top Grand Prix horse, you’re looking at 13 years old. I’m riding two eight-year-olds so this is like a high school player stepping up and competing in the NBA, skipping college.”
White will compete aboard both Pironella and Appy Cara.
“The home-field advantage is that my horses have competed here already in this ring,” White said. “This will be the fourth time they’ve competed in this ring this year, so they’ve seen the flags, they’ve seen the signs, they’ve seen the scoreboard. They’re comfortable with the sounds and they’ve seen the crowd and where they sit so they’re not as easily distracted.”
This week’s Grand Prix event will be the second of three feature events with purses of $75,000 or more.
Kochetova took the top two spots in the $75,000 Grand Prix event earlier this month, collecting a total of $39,000 riding Aslan to the win and Wilford 2 to second place. The third huge payday event will be the $100,000 World Cup event Sept. 28 that will feature numerous international riders.
Many of the horse-rider combinations that competed in this month’s Grand Prix are expected back for the Champions Grand Prix. Millar rode Dixson and Star Power while other top finishers in the field of 27 that day included Ainsley Vince of Frieda, Christian Sorensen on Bobby, Mac Cone on Amor van de Rostal and Beth Underhill on Viggo.
White isn’t expecting any surprises sprung on the field by course designer Michel Vaillancourt. He became the first Canadian to win an individual equestrian medal in the Olympics when he won silver at Montreal in 1976 and has transferred the knowledge he gained competing into his work designing courses.
“With a course designed by Michel, you won’t see one jump coming down the whole time,” White said. “You’ll see errors all over the course with horses and riders and that’s what a good course designer will do. He won’t design a bogey fence, he’ll make horses make mistakes everywhere. Knowing that he’s going to build something that will be very fair, that also makes you very comfortable because he’s not going to set a test that maybe a young horse can’t do.”
White is a busy guy at the meets as Saturday’s event is just one in a five-day meet that features competitions on five different areas on the complex โ the Main Stadium, Travelright ring, EEC Main Hunter Ring, ESI Hunter Ring and Derby Field. The EEC Hunter Ring and Derby Field have grass bases while the others are all-weather terrain.
“I have some serious distractions to deal with,” White said. “Running a horse show and competing at the top level, there’s obviously some distractions there. The biggest key is that for that hour or two hours that the class is happening, you have to block everything else out. Nothing else can be going on. For those two hours on Saturday night, I’m a rider and I’m riding in this class.”
The feature event is slated to start Saturday at 6:15 p.m.
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