I’ve been riding since the age of four. My first pony purchased at the age of 7. I had amazing opportunities within this time to work a variation of incredibly different ponies and horses, as well as breaking in my first pony purchased through hard work from my old trainer.
I was given these opportunities of hacking, jumping, dressage, and riding the naughty ponies at events right up to the age of 12-14 where my time on ponies really hit a new level of success.
Through Equestrian Australia’s Interschool events (which I only attended for a few years) I managed to succeed both on my very hot thoroughbred x Connemara mare, and my beautiful but terribly spooky Connemara x Arab gelding. Every year I qualified for Nationals, the only ones attended were Queensland and Western Australia.
My first nationals was in Queensland where I had chosen to save my ponies the travel and get a pool horse. My pool horse was a little grey pony called Sir Ellen James who was given to me only because no other young rider was able to ride him, he was forward and sharp, a soft eye but cunning… just how I like them.
I trained under Olympian Sonja Johnson and did a lot of strapping for her at most of the events to learn valuable lessons within the competition world of a professional equestrian profile, and what differences came with that. After moving onto horses, my first being a 16hh Stockhorse purchased from Adelaide that had predominantly chased cows and dabbled in some low level dressage, I was now ready to take on the world of showjumping.
I still competed eventing over this time but not as seriously, although another achievement being an eventing run on a random horse I’d sat on for the first time the day of the event in the 95 class at maybe 14-15 yrs of age. We won the class and qualified for nationals, very unfortunately then being disqualified (as was most the field) for changing the rules of the water jump mid competition which disqualified all riders prior.
After deciding to pure showjump under the guide of fantastic trainers such as Grant Wilson from Belgium, Albert Voorn from Belgium, Sonja Johnson, human performance coach Jon Pitts, David Dobson, just to name a few of the amazing opportunities I have been so gratefully given by my incredible parents who continue to support me in my sport, but now leave a lot of the dealings and efforts down to me now that I’m an “adult”- scary to believe… The bills and finances of moving out and owning horses now proving more scary, but so grateful nonetheless!
