Juli and Welbourne at Essex. Photo by Priscilla K. Miller Photography  

Ditchues /DITCH-yoos/ n. 1. The issues associated with a horse who lives in fear of a gap in the ground, however small or wide. 2. Ditch issues.

Everyone loves an underdog, especially when it comes to horses. Perhaps it’s the real life stories of horses like Snowman and Seabiscuit that we love so much. Whatever the draw may be, I’ve always been the hopeful owner that thinks each one of my horses will grow into a champion.

In the past it hasn’t always worked out that way. As every horse owner has endured, owning these 4-legged fragiltons comes with its fair share of heartache.

Of all unlikely candidates to bestow my hopes of glory, the horse I never had high hopes about was Welbourne. Initially, he wasn’t mine for dreaming. He came to me as a horse in training and his owners wanted him sold within the month.

On the day he arrived I had just put my previous horse to sleep. An hour after the heartbreak, I watched Welbourne back off the two horse trailer and onto my farm. Through tears, I showed him to his stall.

Welbourne’s owners were looking for something quieter and more seasoned, basically a school master. I knew of the perfect unicorn, but he was my best school horse and I needed him to run my business.

After a couple weeks I’d been persuaded. The old fashioned horse switcharoo had happened! We signed papers and it was a done deal.

Wells in the early days. Photo courtesy of Juli Hutchings-Sebring.

Wells (affectionately named after a man I saw on the 2016 Bachelor reality TV show) did not sneak his way into my heart very quickly. He wasn’t a particularly fine mover, and his flat work left a lot to be desired. I rode him in one novice level event that weekend (only because the horse I was supposed to ride went lame). It just so happened to be my first recognized event in over 4 years.

Wells was spooky, somewhat clunky compared to the small horse I’d been riding, and leaned heavily on the reins. He pulled me around the show jumps and was quite the opposite on the cross country.

On days I didn’t have the energy to ride, I’d use him for my advanced students. This finally ended when– most notably in our Holiday Horse Show–he dumped poor Emma on a snow covered two foot coop.

It was clear he was only learning bad habits. I made it a point from this day forward to excuse him from the lesson program. I had a few sale ads up on him but never any inquiries. I wasn’t really trying to sell him (the feeling of guilt when you get a horse for free) but I wouldn’t have turned anyone away either.

Serious training had to begin. Trusting his rider was his biggest hurdle. He was the type of horse you couldn’t punish for a spook or a stop at a fence. If you so much as used your crop twice he would spook at every jump or bush beyond the fence line.

Local horseman Roddy Strang gave me some expert advice. He said, “If every time your horse spooks and you punish him for it, it’s like your dad grabbing you when you’re scared and shaking you and yelling, ‘What are you so afraid of?!'” That in and of itself becomes more of the problem. He suggested I soothe him when he acted spooky, and try a reassuring scratch on his withers.

Wells confirming there’s definitely some Arab blood in his pedigree. Photo courtesy of Juli Hutchings-Sebring.

This method didn’t work for all event riders. I had to be very careful who I would train with as this is not the typical response for a horse who doesn’t want to jump a fence. “Get after him; don’t just sit there!” is the generally accepted punishment in eventing when you don’t reprimand your horse for a stop or run out. But I was slowly learning that Wells was not the typical horse either.

At events I always had to warm up over the smallest cross country jump there was, nearly have a stop at it, and then slowly work up to the novice or training sized height we were jumping. People would give me looks, like: “Should that horse really be at this level if he can’t jump elementary?”

Similarly in show jumping, he would often try to stop at the first fence. It was always worse if it was positioned near the gate, and equally bad if it faced away from the other horses.

Things started to look more promising when I had my husband (then fiancé) build me a couple of skinny jumps. We had an apex and a narrow table. I introduced Wells to these in the ring with rails first up on the sides, and gradually took them down and away. He took to them with surprising aptitude.

When we got to Prelim, his longtime fear of ditches started to get us. In our first Prelim he may have sensed the ground began to slope. He hit his Jake brake nearly half a football field before the coffin. I knew this was a problem that would prevent us from having clear rides and certainly from going any further. I had to seek the help of an expert.

Just up the road was Waylon Roberts. I started taking lessons from him and then asked him something I’d never done before. Would he ride my horse in an event for me? Whether it be money reasons, pride, or just plain ignorance, I had never considered this an option with prior mounts.

Waylon agreed. In their first event together, I entered them in the Prelim at Paradise Farm in Aiken, SC. Though super sticky in the show jumping, they got around clear and went onto cross country. An arguable stop/not stop? happened at the down bank, but Waylon being quite persuasive made sure the 20 penalties disappeared. In this case, they finished an impressive 2nd in a large field of horses.

After two more Prelims, Waylon had successfully gotten Wells over his “ditchues” (Ditch issues). Now it was my turn again.

Juli and Welbourne at Essex. Photo by Priscilla K. Miller Photography  

Flash forward two and a half years and Wells has taken me to his first Intermediate, his first three-star, and our first Advanced. Now the only mistakes we make are my own — rider error.

I laugh now in lessons with Michael Walton when my horse stops at a rainbow shape underneath a show jump. I have grown to love his spooky side. I know that 98% of the time he’ll come through for me at the competition.

My horse is still looky, and that will always be in his nature. He’s not the horse that’ll go down in history for never having a stop on cross country. He’ll also never be known for being reliable at the lower levels, or a packer of any kind.

However, I have entrusted him with my heart, and in turn he has given me his. No matter what, I will always see him as the underdog who stole my heart — one spook at a time.

Juli Hutchings and 18-year-old Fling receiving the Traveler's Memorial Trophy at Jersey Fresh in 2008. Photo by Shannon Brinkman.

“Three, two, one — GO!” Fling went; Fling always went. No jump was too wide, narrow, tall or tainted for Fling to get to the other side. No matter the length or level of the cross country course, he always finished just like he began: his small ears pricked forward and his eyes eager with love for his sport.

 When I first met Fling I was 15 years old and had competed through Training level. I met him after my older gelding fell on me during a lesson with Phillip Dutton, solidifying the fact that I needed to find a new partner.

It was thanks to Phillip and the crew at True Prospect Farm that Fling found his way to me. His owner, Gil Phillips, had left him in their hands, and over the years he’d become a seasoned one-star horse at their barn. When he came to me, he’d been off for a year due to a mysterious injury but had come back sound and needed a rider.

For months Fling drug me to the fences as though insisting he knew much better than I. I couldn’t argue most days, and I recall once we nearly careened over my mother who stood in the gymnastic line to help slow him down. I knew I had a busy winter ahead of me and filled it with lots of lessons to learn how to ride him better.

I was still in Pony Club at the time, and I’ll never forget our clinic with Scott Hassler at Hilltop Farm. Amy Jackson, a racehorse trainer and my friend, was watching our lesson and couldn’t contain her excitement when I pushed Fling into a trot. She came bounding out into the arena and flung her arms around Fling.

No one could understand what was going on until she managed to push away her tears of joy and explain that she had trained Fling as a 3-year-old at the Fair Hill Training Center and had raced his mother too. Thirteen years later, she’d known it was Fling only by the way his hind legs plaited as he walked.

After the lesson I called Fling’s owner, Gil, to tell him of the encounter with Amy. He sent me a DVD of all Fling’s races, and it was no overstatement that he was an outstanding racehorse. In nearly every race Fling led the pack from start to finish. In only one did he break badly for the gate and hug the rear only to burst to the front in time to win the race in a three-horse photo finish. The announcer’s words were, “Look out for the big gray machine coming up on the outside; I told you he was the one to watch!”

Fling’s years as a racehorse must have made him the world’s fittest horse. In my events that spring, Fling skipped around like a kid on a playground. We began calling him the Iron Horse, and without a doubt he lived up to the name.

He taught me this: Just point, kick and hold on tight. In my first season of Preliminary I was his protégée, clinging for dear life over jumps larger than us and allowing Fling to be my eyes, ears and protector.

The year after, we worked as a team and took away a ribbon at our very first one-star. I learned the hard way how ties were broken, and after dropping three spots in a tie I stopped letting Fling go his rather speedy pace on the cross country and learned to regulate his gallop to finish nearest the optimum time.

Our work paid off, and that summer we represented Area II as individuals in the 2007 North American Junior & Young Rider Championships. The coaches had decided that with Fling being 17, they were taking a chance on his soundness and couldn’t jeopardize the others in putting him on the team.

Fling proved his worth by finishing better than all the team horses, just missing the 10th place spot for the country’s best young riders. It was two pesky rails that pushed us behind the ribbons. The only downfall I could ever place on Fling was that sometimes he got lazy with his feet. That was until we tackled Intermediate.

Fling shocked us all with three clear stadium and cross county rides between the red flags. My mom knew how hard I had worked, and she and I were both nearly in tears after my first big win in the Young Rider’s Open Intermediate at Plantation Field. In an eight-horse division, Fling was the only one to leave up the rails in the show jumping and finish without time faults cross country. We had come such a long way.

In 2008, we finished two CCI2* events at Fair Hill International and Jersey Fresh. I still remember the chills at Jersey when Fling’s name was called during the awards ceremony. Alongside top horses and riders, Fling and I walked to the middle of the ring to receive the Traveler’s Memorial Trophy for the oldest off-track Thoroughbred to finish the event. At 18, it was no wonder cheers erupted in the grandstand in tribute to such a noble horse. To this day I believe Fling understood he was being recognized; he had never looked more proud.

When the end of summer hit far too quickly, Fling accompanied me to college. I couldn’t leave him behind yet and planned to return him to Amy Jackson the following year. Gil, Amy and I knew retirement as a pony horse at Fair Hill was exactly what Fling would want.

In the meantime Fling spent a happy and healthy fall and winter in South Carolina. My college friends would often visit him at Full Gallop Farm in Aiken and I’d let them take him around the fields, ride double, even pop over a few jumps with me. Laura Anderson, who owns the farm, called Fling a saint of a horse.

After a final jump school one January night, Fling was fit and ready for our in-house event the following week. The phone call at 7 a.m. the next morning put our plans to rest and with it so did my dreams.

Fling was gone. In the awful cold and rainy morning, I drove down the long sandy lane as I had so many times before, only this time, instead of grazing under the 300-year-old live oak beside the lane, Fling lay still and lifeless beneath it. He must have had a heart attack; he was unscathed and peaceful on the ground.

When a man came to take him away from me, he comforted me in saying, “He will be in good company. There are some million dollar racehorses buried where he’s going.” Through my tears I had to smile. I stroked Fling’s soft gray fur one last time and said, “That’s good because he was a million dollar horse.”

Fling taught me more about riding and the sport of eventing than any person ever could. I was so fortunate to have had him in my life and owe him everything. Thank you, Fling.