Thursday Video: At Home with the Lipizzaners

There’s something very special about Lipizzaners, and it’s not even really got anything to do with the high school classical dressage movements, the Hapsburg-era palace they perform in in Vienna (very cool, though, if you’ve not been), nor the incredible story of how they very nearly perished in the Second World War but were saved in a remarkable rescue mission. Instead, I’m talking about their universality for horse-crazy kids. They’re the ubiquitous pony magazine centrefold – like Akhal Tekes, they were one of those breeds none of us would ever actually encounter but we all knew so much about. Horse breed encyclopaedias highlighted them, VHS tapes on the beauty of the horse showed them in all their glory, and model horse companies shilled many a white horse into the clutches of a little girl. That’s why, at the age of 32, I think I still find myself transfixed by them – and why I was so excited to see that the FEI’s RIDE magazine put out a new episode focussing on their true home, the Lipica Stud in Slovenia. I’m already SkyScanner-ing my next holiday, frankly.