In this excerpt from her book The Horses Who Made Me, French phenom Alizée Froment shares the story of one challenging equine partner from her early teens and the valuable lesson she learned from her.
Alizée Froment and Foy.
Foy was an Anglo-Arab who had stayed “pony size” because she had been born with a twin.
Foy was super thin with long gazelle legs, a rather weird face with a bump on her nose, some very long and flat ears, and what seemed like three curly hairs in place of a forelock.
I rode her for the first time very early on a frozen morning. The sun was shining and the light was wonderful.
What I felt under the saddle that day was completely different than anything I had ever felt before. She moved like a horse. The movements felt enormous and less elastic. Everything seemed unstable. I had no benchmark anymore. On top of that, Foy spent the first 15 minutes hopping around like a jackrabbit.
But when we started jumping, it felt like a dream. Foy had an incredible “punching” energy in the last stride before she jumped. She could switch from 2-foot stride to a 13-foot stride in a second. I was riding a Ferrari and just trying to be up to the task. We ended jumping a course with no hole left on top of the standards. I had never ever jumped that high in my life. We were over 4”6” (1.40m), and it looked easy for her, even though she was under 15 hands.
Of course, I got off the mare with stars in my eyes and my heart pounding. I was on a little cloud, amazed, ecstatic…and that was the beginning of a new big chapter in my horse life.
I remember my mother hanging up the phone, turning to me and asking if I was sure I wanted Foy when she was known to be a particularly difficult mare. I answered yes. Mum wanted me to be truly involved in the choice and to take responsibility for it, so my parents told me they would pay two-thirds of the money, and the last part would have to come from me.
I had an account that had been opened by my paternal grandmother in my name when I was six years old to help compensate for the fact that my biological father never took care of me and never gave a penny to my mother to help her raise me. The money was intended to help me pay for my studies at university later on. So using it to help pay for Foy was my first big decision in life, and being a part owner of her became my first true responsibility.
Foy was a mare that could not be counted on. She had constant ups and downs, and her moods were extremely changeable. Sometimes she filled me with euphoria as I enjoyed her athleticism, power, and strength. Sometimes she filled me with despair, as she became entirely inaccessible and offered me nothing. She could jump 4’6” (1.40m) one day and categorically refuse to pass over a ground pole the next, making a huge drama out of it with crazy eyes and theatrical reactions.
Showing her was the same. At our first and only French Championships, we won the first round of qualification after a terrible warm-up, and the day after, she was incredibly relaxed in the warm-up and then wouldn’t even approach the first fence on course.
With her horse-like locomotion and Thoroughbred temper, Foy challenged me to a new dimension of riding. I had to learn, progress, and understand very quickly, because she was not a horse with a forgiving nature. The slightest technical error had immediate repercussions. She made this very clear.
The only possible answer when Foy twisted and turned in the air for several minutes in a row without stopping, while I barely had a foot in a stirrup, was to stay calm and unflappable, and patiently wait for the storm to pass. You couldn’t get into a fight with her, because while she was indeed a very dominant personality, she was also ultra-sensitive.
Foy and her genius jumping style opened doors for me that I never imagined. By the middle of January 2002, Foy and I were participating in our first international pony show jumping competitions together.
Was it that I was entering adolescence and experiencing the loss of innocence that goes with it? Was it the complicated financial situation and my parents making big sacrifices in their lives so I had a chance to compete at an elite level and accept the responsibilities that went along with it? Was it suddenly an awareness of the physical risks and the danger when jumping such high fences with increasing technical difficulty?
I can’t say exactly the cause, and I honestly think it was a mixture of all that, but what’s certain is that I went through two extremely formative but difficult and painful years. For the first time, I struggled with self-doubt and the fear of disappointing.
I was incredibly proud of representing my country and defending our colors. I clearly remember the speech we got during that first team clinic, which explained to us the model behavior that we had to have, the exemplarity that we had to represent, and the values of hard work, self-improvement, self-control, respect, loyalty, and perseverance that we had to embody.
These words resonated in me so strongly that I made it my life to be disciplined and live up to the Federation’s expectations. I locked myself in this “straitjacket” for several years, losing sight of the real reason why I love being with horses so much—the freedom they give us, and the pleasure inherent in the constant search to understand a fascinating animal whose language we do not speak.
I was focused—and I needed to be focused—on improving my technique, but it made me lose my instinct for a while. I was just about to discover that the greatest enemy of the rider is doubt, because to doubt—beyond the technical problems that go hand in hand with it—is to betray your horse. You can doubt before getting in the saddle. You can doubt after you get off.
We can and we all do make mistakes, every single day. But to doubt when you ask something of your horse is to put him in a position of weakness and discomfort, which is much worse than the resulting error itself. It took me a while to truly understand that, and even more time before I was able to put it into practice.
Becoming a horseman takes a whole lifetime. You never stop learning. You never stop growing.
This excerpt is adapted from The Horses Who Made Me by Alizée Froment and reprinted with permission from Trafalgar Square Books (trafalgarbooks.com).
