Kumru Say and Baladin de l’Ocean. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
When I first manage to find the time to sit down for a chat with Turkey’s Kumru Say, one thing is immediately clear: I’ve got to stop whinging about how jam-packed my schedule is. We’re catching up by phone, me nursing a coffee in my living room in England, and she at S International Equestrian Center in Germany, where she’s hunkered down in the tack room, having ridden more horses in a morning than I have in… well, look, who’s counting?
It’s easy, I suspect, to see a new flag appear in the eventing scene and to assume that the person flying it must come from a place of enormous privilege to be able to access the upper levels of the sport. But Kuki, who is giving Turkey its FEI Eventing European Championships debut this week at Blenheim, is swiftly dispelling all those notions.
At 24 years old – she’ll celebrate her 25th birthday next week – she’s already ten years into a career that’s seen her showjump for Turkey at Junior and Children on Horses European Championships before making the swap to eventing just five years ago. To do so, she left home at fifteen to move to Germany and work for every opportunity she could find – while working on finding herself along the way, too.
“After I did the Children on Horses Europeans in Arezzo, I said to my parents, ‘I want to do this forever’. And they were like, ‘okay, what are you going to do about that?’ So I found a showjumping stable in Germany and started working as a flat rider,” she says. “I didn’t speak the language at all, I moved alone, and I had barely any life skills as a fifteen year old – so it was a whole new world for me, but I liked the German way of riding and I figured it out.”
But after a few years of laser focus on jumping, burnout began to set in, and Kuki began to look for ways to get her riding fix out of the competition ring.
As a tonic to the sort of results-driven demands on her – and as a way to fund her riding – she started to pick up work backing young horses. Now, that’s her full-time job, around which she squeezes in eventing a small string of horses helmed by her ride this week, the former Astier Nicolas mount Baladin de l’Ocean. Most days, that means she’s working on the yard from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m., and then schooling her own horses until 10 p.m.
“I got into backing because I got a bit sick of riding other people’s horses, and I might not be very good at riding, but I’m very good at staying on,” she laughs. “So that’s how it started. I found that with backing three-year-olds it’s much easier to please people than when you’re riding their more experienced horses. When a three-year-old picks up the left canter lead for the first time it’s the highlight of the day – when you pick up the left canter lead on a twelve-year-old, you never even think about it. I found that it was these little things that kept me going.”
Getting back to focusing on the nitty-gritty of training horses was also, she found, a breath of fresh air after the intensity of the youth jumping circuit – but it was her time on that circuit that led her, wholly accidentally, to her new discipline.
“I did the Junior Europeans in Fontainebleau in 2018, and it was the one time, I think, that all the disciplines were held together,” she says. “I was already feeling about sick about the whole thing – all my friends were the fancy rich kids, and no matter how much I faked it, I couldn’t be like them. So I started hanging out with the eventers that week, and then it just happened that I got into eventing myself.”
Kumru Say and Baladin de l’Ocean. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
Her first eventer was her Junior jumper, the quirky Hyperion Van Orti.
“He was a little bit of a freaky horse,” she laughs, and I can nearly hear her rolling her eyes when she continues, “I was told I should cross-country school him once to ‘break his spirit’.”
Unsure of where to go schooling, she instead took him straight out to their first event, and they finished on their dressage score, taking second place – even though he’d never so much as seen a water complex. Both horse and rider were hooked – and, even better, totally and completely unbroken in spirit.
It might sound like a seriously bold bit of decision-making but, Kuki says, that’s just kind of who she is.
“I’ve always been super brave, which I think was one of the reasons I didn’t really fit in in the showjumping world: I would take on a horse and enter a huge class and not really care how it goes, as long as we have a good feeling over the fences.”
That feeling-first and horse-first ethos meant that “I felt much more at home in eventing.” But, she concedes with a laugh, “once the eventers started considering me crazy, that’s when I realised how insane I actually am!”
The basis of that insanity? Twelve hours a day of backing horses and mucking out stables; a commitment to taking on horses that other people have passed by; and, perhaps most notably, a tendency to do every job herself – out of necessity rather than choice.
“I loved being part of a team [when I was showjumping], and I always say I’d pay anyone to be able to switch and ride for Germany,” she says. “I absolutely love being part of a team and having someone supervising. I go to Arville, to Boekelo, to all these events, and I’m so jealous of the people who have their matching team jackets, their kits, their trainers, and I don’t have anyone. I don’t even have a groom! I drive the horses myself, I show up on my own, I don’t even have anyone to give me a hand in the showjumping warm-up. Luckily the eventing world is pretty helpful in sharing help in the warm-up, and normally people like me, so they step in and help me out, but being by myself can be quite heavy.”
On the flip side, though, she continues, “everything I do, everything I achieve, everything I fail to do, too, is all my work. So I’m proud of that! I’d love a team, for the security of it all, but I also know I’m okay on my own because it’s been that way for so long.”
As a result, she’s learned adaptability: sometimes, even with all the preparations done and the entries paid for, she can’t even make it to an event because she needs to cover for another staff member at her home base, and so getting to the show feels like the first victory of the week.
“I actually used to be very rigid with how I was managing the horses, and now, if I can’t sit on one for a second time before my dressage test, if that doesn’t fit into the day, then it just doesn’t happen and I’m completely cool with it. I can’t stress too much about these things!”
Kumru Say and Baladin de l’Ocean. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
SEIC is German based but Turkish owned, and Kuki, who spent much of her childhood living in New York, trains with Indian Olympian Fouaad Mirza – so as she trailblazes for her own fledgling sporting nation, she has a mentor in her corner who understands the unique position that puts her in.
“From the very early stages on, we’ve been working together,” she says. “I have a very showjumping background in how I see things, and I still process things in a very showjumping mind. And I remember I watched him at a Nations Cup, I think it was in 2020, and he rode a fantastic round of jumping – one of the best I’d seen from an eventer. After that, I approached him and said, ‘I want to train with you. I really loved the way you ride. I don’t understand so much about dressage or cross country riding, but I would like to learn from you’. We have, like, one and a half hours in between us, but I still try to go there every week during the season. We’ve been working for a long time, and I have to say, everything I learned about eventing, it is from Fouaad.”
The horses she’s ridden along the way, too, have contributed plenty to the occasion – even, or perhaps especially, because they’re often oddballs who require plenty of adaptability and very little ego.
“Every horse I’ve got has a story,” says Kuki. “The Global Orchid horse [who I recently sold], I bought from the field. He was injured in 2019 and was in the field for a long time, and a friend of mine who was grooming for Brian [Morrison] and Chris [Hunt, of Global Eventing], he rang me because he knew I was horseless at the time.”
Kuki watched the horse trot up and then bought him on the spot. That was the beginning of 2023, and the start of a long, slow endeavour to bring the gelding back to fitness.
“It was ten minutes trotting left, ten minutes trotting right, for a long time,” says Kuki.
Jack wasn’t just sent her way because he was a budget-friendly option, though.
“The friend who rang me, he knew that first horse of mine, Hyperion,” says Kuki. “He was a very difficult horse to ride – like, I rode that horse up to 1.45 without jumping a single fence in the warm up, I’d just lunge him before the round. And so he rang me about this Global horse and said ‘he’s very similar’, and that was actually the main reason I got the horse — because I loved that Hyperion horse.”
Kumru Say and Baladin de l’Ocean. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
Baladin de l’Ocean joined the team early last year after Kuki spotted him competing with Astier and registered her interest.
“Fouaad gave me a lot of pressure to buy something normal — he said, ‘can you please buy something that is rideable, so that we can school dressage and learn something?!’”
“In fairness,” she concedes, “I actually did need to learn, because I was just surviving four-star cross country — in a very good manner, but I was just surviving cross country up to last year. So he said, ‘let’s go buy something that is nice and rideable’. This horse does that job very well; he’s my school master, basically.”
Now, partnered with Baladin, she’s learned how to develop her skills beyond survival and into the realm of strategy.
“I’ve learned to walk a cross-country course and actually to have a plan on it,” she says. “That’s something I didn’t know how to do. I didn’t grow up eventing, and in my second season I rode my first four-star, so I have a good eye, but that’s what I was relying on. I come from show jumping, and when I’m in doubt, I can showjump cross country, but that’s not cross country riding, sure. I needed the horse to help me learn that, and he’s been the best.”
It was the cold midwinter when Kuki and I chatted through her life story and her horses, and when I pressed her about her future goals as a ‘hobby’ eventer, it was clear she had a game plan.
“The dream is the Europeans,” she says, firmly. “I’ll try to qualify both horses, and we’ll see where it goes, but when you ride for a nation that does not necessarily have a team or is pushing you to go anywhere, the Europeans is just another four long, really!”
And, she continues, “what I want to be is a five-star rider.”
This week, she’s well on her way to ticking box one off her list. She and Baladin de l’Ocean produced their dressage test on Thursday afternoon, earning a 37.1 to sit 44th going into cross-country. And, reassuringly for anyone who might be concerned about Kuki’s energy levels, she’s even got a groom with her this week: freelancer John O’Regan, formerly of Global Event Horses, has become a friend of hers through the Global Orchid connection, and is by her side for every moment of the biggest week of her career so far.
“I’m delighted to be here, and I was delighted with the test,” she says. “He was very composed, very focused, and we had some small mistakes here and there on my side, but there’s plenty to jump on Saturday, and we’re very much looking forward to that.”
Kuki might feel like more of a citizen of the world than a true-blue Turk, but when she heads out onto Blenheim’s cross-country course, she’ll do so with a nod to her heritage close at hand.
“I’m very superstitious,” she grins. “I have the evil eye hanging everywhere, anklets, everywhere.”
EN is proud to welcome Horsepal onboard as the sponsor of our European Championships coverage! Horsepal is a newly-launched heart rate monitor brought to you by Tom MacGuinness, founder of Horseware and an FEI eventer and endurance rider, who’s brought his decades of knowledge to practice in the design of Horsepal. You can now purchase Horsepal directly to the UK and Europe — learn more here.
Agria FEI European Eventing Championships at Blenheim: [Website] [Tickets] [Live Stream] [FEI YouTube Streams] [Entries] [Timing & Scoring] [CrossCountry App XC Map] [EN’s Coverage] [Support Our Sponsor: Horsepal]
