Isabella Muñoz Jaramillo and Ebay. Photo by Tina Fitch Photography.
For those who followed Helen Alliston’s career through the upper levels of eventing, Ebay is one horse that, once he got into your head, you couldn’t really forget about. His upper-level career with the California-based Helen — one half of the Alliston Equestrian pair that also includes former British-now-USA rider James Allison — culminated in a win at the USEA American Eventing Championships Adequan Advanced Final in 2025, and he’d competed through the CCI4* level with Helen in the irons. When he stepped back from the upper levels that same year, it felt like the closing of a chapter.
But at the Woodside Spring Horse Trials this spring, there he was again. The rider on his back, however, was someone new: a small, serious teenager named Isabella Muñoz Jaramillo, navigating her first recognized event on a once-in-a-lifetime schoolteacher of a horse.
The story of how Isabella ended up in the saddle of one of Helen’s most accomplished event horses begins, improbably, with ChatGPT, funny enough.
When Gloria and Andres Muñoz Jaramillo began preparing to relocate their family from Colombia to Northern California for Andres’s work in the pharmaceutical industry, they did what any modern parent might do: they started researching. Gloria pulled up ChatGPT and started asking where a young eventer could get serious training in the Bay Area. The algorithm pointed, consistently, to one name: Alliston Equestrian.
“We found James and Helen in three different ways,” Gloria recalls. ChatGPT surfaced them. So did a hunter-jumper trainer the family cold-called. So did a retired horsewoman in Walnut Creek who spent an hour talking with Gloria, felt a kinship with Isabella’s story, and then went home and emailed her own network for recommendations. Every thread led back to the Allistons.
So one Monday in January 2025, Gloria and Andres drove out to the farm unannounced, walked in, and found Helen and James riding side by side. Gloria pulled out her phone and showed Helen videos of Isabella riding in Colombia. She’d started off at a riding school and had expressed a desire to start eventing.
Helen Alliston and Ebay. Photo by Shannon Brinkman Photography.
“Helen said, ‘Yes, awesome, she can come,'” Gloria recalls. When she called Isabella with the news — that she was standing at the barn of James Alliston — Isabella’s response was immediate. She already knew who he was. Her trainer in Colombia had followed the international circuit closely and had sent her videos of James competing at CHIO Aachen a few years earlier. Her parents, meanwhile, had never heard of him.
“We said, oh, okay then,” Gloria laughs. The matter was settled.
The family moved to California in May 2025, settling close enough to the barn that the commute is twenty minutes, which was a deliberate choice. Andres drives an hour, minimum, each way to San Mateo for work. Nobody in the family complained.
“For us, it’s very important,” Gloria says of her two children. “To have sport in their lives.”
Helen had tried to retire Ebay. She had, in her words, “done the dramatic Facebook post.” She moved him out to pasture with James’s older horses, Jumbo’s Jake and Parker, and thought that was that.
Life as a pasture pet didn’t take for Ebay — a story we hear often for recently retired horses.
“He wasn’t eating. He wasn’t super comfortable around the other horses,” Helen recalls. “And he was losing a lot of weight.” So, she brought him back in and found herself at a crossroads. She had done some dressage with him pre-retirement, schooling Fourth Level work, and had even done a show or two. But it didn’t truly suit either of them.
“I went to a couple shows and it was just wasn’t really my scene,” she says (relatable, to be honest). “I didn’t think it was fair to him to have him just in a stall when I was only riding him. It just didn’t seem quite right.”
Ebay, as many other upper-level horses in retirement, is a horse who needs a job and people around him. “He wants people around him all the time,” Helen says. “So this is ideal for him.”
So when Isabella’s first lease at the barn ended and the question arose of what came next, the answer arrived organically. Isabella had spent months proving herself: showing up early, grooming, mucking, helping with therapy treatments, and generally doing whatever needed doing without being asked. Helen had told the family upfront that not just anyone would get to ride her good horses.
Isabella hangs with her best bud, Ebay.
“The work ethic…you don’t really get that anymore,” Helen says. “She just wants to be around the horses. She wants to learn. She’s just got a really good attitude that you want to support.”
There was one other thing Helen remembered. On the very first day the family had visited the farm, Andres had looked at her with a quiet smile and said something she hadn’t forgotten: “You’re gonna want her to work for you.”
For Isabella, the challenge of riding a finely-tuned horse has become the education. Coming from Colombia, where grooms tack up and untack without the rider touching the horse, she has had to learn everything from scratch. And she prefers it this way.
“Back in Colombia, I didn’t really ever tack up my own horse,” she says. “And I really wanted to be able to do that and spend more time.” Here in California, she works off part of the lease. She hacks Ebay constantly, ices his legs, and studies every lesson she can. Going to the barn six or seven times a week during the school year isn’t a sacrifice, it’s just where she wants to be.
The partnership clicked in the way these things do when the fit is right. “You can truly tell he loves what he does,” Isabella says. “That’s just great to feel and to know. He’s allowed me to learn more than I have to worry about him actually knowing. He’s a trained horse. He’s allowed me to grow better in dressage and show jumping and focus more on what I have to do.”
At Woodside, she got a taste of what it means to ride a horse who genuinely loves his job. “He would let you know that he loved it,” she says. “You’d just feel him excited. But it was never in a way that I would feel scared. He would never want to hurt you or do anything to put you in a dangerous situation. That is really good to feel.”
Gloria watched all of it: the cross-country schooling at the crack of dawn, the saddle-hauling, the leg-icing, the accumulation of skill. “She reflects a person who has a real dream, a real passion,” Gloria says. “She doesn’t think of anything different than horses.”
“Ten years ago, we never imagined Isabella riding in the United States,” Gloria continues. “And it’s not only riding, it’s training every day with professional riders.”
Helen, for her part, just wants to watch it keep going and enjoy the ride. “Since I can’t really retire him, apparently!” she laughs. “I want him to last a long time. And I think he’ll enjoy doing this with her for a long time.”
