Kim Severson, who is one of just four riders on the US High Performance A List this year, kindly spared me some time to chat recently from her winter base in Aiken. With four horses in her barn, and what she calls a “medium amount” of teaching, we discussed her horsepower, her training methods, and plans for the Spring Season.
Of course, Tipperary Liadhnan is probably her best known horse, but she has two other youngsters waiting in the wings,
“I have a horse called Wiley Post, an American TB, that I’ve had for about four years, and hopefully he will do a two star well this year. I’ll be aiming him at the Pan-American Games. I also have another horse called Fantasy Impromptu, owned by my mom, who is a Hanoverian, and he too ideally would be aiming for the Pan American Games. It’s a bit of a stretch for both of them, but I’ve been pretty careful and pretty slow with them, so that might be something in our future.”
This is the first year that riders have been named to the High Performance or Developing Riders Lists without a specific horse, so I asked Kim if she could choose which horse she takes to the training sessions,
“Basically, I think Mark (Philips) wants to see the ones that are going to be potential team horses so that he can evaluate them, or as he put it, if we need a second opinion on a particular horse.”
“I’ve actually been in Wellington for three weeks working on my show-jumping with Katie (Prudent) so she’s seen them, and was quite happy, so that’s a good starting point.”
Kim started working with Katie, and Katie’s husband Henri Prudent after the Bromont CCI last summer,
“The team gave us some grant money to work on our show-jumping, to see if it would help for Paddy (Tipperary Liadhnan). Clearly it helped plenty, so this year when the A-Listers got some grant money my plan was always to go back and work with Katie and let her see the two younger horses. And of course Paddy worked with her as well.”
From what little I saw at a few of the big events last year, Katie seems to be much more than just a trainer, but also mentor, and almost mother figure to Kim,
“She is the best! I adore her and Henri both, they are amazing. They’re very good at the whole picture, not just jumping clean rounds, but the whole picture: all the flatwork, all the horse care, all the information, everything. That’s been huge, and opened up my eyes in new ways. I hadn’t experienced it before, and it’s been tremendously helpful.”
After a pretty disastrous show-jumping round at Rolex last year plummeted them out of the top 20, and three rails down at Bromont a couple of months later, Kim agrees that the transformation of Paddy’s jumping since working with Katie has been fairly miraculous,
“It was amazing. I learned that I’m very ignorant about show-jumping! There’s just so much that I don’t understand. I’ve always just jumped the jumps without much thought, I didn’t really understand the intricacies of how the horse jumped, and what you could do to help them. A simple example is counting strides – I had never ever counted strides – I was sort of from the school that anything beyond three was beyond me – but it’s really helped me. Let’s say your first two jumps are seven strides apart, I know that now if I jump in and I’m not on the seven strides, whether it be six or eight or whatever, I know right then and there that I’m not in the canter that I need to have to be able to ride the course, and that’s just been a very simple thing for me to understand and know right away if I’m in the appropriate canter.”
Kim told me also that, counter to what I expected, her strength on the flat was almost her undoing,
“While I think it does help me in some ways–it helps me to have very different canters–but then again I don’t know which canter to use! I mean it’s great to have all these choices, but if you don’t know which one to pick…! If you don’t know how to decide what you need, then it’s not going to be very helpful.”
Similarly, Kim explained that show-jumpers and eventers of course, come from completely different places,
“It’s so funny when you have a lesson with Katie, and she says,’ right, go and gallop the oxer.’ Boy, we eventers go GALLOP the oxer, and she’ll say she didn’t mean quite that fast, and I’ll tell her that she has to pick a different word to use then, and generally we’ll be having lessons with other show-jumpers, and let me tell you, their idea of galloping, and ours, are very, very different!”
Just in case you were wondering, Paddy is in fine form,
“He’s good, he came sound by the beginning of November, and he spent most of November in an aqua-tred. I was at the Asian Games in China with Nina, so I was away and Paddy did a month of aqua-tred. Then he came back in December and did all his flatwork and I started to jump him at the very end of December. He went to Florida the second week of January, and I did a week of lessons with Katie, and then we did two weeks of showing. He’s had a few gallops by this point and he seems to be fine. ”
However, there may always be a reminder of the infection that prevented them from representing the USA at the WEG last autumn,
“The leg doesn’t look normal, it probably will never look normal. It’s just fluid between the skin and the tendon sheath, that’s all it is, it’s just scar tissue. So although it looks a little different, he’s 100 % sound on it.”
I asked Kim about her plans for the upcoming spring season,
“I had thought about Badminton, but I’m not so sure I’m going to do that for a couple of reasons. One is that I’d like to go back to Rolex and show-jump a good round, and the other is that I want to be able to pick and choose what he does. For example if he, for whatever reason, didn’t feel completely right, I don’t want to be locked into being over in England and that sort of thing. I just think the safer option, so that I don’t feel like I HAVE to do something, is to do Kentucky. Then of course, if I feel at any point that it’s not worth running him, I won’t. “
The Horse Park holds mixed memories for Kim,
“Well, it’s funny – at Kentucky I tend to do either really well, or poorly.” She laughs again, “it goes both ways, but I do feel like rather than spending the money to go to Badminton, and feeling that pressure, I would just rather stay here, and then if Kentucky goes well, then maybe he’ll do Burghley in the Fall. I believe Mark would much rather they do a four-star in the Fall, so I need to talk to him about it, but we’ll see..”
I asked Kim how she started her relationship with Paddy,
“Paddy kind of found me. He was brought over as a two year old from Ireland by a lady called Tracy Economidis, to the best of my knowledge for her to ride, but she had some sort of accident and couldn’t ride. So Paddy hung out, and people here and there rode him but he didn’t do a whole lot. I don’t know if he’d ever even been to a horse show when I got him. He was 8 years old then, and really not very far along. He was for sale and Linda’s niece, Ann Wachtmeister, was looking to buy him, so they wanted my opinion. When I first saw him I thought they’d be lucky if he did a two star someday – he was as big as a house, it took me an hour to get him in the water, his jumping style was not the best and so on and so forth, so I wasn’t that impressed. Three years later he went to Kentucky! He’s been pretty amazing.”
I remarked that there must have been something about him that changed her mind,
“Well, not really, he just kept on kind of doing his thing! He kept jumping the jumps, and he went around his first advanced at Poplar, which is pretty big, and he just jumped everything. He literally just kept going and doing. Then all of a sudden, there we were at Kentucky!”
Kim and I agree that physically, Paddy could hardly be more of a contrast to her famous ride, Winsome Adante,
“They’re very, very different creatures, but they’re the same in the heart, and obviously, as I’ve said before, what makes an event horse is their heart and their mind. They’re the same in that respect, but definitely physically they could not be more different.”
“The two younger horses are very different as well; Fancy Impromptu is Hanoverian, but a very thoroughbred-y Hanoverian, and he’s incredibly fancy. But he gets worried, so the dressage sometimes can be tense. Although he’s this big, fancy, lovely mover – if you don’t have the relaxation, then you don’t have much. He’s getting to be quite a good jumper, his technique is getting better and better and he’s the sort of a horse I feel like if I put it in front of him, he’ll jump it.”
“The Wiley Post horse, which is the American TB, is quite sassy, he’s becoming a very good mover, he’s very trainable, and he’s a good jumper. The big question with him is if he’s going to believe in himself enough to do the upper levels. It’s funny for an athletic and quality a horse that he is, he gets worried that he can’t do it. I have every faith in that horse, I believe he’s a very, very good horse, it’s just a matter of him believing that he’s that good of a horse. For him, it will be a wait and see year to what’s going to happen.”
“They’re pretty different horses!”
Kim is renowned for her skill at getting the best out of all sorts of types of horses, and having heard the affection and detail with which she described each of their characters and quirks, I asked her if this is what she really enjoys, and what motivates her,
“You do it because you love it. You love the horses. They’re all interesting in their own way. I do it because I love the horses”
Kim, of course, is easily one of the leading US event riders on the flat, and has taken lessons from Gerd Zuther for the last six or seven years,
“He’s rather like Katie in the fact that you never get the same lesson twice. You get whatever lesson is appropriate for the horse and where it’s at and at what level. He’s one of those people who can look at a horse and know what particular exercise is going to work for it, and what’s going to work best for the horse, he’s pretty unique that way.”
Kim has four horses in work currently, and tweaks their schedules according to how they feel daily,
“I definitely believe that you should have a general plan, ie the day after a competition off, and the first day back in their work I prefer that they go trotting, and say the next day would be dressage. Maybe there are certain things I’ll work on with each horse, or sometimes I’ll get on and feel like I can’t even get to that point today and so I’ll work on transitions instead. I strongly believe that if things aren’t working on a particular day, if it’s a bad day for you, or a bad day for the horse, and we all have those, I’m happy to just leave it, absolutely leave it, and go and do something else. If it’s just not going to happen, then I’d much prefer to just leave it alone.”
I asked Kim who she looked up to most within the horse world,
“Currently, that would be Katie and Henri (Prudent) . Of course you have your influences over the years, like Lucinda Green – watching her jump around the ’84 Olympics and stuff like that, those are the type of people you look up to and always will. I guess I believe that you can learn something from everyone.”
Finally, we talked about having a life away from the barn, being able to relax physically and mentally,
“I’m pretty good at switching off”, she laughs, “It’s not really an issue for me. I like to watch television, and movies, or read. It depends on where you are and what you’re doing.”
The last movie Kim saw was Secretariat at the end of January, and she’s longing to see Black Swan, but the cinema in Virginia is a 40 minute drive so she doesn’t go as often as she’d like. However, she has netflixed 30 Rock, and is well into Season 3 and loving it!
Of course, I want to thank Kim for her time, it was a real treat to chat with her. I was disarmed by how extremely modest she is, and her quiet sense of humour, and I can’t wait to see her at future events. Thank you for reading too, and Go Eventing!
