The Retired Racehorse Project Trainer Challenge gained some great publicity for off-track Thoroughbreds, but many of us already knew OTTBs make fantastic partners! Thanks to Eventer79 for sending us this video on her retired racehorse-turned eventer, “Encore.” Thanks for reading, watching, and Go Eventing!
From Eventer79:
Don’t know if you’d be interested in this or not, but given all the OTTB press lately, I thought I would share a success story. This is my 6 y.o. OTTB named Away Again (Encore). He raced for three years and was then donated (sound) to Canter Mid-Atlantic. They let him down from racing and I bought him last September (2011). At that point, he could (sort-of) steer and had never jumped a vertical until our trial ride. This is the helmet cam recorded this past Saturday from his first BN cross-country course, at Running Start Horse Trials on a Gina Fiore-designed course in Vass, NC at the beautiful farm of Roger and Mari Secrist, who very generously just started offering horse trials there. Encore has been back under saddle, post let-down, for about seven months and did one schooling Maiden HT last fall and almost all of his training has been done by me, an adult amateur rider with a full-time job (and a horribly sad paycheck). A pro would have been much faster, I expect, but I’m poor and I enjoy the process. He had a great run, we just had to do a little “brake check” in the middle before barreling down a hill! It was a challenging course for BN and he stepped up to every question; I have fallen hard for the magic of the OTTB.
