Thursday, October 26, 2006

Michigan's Catherine Haddad: First Alternate for the U.S. Dressage Team for the World Equestrian Games, Makes a Visit Home
By Jan Macafee

Talk about so near and yet so far! Catherine, formally of mid Michigan, was a heartbeat away from one of her ambitions, to represent America in international competition. (The WEG were held in August). Making the team is a complicated enterprise, and it was not to be, in spite of her excellent scores accrued in the past show season on the Danish horse Maximus JSS. Catherine has been living and learning in Germany for 14 years, competing, training horses and teaching riders. She took the disappointment in stride and is wisely just very pleased to have done so well, to be breathing the rarified air of the highest echelons of competitive dressage. She is now rated in the top 50 in the world.

And she brought that expertise and experience for everyone to see in a clinic (part of a month-long series in various states) Sept. 12 and 13th in Milan. She had a full schedule both days and the event attracted both professionals and amateur riders, many of whom had ridden with her in the past and couldn’t wait to do so again.

There’s a reason for that enthusiasm. Catherine is one smart cookie (she graduated with honors in International Relations from MSU), and brings an intellectual component to her gimlet-eyed observations of a given horse’s performance. Articulate, upbeat and with a wicked wit, she is simply fun to be around, along with being a born teacher. Her skill was obvious with the marked improvement shown by all the horses. To everyone’s delight, she rode some of them, and one could see the effects of all the hard work with instructors like the late Willi Schultheis and one of his students, Rudolph Zeilinger.

Here is a necessarily abbreviated list of some of Catherine’s ideas......