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Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Collecting Gaits Farm/USEF Dressage Festival of Champions

Lauren Sammis and Sagacious Rapid Rise to the Top
Lynndee Kemmet for Dressagedaily.com

Less than a year ago Lauren Sammis and Sagacious debuted in the Prix St. Georges, at Dressage at Devon, and are now on their way to Rio, to represent the United States on the Pan American Games Dressage Team, placing second overall in the Collecting Gaits Farm/USEF National Dressage Intermediaire Championships.

Sagacious, an eight-year-old Dutch Warmblood gelding owned by Al and Judy Guden’s Hyperion Farm, came in second overall in the Pan American Games Selection Trials, earning a spot on the U.S. Dressage Team that will travel to Rio this summer. The gelding was once almost on the sale block, but now he’ll most likely be heading to the Pan American Games this summer. After this weekend’s competition, Sammis and Sagacious have earned the right to represent the U.S. at the Pan American Games in Rio along with Hickey and Regent and Katherine Poulin-Neff and Brilliant Too. The team alternate is Susan Dutta with Pik-L.

It was Dutch trainer Toine Hoefs who bought Sagacious (by Welt Hit II out of Cocktail) for the Gudens when the horse was four months old. The gelding stayed in Europe until he was four and then the Gudens brought him home to the U.S.

Sammis came into the picture when the Gudens were looking to sell the horse. “I had the horse and I needed a new rider and I had decided at that point that I was going to sell the horse,” Al Guden said. “So I called Lauren and told her that I wanted her to get on, see what she thought of the horse and sell it for me. We’ve known each other for a dozen years, since she was a little kid. So she came over and rode him. When she got off the horse, I told her what I wanted to get for him and she, ‘absolutely no problem.’ But then she called me back the next day and said ‘I’d like to bring that horse along a little bit because I think he’s really valuable’.”