E-Mail This Page

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Collecting Gaits Farm/USEF Dressage Festival of Champions

Sammis and Sagacious Top the Leader Boards In Intermediaire I

Sammis, who runs a sales and training business in New Jersey and Florida, also had a fair amount of family members in attendance during the competition. It added a bit of pressure for her to perform well, which, of course, she did. “I’m glad that I was able to step up to the plate and not embarrass my family,” she said.

Sammis is clearly thrilled with Sagacious, which really showed after the pair’s I-1 victory on the Saturday of competition. “I thought he felt great. I was happy to ride him,” she said. When asked to describe what was best about her ride she replied, “I can probably better describe things that didn’t go well, because I messed up a change and came around to my pirouette and thought, ‘you screwed up one thing so you’d better do really well on something else.’ I was thinking to myself, ‘come on buddy, bring it home.’ The whole horse has changed so dramatically, even over the last four weeks. He just feels really, really great and it sometimes surprises me when I go into a corner how right there he is.”

What’s changed most in the last month, Sammis said, is that Sagacious has begun to learn his passage.

“And that’s a big thing for a horse that is going from Prix St. Georges to Grand Prix.

When your horse can learn to passage, you can kind of put it into your test a little bit when your horse is really learning to collect.

And that just appeared with him and it’s amazing to get that feeling that he can just collect and you can start to get that cadence that will really show when it gets to Grand Prix, but it gives the horse a lot more expression in the Prix St. Georges.”