Chocolate Horse (13 page)

Ms. Bryant began writing The Saddle Club in 1986. Although she had done some riding before that, she intensified her studies then and found herself learning right along with her characters Stevie, Carole, and Lisa. She claims that they are all much better riders than she is.

Ms. Bryant was born and raised in New York City. She still lives there, in Greenwich Village, with her two sons.

by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

C
lose your eyes and try to picture the biggest Olympic athlete ever. What do you see? A giant basketball player? A super sumo wrestler? Wrong! The biggest Olympian weighs more than six sumos—more than twenty-five gymnasts! America’s largest Olympian is huge!

Meet Gifted, a Hanoverian horse. He’s owned and ridden by a woman named Carol Lavell, and in the world of dressage riding, he’s famous. He’s also really big.

“Gifted is 17.3 hands high,” said Carole. A hand is four inches. Horses are measured from their shoulders,
so it’s nearly six feet from the top of Gifted’s shoulder to the ground. “While there are some other very tall horses out there,” Carole continued, “our joke is that Gifted is also 17.3 hands wide. He’s very wide, extraordinarily heavy, big and huge.” Gifted weighs 1,895 pounds!

Gifted competes in dressage, the most elegant equestrian sport. In dressage the horses don’t jump but execute patterns of movements on the ground. Top-level dressage looks like a dance performed by horse and rider, and sometimes dressage performances are set to music. To do well at dressage, a horse must be strong, so many dressage horses are larger than average. But dressage horses also have to be agile—they must be able to move quickly and gracefully. Most gigantic horses are clumsy. Gifted is not. He’s like a hippopotamus doing ballet—and he dances like a prima ballerina.

The United States excels in show jumping and three-day eventing, the other Olympic equestrian sports, but has never done particularly well in dressage. In many European countries, children who want to ride must start out learning dressage, and they might ride dressage-style for several years before being allowed to learn to jump. In the United States, dressage is rarely taught to the young. Children learn
to ride in a different way and start to jump much sooner. Many American riders never learn dressage.

Dressage is not as popular in the United States as it is in Europe. Europeans flock to dressage shows; Americans don’t. The United States has won only one individual medal in dressage, and that was in 1932, a year when very few horses competed. The United States won the team silver in 1948 and the team bronzes in 1932, 1976, and 1992, with Gifted
competing last and finishing best among the Americans. Gifted was the sixth best, behind one horse from the Netherlands and all four horses from the super-strong German team.

Carol Lavell rides Gifted.

Because of Gifted, dressage is becoming more popular here. When he performs, he does it with a joy that people like to see. They come to Carol’s farm to watch him practice. Sometimes Carol needs to get work done and asks them to leave, but usually she likes to show Gifted off. She wants more people to enjoy dressage.

Taking care of Gifted is an enormous challenge. Carol said, “He’s more trouble to take care of than any ten other horses I’ve ever owned.” Carol recently described for The Saddle Club readers all she does for her wonderful horse.

How much does Gifted eat?

Most horses are fed a scoop of grain once or twice a day and an armful of hay two or three times a day. A horse that does a lot of work might get more grain—maybe as much as ten pounds of grain a day.

“I’d like Gifted to eat at least twenty-seven pounds a day,” Carol said. Gifted needs to eat that much or he’ll lose weight and energy. But the problem is, Gifted doesn’t like to eat. He doesn’t want anyone to watch him eat, and he doesn’t like to eat in the mornings. “He rarely eats breakfast,” Carol said.

Since Gifted would never eat enough if he were fed only twice a day, Carol feeds him several times. In the morning she gives him breakfast in his stall. If he starts to eat she leaves him alone, but if he doesn’t eat she takes him out and starts his day.

At noon she gives him lunch right on top of the breakfast still left in his dish. By then Gifted is usually ready to eat something.

“His feed dish is like a huge dog food bowl on the floor of his stall,” Carol said. “In the summer we put a towel over his feed to keep the flies off. He knows to push the towel to the side when he wants to eat, but we haven’t been able to teach him to put it back on. So, all day long, we have to put his towel back.”

At dinnertime she gives him more grain on top of the lunch leftovers. Late at night she goes out to the stable and fills his dish to the top. In the morning, it’s usually empty. Gifted likes to eat at night. Carol washes his feed tub and fills it again with breakfast.

What does Gifted eat?

Gifted eats sweet feed, a mixture of oats and other grains. Sweet feed usually has molasses added to give it a sweet flavor and a sticky texture. Gifted is very picky—unlike most horses, which will eat almost any grain, Gifted likes only a certain brand of sweet feed. When Carol took him to the Netherlands for the 1994 dressage World Championships, she took 3,000
pounds of Gifted’s sweet feed with her! It cost her more than a thousand dollars to ship it by air. “They have perfectly fine horse feed in Europe, of course,” she said, “but not according to Gifted.”

Gifted also gets all the hay he wants. Carol keeps a rack in his stall full. He gets as much water as he can drink, too—and if he’s been working hard Carol puts electrolytes in it, making it like horse Gatorade. And Gifted takes vitamins every day. Carol watches his diet carefully, because she knows good nutrition keeps him healthy.

What is a day like for Gifted?

Carol can’t just put her saddle on Gifted and go out for a ride. Gifted is getting older—he’s fifteen—and dressage puts a lot of stress on his legs and back. So Carol uses two special treatments to help keep him comfortable—a magnetic blanket and a laser.

One of Gifted’s legs is a little arthritic. Carol uses a medical laser on it to make the blood in that leg flow faster. This keeps Gifted from feeling sore. (Some horse medicines would also keep Gifted from feeling sore, but because he is a competition horse he is not allowed to use them. All horses in competition are tested for drugs regularly, and they aren’t allowed to take any medicines while competing.) The magnetic blanket is similar—Carol puts it over Gifted’s back, and it gives him a massage. Gifted gets both the magnetic
blanket and the laser treatment for half an hour in the morning and half an hour at night.

Then Carol rides, right?

Right. Carol tacks Gifted up and they go to work. She usually rides him for forty-five minutes every day. They practice all the special dressage moves they do in competition. Gifted’s favorite movement is one-tempo flying changes—he canters across the arena, changing his lead leg every stride. It looks as if he’s skipping. Gifted thinks the piaffe—the trot in place—is hard, and any movement that calls for him to go sideways is difficult for him because of his size.

After forty-five minutes of hard work, Gifted is hot and sweaty. Carol takes his saddle off and lets him have a drink of water. Then she gives him a shower for another forty-five minutes. She’s careful to put a lot of cold water on his legs. This is good for Gifted’s tendons, which take a lot of stress from his weight. Carol has special “soakers” that attach to Gifted’s hind legs and drip cold water down them continuously.

Then does Gifted relax?

Yes. Carol dries his legs and wraps them in bandages to protect them. Gifted has white stockings up to his knees on all four legs, and the pink skin underneath the white hair is very tender. Fly bites make his
legs bleed. So Carol bandages them—and she has to wash the bandages every day.

Gifted has his own grass paddock attached to his stall. Carol opens the door in between so that he can wander in and out as he pleases. “He usually falls asleep lying down, wakes up, lifts his head to eat the grass around him, then puts his head back down and sleeps some more,” she said.

Then does Carol relax?

No! She has other horses to ride and train. She has students to train. She has bandages to wash.

When she and Gifted are at competitions, especially in Europe, she often can’t find a paddock for Gifted to relax in. When she can’t, she takes him for long walks in the afternoon.

How does Gifted travel to shows?

In the United States, Gifted rides in the Giftedmobile. He’s so long that he doesn’t fit in regular horse trailers, so Carol had to have one specially made for him.

On airplanes horses travel in shipping stalls. When Gifted flies he has to have two stalls because he’s too wide to fit into a single one. The airline has to take out part of the back of the stalls, too.

How does Gifted fit into horse stalls?

Not very well. At home he has his own superlarge stall, but at shows he has to have a regular stall like all
the other horses. “He’s so big that if he just turns around in an ordinary-sized stall, he breaks something,” Carol said. “He’s always getting cut because he’s got pieces of boards or something around his feet.” That’s another reason why Carol keeps his legs bandaged.

How did Carol find a saddle to fit Gifted?

She won it! Carol used to ride in the widest saddle she could find, but sometimes it still made Gifted’s back sore because it didn’t really fit him. Carol and Gifted won the World Cup Freestyle League dressage championships in 1992. One of the prizes was a saddle made by Hermès, a famous French saddle company.

When Carol told Hermès that the prize saddle didn’t fit Gifted, they offered to make her any kind of saddle she wanted. Hermès flew a team of saddlers to Sweden, where Carol and Gifted were competing, and they measured Gifted and talked to Carol about how she wanted the saddle to fit. After a few adjustments, the saddle was perfect! Carol got it just in time to use it in the 1992 Olympics.

Gifted’s other tack has to be specially made, too. His horse blankets are more than seven feet long, and they have to have extra material added at the sides so that they fit around Gifted’s middle.

Where did Carol get Gifted?

She bought him in Germany. Gifted was four years
old and had never been ridden. “I’ve always started all my horses,” Carol explained. “I’ve never had a competition horse that I haven’t trained completely.

“I didn’t think Gifted was difficult to train, but other people have told me he was,” she added. “Gifted has very strong opinions … when he doesn’t want to do something no one can make him. You either figure out how to make him want to do it, or you just give it up for a while.”

Will Gifted be on the Olympic team in Atlanta?

Carol hopes so! She thinks Gifted is stronger and better now than he was in the 1992 Olympics. She and her superstar horse will give it their best shot!