Gill Rolton was the original Golden Girl of Equestrian Sport. As a member of Australia’s gold medal winning team at the Barcelona Olympic Games, it was her bubbly personality that captured the imagination of the Australian public – here at last was a horse person that the media loved to interview. Four years later, Gill was again a cult hero, this time for her courage in continuing to ride across country with a broken collar bone and ribs – at one stage four tough AFL clubs were using footage of the ride to inspire their players!
Since then, Gill has scaled back on the competition riding – although she is still active at a lower level – and found new equestrian heights to scale. As a judge, she has been in demand all over the world, and has proven her dedication to her new role taking time out to watch master dressage trainer, Jean Bemelmans at work in Germany, to sit in with Olympic level judges at Kentucky, do judges training and shadow judging in the UK as well as Australia, amongst other things…
Gill was instrumental in the formation of the Mitsubishi Young Eventing Rider Squad, perhaps the only wildly successful young rider initiative in Australian equestrian history. Sadly the cars were not as popular as the sponsorship, and when Mitsubishi pulled the plug, the Mitsubishi Young Rider squad bit the dust. But Gill Rolton is no quitter, she has bounced back, in an even more demanding job – the director of the Adelaide four star!
And – as you will find in this exclusive four part series – Gill still finds time to teach a number of exciting young riders, while bringing on an group of exciting young horses. Wow.
Memories…
Gillian Rolton’s first horsey memory is of her brother’s horse, Starry. “My brother John is ten years older than me. We lived at Bellevue Heights at the time, in the suburbs, and John and a couple of friends, shared horses between them all. I was three months old (according to reliable reports, ie. her Mum) at the time, and always wanted to get on Starry. And of course, Mum and Dad wouldn’t let me because I was too young and precious. By the time John got to 16, Starry was well and truly gone and he was into go-kart then car racing. I was harping, harping, harping for a horse and Mum and Dad kept saying ‘no, you are too young.”
“Then I got into competitive swimming and did the endless-black-line thing, but I finally went to Sheoak Riding School at the age of eight, and for the next couple of years, went every Saturday – still swimming competitively. A couple of my friends at school had show horses and my best school friend Gail – her grandfather owned Sargeant’s Stables at Darlington. There was a mish mash of horses there, trotters, pacers, kid’s ponies – I used to go at the weekends and clean stables and groom horses and hope to get a sit on something occasionally. It was entrenched; there was no way I was going away from horses…”
“When I was ten and a half, my parents gave in. My first horse was a big, black Standardbred, Randy the Rig. He was lovely. Not the sort of horse you’d ever buy for a kid, but he was the first one we went to see, and I just had to have this horse, so Mum and Dad bought it. I did everything with him. I went to Pony Club, tried to make it canter, which he did abysmally badly. Occasionally he got out of the pace and into a half canter. We used to go to shows… and go in everything.”
“We used to ride for an hour or two to get to Riding Club at Blair National Park, then ride around the Park with the club, then ride back home. By this stage my friend Jan Noblett was very much into the showing side of things and it looked quite fun. My first show was Macclesfield, a few of us from Sargeant’s stables hired a really old Goldners horse transport to take our horses. I was in the rider class trying to make Randy canter! A lady called Mrs Bald came up to me that day and she said I’ve got some ponies and we need a rider to show them in the child’s pony classes – would you be interested in riding them? They were also really good novelty ponies and I was really into novelties… Mum and Dad agreed.”
“The first goal in life was to get a horse. That was achieved at age 10. The next goal was to get to a Royal Show, and that was never going to happen with old Randy, but riding for Mrs Bald, I got to ride in the rider classes, the pony hacks and the novelties. We did the whole lot. At my first Adelaide Royal I think I came fourth in my Rider Class, third in the Kid’s musical chairs, fourth in the Kid’s Pony… so that was that goal achieved, and the next was to win at a Royal and we managed that too. Now the search was on for the next goal.”
“Randy didn’t do much in the way of jumping. I tried to head him into fences but while he got over them, he wasn’t wonderful, and he was certainly not a show horse… so it was time to find the next horse. We found a nice home for Randy – he was supposed to be a seven year old Thoroughbred ex-racehorse and eventually we found out he was a 17 year old ex-Pacer. The next one was a little bit more successful, a four year old Riding Pony, Petrella. (by Petreem out of Arabella).”
She was lovely, green but quiet and sweet. We took her home, and I had lessons on her with Pat Hutchins who was a showy and dressage coach whose mentor and teacher was Tom Roberts. Pat still coaches young kids and is a B level dressage judge… She worked a lot on position and getting the horse rhythmic supple and into a contact….she was great.”
“Trelle became quite wayward when she came home, we didn’t know enough, she was young and not really established – and could be a little spooky and naughty – for the first year I was probably more often on the ground than on her back, she learned to dump me fairly well and I had to learn how to ride her. Pat certainly helped… Pat would ride her once a week and I would ride her the rest of the time. She ended up being quite successful , she was a great novelty pony but she was a good pony hack, and did the rider classes and everything – and placed in all of those classes at the Royal.”
“In those days Riding Clubs were really big, I went more the Riding Club route than the Pony Club way. Pony Club was more get out there and kick around and jump a lot, and not do a lot of flat work. The Riding Clubs were more showing / dressage, and so I got more and more into the showing side and I started to be asked to ride people’s horses for them. I got to ride quite a lot of nice horses and did quite well at the Royals. I did some dressage with Pat. We used to have Summer Schools and May Schools, and May Schools were with Jane Bush and John Vaughan and all the good old riders who went back to Franz Mairinger. I used to go to all of those.”
“Then I got a Thoroughbred off the track, an orang-utan Galloway, she was lovely, she was quite hot, but a lovely mare, she was champion led at the Royal a number of times, and did well in her Galloway class. I started jumping her, she was quite an athletic, jumper, and did dressage with her as well.
Next I was given the ride on Dahlreem (Mr P) – a very nice moving, big grey, dare I say, Anglo Arab by Petreem out of Nora Dale. I did quite well in dressage with him, and won Champion Equestrienne and riders at the Royal, did hacks, and hurdles, and hunters, all sorts of stuff with him. I had him in my school years eleven and twelve.”
“Back then there was real horsemanship. We all did everything, you learnt how to feed the horses, you learnt how to work them correctly, you learnt how to condition them properly. I remember one time, it must have been during year 12 and it was leading up to the Royal Show. I went to a show, and I knew I hadn’t done the work on Mr P, I’d been studying, got into my Rider Class, and he preceded to dump me right in the middle of the ring in front of everyone – how embarrassing was that! Served me right, because I didn’t work him enough and went to the show anyway… you learnt pretty quick if you didn’t do the work, you wouldn’t do any good.”
“One of my first instructors was Tom Roberts, and also Keith Guster, down at the South Australian Dressage Club in the South Parklands. We used to go down there every Sunday if we weren’t at riding club. I took old Randy to Tom Roberts and Keith Guster! Pat Hutchins was a product of Tom Roberts and the Dressage Club. Pat had some very good show horses, as did her daughter, Gayle later on. Pat also had a super moving Paint dressage horse called Fantasy I think that she took quite a long way up the grades. They were great role models of their day.”
“In the end I rode quite a lot of horses at the Royals for many people, including the Nobletts, Charlotte Mitton and Judy Kaponica, and won championships or reserve championships in Ponies. Galloways and Hacks.”
“I guess I got to ride such a diverse range of horses because I was pretty brave at the time and I would get on and ride anything. I didn’t have a lot of money. I had a lot of parental support but not a lot of parental money. I had to make do with what I had, and when you are driven by various goals, you have to work out ways you are going to achieve them.”
“I kept on being a showie all the way through. I think showing is not a bad thing because you learn how to feed to the horses well, how to present them well, you learn how to condition them. I found it was a really good way of getting young horses out and about, they would get used to the showgrounds, used to horses running up their backsides, and you would keep them flowing forward – whereas a lot of people who went straight into dressage would never ride out, just ride around and around in a little arena. A lot of horses would lose their movement because right from day one they would be worked in an arena, never getting them through and forward. I thought hacking was quite a good means-to-an-end for me. In those days, you would do a year’s hacking and a little showjumping as part of their basic education, there were jumping hunter classes, and they always really paid well at the shows. So if you didn’t do well in the hack class, or the equestrienne or rider class, you’d go in the hunter class, and maybe pick up twenty or thirty bucks and pay for your petrol home, and that was important.”
“I was doing a little showjumping at the same time, but not much until I went overseas. In 1976 after two years at Teacher’s College, I knew that I didn’t want to be stuck in classroom gazing out thinking I could be working the horses, but there was nowhere in Australia where you could study for employment with horses. The time at College was very good, and helped me as a teacher, and on reflection, maybe as a coach, but it was not what I wanted to spend my life doing… I wrote a lot of letters to a lot of places all around the world to see where I could go to learn to ride. I went to see Pat Roberts – Tom’s widow – because I remembered that in one of their newsletters, they’d talked about riding overseas. Pat gave me a few names and I wrote off, and received a very nice letter from Grant McEwen College in Alberta, Canada, saying ‘come over, we run a vet course, but you can work full time in training stables, do some of the lectures at night, and then sit your exam at the end of the year’. Great. It was organised… ”
“My surfing and school mate, Juli –who I used to go down the coast surfing with and who now had a job with the Tax department and had with real money– said ‘you’re not going to go overseas without me’. So It was organised, as 19 yr olds we would embark on a 12 month trek ‘OS’. Juli had done a bit of trail and western riding, so off we went to Canada via Hawaii, and California – lots of fun – then ended up at Sandy Ramsdale’s school in Edmonton, Alberta. It was great. They gave me a little grey Anglo Arab to break in – under their supervision. Broke her in and learnt all the steps, and watched a lot, rode a lot, cleaned lots of stables. Sandy was riding Prix St Georges / Inter I, she was mainly dressage but it was a very big stable – they had a lot of horses, they had Western horses, I did a couple of clinics with a Western guy, that was very interesting. They had some jumpers, but no eventers. Mainly dressage.”
“I ended up staying three months. I sat the exam and passed it quite well, and by that stage Juli was getting understandably edgy about the early mornings and cleaning out a whole bunch of stables every day. I got to ride a bit but she was basically just doing stables. So we moved on. Got to Montreal just before the Olympic Games but everything was so expensive we just couldn’t afford to stay, which was a real shame… we pretty much travelled around the world for the rest of that year, but in that time I realised that I wanted to make a career out of horses if I possibly could. I did quite a lot of jumping in my training for the Professional Horseman’s association of Canada’s Level One, and got quite itchy feet to get home, and do some jumping, and ‘proper’ stuff instead of going round and round in circles.”
“Before I went overseas, I bought a weanling, Monty, and by the time I got home, it was time to break him in and start riding him… that was to be Saville Row, my first eventer.”
Next episode, Gill rises rapidly through Australian eventing ranks, the road to Barcelona is open…
Joe Waldron takes a lesson
I must confess I am a sucker for lunge lessons. I figure that if one of the world’s all-time-stylists in a saddle, American jumping superstar, Bill Steinkraus, warms up – stirrups crossed on the lunge – and then goes straight out to win a gold medal at the Mexico Games, there might just be something to be said for working on your position in this time honoured way.
It seems that Gill agrees, since young Joe Waldron finds himself sitting on one of the classiest of lunge ponies – the Warmblood stallion, GP Jack Sparrow (by Don Ramiro and bred by Ali Foye) no stirrups, no reins, and to ram home the message that she is a stickler for correctness, Gill wants to know why Joe is on the wrong diagonal for his rising trot?
Now he has to point his toes down, toes up, arms out, rotate backwards, twist and point, now the knee off the saddle, “find your seat bones.”
“Loosen your shoulders, sit tall, sit up, follow the motion with your seat.”
This is simply brilliant rider education.
Joe confesses that actually he doesn’t do a lot on the lunge back home in Whyalla, three and a half hours drive away:
“Only when I come to Gill. I have a couple of lessons on the lunge each time I come down, and I can definitely feel my position getting better… working on my arms, seat and lower leg, it helps heaps.”
Joe grew up in Dunedin, on New Zealand’s South Island. “It was more just get on, have a bit of fun, jump a few jumps – now I’m trying to get a bit more serious with my riding.”
“Eventing is my main aim, and a bit of showjumping in between. I’ve got a nice horse, nothing too flash or serious but hopefully he’ll be able to get me up the grades. It’s hard at Whyalla, I come down to Gill every three weeks because there’s nobody up there, and there’s no competitions – a few pony club rallies every now and then. I’d love to take my riding as far as I can go – the Olympics one day would be pretty good.”
And Gill as a coach? “She’s awesome, she gets her point across so easily and it is so clear you know exactly what to do when she’s telling you. She makes sure you do it when she tells you, but she also makes sure she tells you when you get it right, it gives you a lot of encouragement.”
Joe wasn’t actually supposed to be sitting on the lunge, he was headed for his first intro event, and – guess what? – horse hurt himself and needed four weeks off. There are some lessons everyone has to learn…
Gill is clear in her aims: “With Joe, he’s a young lad with a nice feel, quite a nice position, but needs to be developed. He doesn’t have a lot of schooling and he rides at home in Whyalla, without any help, on pretty orang-utan Thoroughbreds without a heck of a lot of movement, so it is very good for him to sit on horses that have got a natural rhythm, that do come through, that he really has to start to feel the horse’s movement – the best place to do that is on the lunge. The lunge work is developing his seat, it is developing his feel, and on Sparrow particularly, I want to work on him just feeling the motion of the trot and being able to sit to it. It’s a big trot to sit to and it is good for him to loosen up and sit with it, and not go against it. He’s a great horse in that he’s got a wonderful temperament, he’s the quietest ‘gelding’ on the place, even though he has a couple of foals on the ground he doesn’t really know he is a stallion. He has a naturally good rhythm, though he does need to be motivated to keep those hind legs active – he’s a bit stalliony there – so you have to use your leg, but he has a very good walk, it is great for Joe to feel a horse that does step under itself with a big overtrack and step through in a very clear correct active walk.”
“In the trot, Joe has to learn to keep his leg on and not leave it to me to motivate the horse, he has to ask him forward and get him through, himself, as he is sitting to the motion. Sparrow also has a quite big uphill canter and it is very good for Joe to feel the motion of the canter and learn how to sit with that without having to worry about putting the horse in a frame, or worrying where he is going next. He can think about the motion of the horse – occasionally I get him to close his eyes to feel the motion. It’s good for any rider not to be dependent on their hands, to learn to sit and use their balance to stay with the horse rather than holding themselves in. Occasionally I might get Joe to hold the saddle to help balance himself if he gets out of the rhythm, but then he has to let go, and have the confidence that he can do that, not having to balance with his hands.”
Are we losing the art of lunging?
“I think there are a lot of people out there who lunge horses, I don’t know if there are many who lunge horses well. There are not a lot of horses you can use for a lunge lesson. Joe is quite lucky, I wouldn’t let just anyone on this horse for a lunge lesson but I do know that Sparrow is quiet enough and sane enough to use. Lunging can be quite dangerous if you don’t know what you are doing – while it can be great for riders, you have to be careful that they are aware of the safety issues, and they have the right horse to be lunged on.”
“What I like to do, is start them off with the stirrups and the reins so that they feel confident that they are in control. I got Joe to keep his stirrups at first in walk and trot and establish the rhythm. Then I got him to knot his reins and let go with his hands – first hanging on to the pommel until he found his balance and confidence. I went through those steps quite quickly with Joe because he is pretty competent and I’ve worked with him before.”
“What I wanted him to do was let go of the saddle and put his arms out to try and find his centre of gravity and seat bones while being independent of his hands. To start with he had his hands quite low and stiff in the elbow and I had to keep reminding him to have his elbow bent and hands up – more for the mental discipline of ‘do this correctly’. Joe is a casual sort of guy and needs a bit of discipline, Although he is very motivated, in Whyalla, close enough is good enough because there is no-one else to motivate him to be that much better. However he has to focus on the mental discipline of doing things correctly, especially in this situation where he is not in a competition trying to ride a test and he can make the most of getting into the habit of sitting correctly.”
“Arms out, then backward circles with the arms. I start with one hand on the pommel usually. That is just to get more mobility in the shoulders. As a rider you need to be supple, just like the horse, you need mobility in all your joints but also you have to be coordinated. These are exercises to get Joe thinking about isolating different parts of his body : being able to use different parts of the body at the same time to do different things. It’s both a discipline and a suppleness exercise. I like backward arm circles rather that forwards circles, because backwards circles, you are thinking sit up, lift up through the diaphragm, stay up through the shoulders – it makes you think sit up, but because he is in sitting trot, his hips have to be mobile enough to go with the trot while doing the backwards circles exercises, and keeping his shoulders up.”
“Another exercise is turning the body to the inside, to the outside, again, that is isolating the waist, developing the ability to turn the shoulders or body while still sitting with the hips and the seat and the thighs. Keep the lower leg correct, while you are doing things with your upper body. Again it’s mobility, again it’s that feeling of being able to go with the horse with the lower part of your body but still stay up tall through the upper part and the coordination necessary to do different things with different parts of the body at the same time. ”
“I can always remember seeing a video of Reiner Klimke doing passage, and he just had such an erect upper body, super steady hands but his mid-section was like a concertina, it could take the motion so amazingly well, and his hips could move with the horse, allowing the horse to go through underneath him. These exercises ideally will help Joe in the future, even if he never reaches the Reiner Klimke level.”
But – I guess happily for Joe – it wasn’t all working on the lunge. He was given the ride on Gill’s husband Greg’s horse Oscar, to further hone his own riding skills.
Gill sets the scene:
“Oscar is a very tall (nearly 18hh!) and long Thoroughbred, he is not built as a dressage horse, he’s too long behind the saddle, he doesn’t have the suspension in his movement, but he has a quite nice rhythm after you get him through. Oscar is quite delicate in the contact, he can get offended by your hands if they are moving too much, but at the same time you have to ride him into an elastic connection to get him to operate.”
Stiff Side – Hollow Side
“So with Oscar, it was again a matter of working on Joe’s position while I was giving him the feel of trying to get the horse more over the back and through, then ride the horse more uphill and into a connection. The sorts of exercises he is doing with his Thoroughbred horse at home – the horse at home is a very typical off-the-track Thoroughbred from this hemisphere, where it is hollow on the left and stiff to the right. Oscar has been hollow on the left and stiff on the right, and if you ride him correctly he is pretty supple and even , now. But Joe having ridden hot off-the-track horses, tends to pull the horses around with his inside rein on the left rein, accentuating the whole hollow issue, and forgetting his outside aids – leg and rein to control the outside shoulder. So Oscar is actually perfect for this exercise, because if Joe rides him the way he has been riding his horse at home, he won’t operate. Oscar will turn his head really nicely to the left and fall out really badly through the right shoulder. Joe has to learn to be able to put the horse more into his outside rein on the left.”
“On the right, the horse is a little more stiff – he is not so stiff when you ride him correctly, but at home, Joe’s young Thoroughbred horse drops the right shoulder, and falls in on the right leg as soon as you ask for any flexion or bend at all, so he has grabbed onto the left rein again to try and hold the horse out, instead of trying to ride the horse out with his inside leg into the outside rein, and asking for the flexion and bend. He survived at home by having his horse go round in pretty much counter flexion (ie. left flexion ) to the right, and he can ride a circle like that – however we don’t have any lateral bend to the right.”
“On Oscar, Joe asked the horse to come around his inside leg and do some small circles – we achieved this really well today. He had the horse from right leg to left rein with bend through the horse’s body, but because the horse is stiff that way, he has to keep reminding the horse to submit to the inside when he’s on a circle right, otherwise he starts to get it going around falling against his right leg, dropping its right shoulder looking to the left and not stepping through, hence the work on the circle.”
The Circle Exercise
“If you are riding a twenty metre circle in a twenty by sixty arena, the circle is made up of four tangent points that are very easy to identify as long as you know the dimensions of the arena and the distances between each marker. If you are starting at C on the left rein, your circle touches between H and S, the rider then looks to where the circle crosses the centre line 2 metres past the SR line then between R and B then back to C.”
“I was getting Joe to think about riding the figure accurately. Riding the figure accurately by riding the horse better; anyone can ride a horse around some semblance of a circle, but not necessarily doing it accurately and correctly. The rider should start thinking about the four points of the circle, and as they are going past one point on the circle remember to look to the next. By looking to the next point, they are keeping their eye up and their body positioning starts to become more correct.”
“To ride the circle the rider should be maintaining the elastic contact in the outside rein which supports outside shoulder and allows the degree of bend, with an outside leg to control hindquarters while the inside leg is the post around which you bend and the inside rein is indicating the flexion.”
“As Joe is riding the four points of the circle on Oscar on the right rein, Joe is trying to soften Oscar’s jaw a little at each of those four points, using inside leg, asking the horse to flex through the poll and jaw for about three seconds as they go past that point on the circle, you’ve got the outside leg holding the quarters, the outside rein maintaining a feel but softening the jaw on the stiff side on each of the four points of the circle. Leg – soften the jaw – lighten the hand back to the original contact – leg. That sequence will ask a horse to come around on a circle with a bend, but at the same time riding from the inside leg to the outside rein.”
“Ideally what you are trying to do is be able to ride the circle exactly the same on both reins, however on the left rein because of Joe’s tendency to put his left elbow out and bring his left forearm across his body and pull the horse to the left side, I have to get him thinking about keeping a tiny counter-flexion on a circle. To start with, think of a little tiny counter flexion and get him thinking about his outside aids – which on the circle left, where the horse is hollow, become more and more important to control the bulging shoulder. He has to think about tiny counter flexion, get the feel in the outside rein, keep the outside leg on to stop the horse drifting out and then ask the horse to flex and come around on each of the four points of the circle. So on the left rein he doesn’t end up pulling the horse around with lots of inside rein and getting too much bend in the neck to the left and falling out through the right shoulder.
He needs to think: get the tiny counter flexion on the circle, get the outside rein connection, get the outside leg on – a lot of people tend to forget the outside leg, and then just ask the horse to come around on each of the four points of the circle so that the rider doesn’t get into the habit of hanging on to the inside rein and pulling the horse around the circle.”
It was time for Joe to wash Oscar down, time to join Gill and Greg sampling one of the many excellent wines from the local McLaren Vale wineries, time to think about the great tradition of correct riding that is handed on from generation to generation…
