I must confess, at times I’ve found it hard to get a lot of words out of Stuart Tinney. He is not a naturally gushy sort of guy. This time I decided to try a new approach, cut straight to the deep and meaningful. And it worked! Stuart let fly with an interview that ranges far and wide and is packed with the sort of insight you might expect from the rider regarded by many as the world’s best when it comes to cross country style…
Is cross-country riding ability something you are born with, or something you are born with to a certain extent and can improve on – or is it something you can learn?
“Whew… Feel for horse riding is something you have or you don’t have. Whether that is specific to cross country riding I don’t know. I think it is probably for everything, and that comes to understanding horses, whether they need encouragement or a little bit of discipline. I think that is hard to learn, to get a feel for what they are thinking at the time, you’ve got to be in synch with them. I suppose that is something that you have or you don’t have. It shows up more in cross country riding, you can get away with it more in the other phases.”
“Just going cross country can feel lovely, when everything is going to plan and the horse is listening to you and the round is nice. Other times it feels like you are getting around as best you can. I don’t watch a lot of cross country but when I do it is very obvious the ones that are going with the whole thing – even correcting errors, because you can correct as you go around. If they drift over one fence, correct it. I think that’s a big thing actually: going round the course doing each little correction that needs to be done to keep the horse learning and doing the right job – then when you get to the tough fences, it works okay. Sometimes that can be encouraging them because they might be struggling; the fence might be daunting, a bit big. You have to keep them confident – don’t bustle them too much or do anything too quick or wild, because that just worries them more. You’ve got to know that, feel that, so you can feel when they are a little worried, as opposed to them saying – I can’t be bothered. You need to know the difference to know what you are going to do about it – that’s not something you learn, I don’t think… Well it is learnt through riding lots of horses and knowing horses, riding horses with this problem and that problem, and the more you can do that, the more you learn. The horses teach you and it is hard for someone to teach you that feel…”
Is effective cross-country riding also a function of the rider not being affected by the big adrenaline buzz? We know that horses can get too excited to concentrate on the job, but does the same thing happen to riders?
“The big thing about riding horses, is that you are the trainer. If I am a 400 metre runner, then I have a trainer who manages me, tells me that I went out too early, or whatever – I think running 400 metres is a little complicated. You can probably do that yourself, but it is easier if you have got someone helping you. If your trainer is a bit wild, and can’t concentrate and gets distracted every time you go to a competition, that can’t be great. It is the same for the horse; you are the horse’s trainer and even on the course, the more logical you are, the more focussed you are, the easier it is for the horse. It is easy for the rider to get a bit stressed.”
Are you are very confident rider, or do you sometimes find yourself scared before going on a big track?
“More the nervousness of being at a competition, but you can get just as nervous before the dressage, it doesn’t have to be the cross country. Anything can be bad. Being over-happy is bad because then you are not judging the situation correctly, being nervous you don’t judge the situation correctly, being scared… The more your brain is like it is normally, the easier it is to focus. It depends on what you are sitting on – that can make you stressed.”
Have you ever been scared?
“Yeah, heaps of times. It is usually at a lower level, usually pre-nov, because I am on a green horse that doesn’t know much about this eventing stuff, and I am coming down to a big tall vertical, thinking, ‘I hope you can jump this…’ But when I am actually on the course I am not scared very often.”
“Very rarely am I scared on cross country at all. I do remember at the Adelaide cantering down to that ditch. I wasn’t early in the draw so I knew a bit of what was going on there. Thinking…well can’t wait to get there! But what it made me do was do everything BETTER. It was a downhill approach and I knew you had to ride ditches like I ride them – except more, I AM GOING TO GET RE-BALANCED going down that hill, and I am GOING TO GET MY STRIDE… I was going to do all that anyway but I just made it more so, and if that wasted five seconds, which I don’t think it did, that was fine. Tex jumped it fine for me, but then while I wasn’t nervous coming down to that fence, I wasn’t saying, great I can hardly wait to jump this one… Like any time you want to take this out of the course!”
But it is important to control those emotions?
“Absolutely. Because what a lot of people did was kick down that hill, which was not a good choice. If you happened to get a good spot, which was luck, good on you – and if you happened to get a bad one while you were kicking on, just look away…”
Do you do any mind games before a big event – meditation… visualisation?
“I go through the course, I visualise it, but I think you’ll find a lot of riders do that. I usually fall asleep by fence six and have to wake up early in the morning to finish it off. I always sleep soundly the night before.”
Is it the same with horses – is the ability to handle a four star track something they had the first day they stood and suckled their mother?
“Yes, reaction is what is important. If you’ve got a horse that doesn’t react you have problems. You have to be able to say ‘wait now, now go’. There are some that you say go, and nothing happens and you have to train them to be better. You know that fairly early on because some of them don’t go at all – some you say, now go and they learn and they are okay – but there are some that don’t learn, six months down the track they are still not reacting to you and doing what they are told, or they do it after they go “…whaaat?” Too late.”
The first time you rode Jeepster did you say, wow this horse is going to take me round an Olympic Games course and I am going to end up wearing a gold medal?
“No because he is not a great jumper. The more I rode him cross-country, yes, absolutely because he loves it and he is so easy to ride, so focussed and so good. It didn’t take too many cross-country rounds before I realised that wasn’t a problem for him at all. Showjumping was a little harder because he is technically quite faulty, and the dressage I always thought it was there, but after a year or so it was getting a bit boring waiting for it to arrive. Cross country it didn’t take long to realise how good he was.”
But he wasn’t an easy horse to begin with – too nasty to other horses to race, too nasty to be a showjumper…
“He’s an exuberant thing. Like you will just be riding him around now and think he’s older now, and he scoots off. When Karen rides him he turns it up a bit for her. She’ll do a canter transition and he’ll shove his head up in the air and nick off… It is quite often sound related. If someone makes a noise down in the yard, whoosh, he’s off – then he can go into an Olympic Games arena and not care. So it is an excuse for him to do his thing and it is quite often nicking off with his head and his tail stuck in the air. That’s why he used to do in the early days of his dressage, lots and lots of 8s and then 3s because he did something bizarre.”
And before you got him he had been taught a bit of Spanish Walk and how to bow?
“I didn’t know that when I bought him. I haven’t found ‘bow’ but Spanish Walk I found a couple of weeks after I bought him. What is that! It’s sort of a weird thing with only one leg, and then it became full on Spanish Walk… He gets confused with it. He used to relate it very much to letting go his neck. I’ve found it with another horse, owned by a girl from Terrey Hills, that was also very tight in the neck, we had no idea but when you loosen it up – there it all is, Spanish Walk – and he’s got bow as well. They get very confused. Jeepster would do the Spanish Walk while he was trotting while cantering! We would start canter and he would let go of his neck, and do Spanish while he was cantering, which of course you can’t do, and he would fall over, then he’d get worried. A nightmare and it happened every time he let go of his neck, so then he would hold this frame and he would be fine, except you can’t move like that.”
“To let go of his neck – it’s really his back, he relates it to this Spanish walk thing. Even when he came into work this most recent time, when I asked for a bit more, out came the Spanish thing. I’d just apologize and try to get it to go away, now I’ve learnt to unblock him and he goes forward most of the time, but it has been a challenge.”
Stuart like most of Australia’s eventing stars – even ones who have won gold medals – finds that it is a financially demanding and difficult sport…
“It is hugely important to have sponsors, without support you would be selling even more horses, even the ones you think are the potentially good ones, you would have to sell just to survive. All my sponsors contribute to that, and help keep the horses in Australia. Horseland and Bates have been with me for years and they have been a wonderful support. Coprice with the feed, and now Nature Vet with Pentosan… they are all wonderful!
PS. And the best news? That horse in the photos is Jeepster – back on track and hopefully headed for a place in the Team at Athens.
