Story Chris Hector & Photos Roz Neave
Vaughn Jefferis was not only a World Champion Eventer, he was also a very stylish rider, and it was great to catch up with him at a clinic in NSW, in the jumping paddock of James Arkins and Ned Calcraft’s showjumping centre at Moss Vale. For all Vaughn made his name as an eventer, he, like the rest of the all-powerful Kiwi team of the time, started life as a showjumper, and it is to that first love that he has returned as a trainer…
“In New Zealand, we all started as showjumping riders and all of us could jump Grand Prix – Mark (Todd) and Blyth (Tait) and I, were jumping 1.45 tracks, weekend after weekend, we had done that for seven or eight years. I copied my style from Liz Edgar, remember her with Everest Forever? I thought she was classically beautiful… I was also lucky enough to be trained by John Cottle as a kid, he really was good. He’d trained with one of the old masters which made him into a classical rider. He took me under his wing when I was seventeen or eighteen, and I spent three months on the lunge without my stirrups and reins until I got a lower leg and seat, riding with my heel down… So I came out, re-invented as a young rider with a classical position.”
“I was always interested in becoming a classical rider, and now I train the same. If you watch the kids I produce, they are all beautifully classical riders. They sit perfectly, they ride beautifully, they have a lot of feel, but they are also gutsy kids – I don’t turn them into robots. I want them to be classically correct, but I want them to have their own instincts and be gutsy.”
What turned you from showjumping to eventing?
“I think when Todd jumped boat, Blyth and I had been friends as kids for years, and we were like, if he’s going to be famous, we used to beat him at showjumping all the time, that was an incentive to do it. If he’s going to be an eventing star, we want part of it as well. I don’t want to sound like an arrogant pig, I just knew it was going to be easy to be successful eventing, because I could jump the jumps, I was brave enough to go fast, so it was just a matter of learning to ride on the flat and that was the hardest part for me. I got it in the end, but that was a lot of work and it wasn’t until I got with Carl Hester that I really nailed that.”
“We could see that eventing was the way to go. Todd had been the 84 Olympic gold medallist, and I was sitting at home watching and thinking, this could be us! Pretty much the next year, we all went eventing. Most New Zealand kids do a bit of showjumping, a bit of eventing, a bit of everything, polocrosse, so we all decided to go eventing and that was the start of it, and because we were so ruthlessly competitive, and we were all fairly good, in the end it was just a matter of who was going to win today.”
There was also a supply of very very nice Thoroughbred horses…
“Blyth and Mark are from racing backgrounds, my grand-father was a good racing trainer, so I grew up in that world. I’d ridden in amateur races as a fourteen-year-old, racing was part of our history, and in New Zealand, there are a lot of Thoroughbreds. There was never any doubt that’s what you needed for a four-star horse, and I still think that today. If you can get a Thoroughbred that can move, and he is careful enough, he is still the best option, because it is a galloping competition at the end of the day, isn’t it? I love the Warmbloods and I don’t mind a little bit of a Warmblood mix, the modern type of event horse, but for the kids I train, I am still looking for a Thoroughbred horse that can do the job.”
Vaughn’s great eventer was Bounce – the horse that took him to a World Championship…
What was it like when you met up with Bounce – was it love at first sight?
“Love at first sight… I went to see him for the girl. He’d been a bit of a rogue, a bucker as a youngster, so the first person only had him for five minutes. We went to see him and I loved him straight away, but we were buying him for the girl. She did a nice job on him but she got him to the stage where she wasn’t going to go any further, and she offered him around. She offered him to Mark, but he didn’t want to pay any money, Blyth rode him and didn’t get on with him, and I came back to her, and absolutely loved him.”
“He had lost confidence, so I spent of time getting him going again. I took him back to basics and we just built a strong partnership from there.”
When you arrived at the WEG in The Hague in 1994, was that your first Championships?
“I’d ridden as an individual at the first WEG in Stockholm on Enterprise, but I was basically just trying to win my way onto the team and I knew with Bounce, he was the horse that was going to put me on the map.”
You went to The Hague aiming to win the gold medal?
“I knew I was going to win it, isn’t that weird? I was always going to win. I was really on form, I’d produced that horse the way I wanted it to go, and I knew what I needed to do. After running third at Badminton on him, he really was well, and my confidence was just huge. Some things in life just evolve for you, and that was just a progression, every time it got better, it was just a stepping stone of success for that horse. I went to The Hague the most confident I’ve ever been, I was so determined to win. My father was coming, that was a huge plus because he never traveled, and I really wanted him to come. My mother had not long died, and it was just a good thing. I was on top of the world. Carl (Hester) had really been nailing the dressage, so I was super competitive on the flat, and the horse was mega-fit. It was going to be my time.”
It was interesting to get Vaughn’s take on the horses in the clinic, there was certainly a wide variety of types
“It’s really fascinating for me to see the quality of the bloodlines in Australia, how much good European blood is here – New Zealand is light years behind in that aspect.”
The riders?
“We had a great clinic today. Tony Priestley and his young mare Runamuk (Rotspon) – she jumps pretty well, and then Ned’s horse, Celeborn Ego Z (Camelot Ego Z), he’s a nice horse too, what a fabulous horse to learn on to jump the bigger fences, the horse is brave, he’s careful and he is genuine. I’ve enjoyed today, nice people, cool paddock, nice equipment.”
“Riding is really all about riding forward in rhythm, there is nothing more to it than that, the more advanced the riding, the more collected the canter work becomes. If you ride the horse forward and straight and in a rhythm, that’s all you need to do. It’s really the basics all the time. We don’t use the gadgets, we ride them in nice bits so the horses learn to engage through the hind legs, through the back to the contact. Then when you take a pull, the horse comes more together rather than going upwards, there is so much upside down training – if you train them classically from day one, then you never have those issues.”
There are so many riders who go to clinics like this, and they do the exercises, and they see that their horses improve but do they do them when they go back home? It’s back to put up the jumps, jump the jumps, it’s schizophrenic…
“Sometimes, but hopefully from today, a few of the things we’ve done might give them an insight into what classical training is all about.”
If people would spend 20 minutes a day, doing proper balancing work on the flat instead of jump, jump, jump, the horses would go a lot better…
“Absolutely, you’ve watched me teaching today, it’s usually ten to fifteen minutes on the flat every time, getting horse soft, left and right, getting the horse to be engaged, then working up and down the gears, so the horse is really on the aids so we can make adjustments forward and back, everything is done with a natural compression and not force.”
What are you doing these days?
“I’ve gone back to my showjumping root. I train a really fantastic boy, Mathew Gilmore, who has been with me for five years. He has started from scratch and just got to the Grand Prix arena now, he’s a beautiful rider and he is going to be a big prospect for the future in New Zealand. I’m still producing good kids, I am pretty selective about what I do, I train Clark Johnstone in the eventing ranks, I have a fantastic junior girl, Sarah Young, who is going to be the next big thing – great rider, very good on the flat, I started teaching her when she was nine, she’s now eighteen. This little girl has been with me every week for all those years, so it is kind of cool to see the progress. I’m still teaching clinics around the country, Wednesday, Thursday, are teaching days at home, and I’m an agent – I love finding horses for people.”
“I’ve worked so hard for years, now I am really enjoying traveling at my own pace and putting it back into the people I want to help. I’m only interested in training people who are totally dedicated and prepared to follow the system, and if that’s the case, seeing them make huge steps is great. Someone like Clark, I’m really proud to see him go so beautifully, he is probably one of the best cross country riders in the world now, it’s nice to think you’ve had an influence on that. He’s another that can jump the 1.45 classes as well, similar to like we were when we were kids, we could jump the Grand Prix all day long, so when we went eventing, it was like nothing…”
