Story by Chris Hector & Photos by Roz Neave
Readers of the very early editions of THM may have encountered Ilse Schwarz in an earlier life as a inveterate contributor to the kid’s page we used to have. Ilse and her sister, Ruth, used to recount the adventures of their super pony, Speck, complete with charming illustrations. It’s just a few years down the track now, and Ilse has swapped chill New England for the heat of Florida, but she is still ‘mucking about with horses’, and following her dream of riding for Australia…
How does a nicely brought up girl from Armidale end up in steamy Florida?
“A man. There’s no other good reason. After I did my PhD – joint lubrication and arthritis, a general mechanism – my major was in biochemistry/physiology, I was just travelling to America, then I was going to go to Germany, working with horses to pay my way. Then I was supposed to go back to Australia to keep my post-doctoral work going and I met Ken Braddick at Devon in Pennsylvania.”
(By way of background, Ken is a former political journalist, tech entrepreneur, high flying businessman – now to be found peering through the lens of a Nikon, taking his photos for his hugely popular website, www.dressage-news.com)
Love at first sight?
“For him, not for me. He had to work really, really hard. He followed me around a lot, wooed me for months and months, and I finally decided that I would leave Australia and live in America –because he made it very clear he wouldn’t live in Australia. He’d been there, done that, too many rules in Australia, he said. He liked the land of the free and the home of the brave. I had spent some time in Wellington, working with some horses, it didn’t look anything like it does now, but I figured you could ride horses and make a living here… and here I am.”
Bit of a climate switch from Armidale…
“Just a little. Eleven years later I am still not used to it, and still trying desperately to get out of it during summer. I do a lot of clinics in Australia about that time.”
“For the first four years I was in America, I worked for Oded Shimoni, he is an Israeli who is based here. We did winters in Florida and summers in New York. Then I did a winter in Vermont – that was eye opening, blizzards, ice storms – not great horse riding weather. I got fed up with moving back and forth, and Ken and I decided we should try living in the same spot for a year at least. I quit my job and set up my own business in Wellington.”
“I do a lot of training horses, I am riding a lot, there are a few clients I am teaching. My barn is nine stalls, not enough, so I have horses scattered up and down the road. I do clinics, mostly out of the season, because the season is peak business time with clients who come down from the north.”
How did you hook up with Steffen Peters?
“There used to be an annual young riders clinic here. There were always three or four instructors and one year Steffen was one of them. On the Monday, he had spaces open for the local trainers. I had two horses at that time, and he wasn’t a popular clinician here then, he didn’t even do regular clinics here. I rode with him, and it was like okay, there’s my trainer. I had one horse that was going Grand Prix, and one horse that was a very difficult Small Tour horse, and Steffen just made total sense.”
“He taught half of my first lesson in German, given my name, and half way through, he went, is it okay that I teach you in German? And I said, it is, but it would be better in English, I am Australian. It was kind of good he thought I was German, I can’t have been riding too badly.”
“I’d tried a lot of the local trainers but I just clicked with Steffen. I was incredibly shy, so it was hard, but I approached him and asked if he would be interested in regular clinics in South Florida and if I could run them. It worked. That would be seven years ago. I try to bring him every month so he is here five or six times during the season.”
Why do you find Steffen so helpful?
“Steffen is just so picky about the detail, and about the suppleness. It is not okay if it looks good and feels bad. He really cares about that. He gets on the horses and he rides them – you’d be amazed how many of the trainers here don’t do that – and he is absolutely determined that you are going to get it. That you understand it. The attention to the activity of the hind legs. The attention to the connection and the suppleness. For me it is really about that idea of connection and making an uphill carriage. He just never gives up trying to make it happen. Every single time he is picky, picky, picky.”
“He is forever saying ‘why did you let him do that Ilse?’ Well, no, I had no idea. Then he explains, if the horse just knocks the bit a little, you have to deal with it. Say you are in piaffe, if the hindlegs walk for a stride, whoa, it is not okay, you can’t just cover it up. It is all about training and building a system. I think when it comes down to it, the biggest thing I have learnt from him, is to have a system. Whenever I get on any horse now, I have a system I go through – I check how honest they are to the aids – and it works for every horse.”
“It is so good having that layered system that you can teach.”
Do you go to Europe to find your horses?
“I have done. I have two of my own right now. One I bred, Miss Contango, out of a Swashbuckler Thoroughbred mare. I imported her from Australia and she is doing Grand Prix. Then I have a Sandro Hit mare, out of a De Niro Landadel mare, and she will be doing her first Grand Prix soon. I bought her as an unbroken three-year-old, in a sand paddock, 15 minutes from where I live in Wellington. She was imported. She is injured at the moment.”
“I tend to go to Germany for my sales horses. It’s not a big part of my business any more, but the sales horses are generally imported. I go to Germany more to watch the big competitions, and work on our web site.”
How did www.dressage-news.com arrive on the scene?
“Ken had been involved with the media a lot before I met him, and when I met him, he was not having anything to do with horses. But he loved horses, and was used to the media, and after 9/11 the area of bank security he worked in, completely changed, and he was driving me mad, twiddling his thumbs and watching me ride every day and pretending he was a Grand Prix trainer. I finally said, we better get you something to do – you like the media, you like the horses; I think there is room for a magazine of some sort.”
“We set up a high-end magazine, modeled a little on The Horse Magazine, and a little on trying to put horse sales through, like Horse Deals. It ended up being much more of a reporting magazine, then we sold it and started the website which Ken, having been a newspaper reporter, loves much more than a monthly magazine. Reporting daily is much more his cup of tea. It is good for me because it gives me the opportunity to attend some of the really big events and get behind the scenes. It helped me get familiar with the much larger European international events.”
It puzzles me, there have been so many really good horses sold into America, and even as far back as the fifties, so many really good European trainers were lured to the USA, dressage in the United States really should be a lot better than
it is…
“It should be. Jumping is as good as anywhere, but I don’t have a good answer as to why dressage is not better here. Trainers are here and the horses. One thing, our money is made so much from the amateur side of the sport and you can get caught up in that a little, maybe. A lot of the very good horses are bought by not very good riders – as trainers our job is not to steal the horse, but to make the owner happy on their horse.”
“I might be wrong, but I think there is more of a system in the jumpers of trying to get the right riders on the right horses. There is a heck of a lot more money being spent on the professionals in the showjumping world, which doesn’t happen in the dressage world. But really I don’t have a good answer – dressage should be a whole lot better than it is.”
But there is a tradition in the United States, of wealthy owners who buy horses for talented riders – in Australia, they want to ride the horses themselves…
“There is, but like I say, I don’t have an answer. Like Steffen’s owners – they founded Yahoo – really famous money people back a lot of the professionals. I think the riders with those really solid owners, they have been successful. Think of Gunter Siedel, with the one owner for a long time, George Williams, when he had the mare with the floppy ears… but there are not so many of the owners with that sort of money, that are in for the long haul. I think Jane Clarke has an interesting horse now with Catherine Bateson, there are a few here and there. A lot of the professionals over here have never had to start a horse from scratch, they haven’t had to make a horse by themselves to Grand Prix, maybe that leaves some gaps in their education. In Australia, I think in general there is a lot more natural talent, and a lot less money – and great distances.”
“Certainly it is a hot topic of debate in the US dressage scene, because it is a dilemma, they did not do well at the last Olympics, really not well. One of the ideas being thrown around was find people who can produce horses, the people who can work with good young horses, and then feed them on to the good Grand Prix riders. Trying less and less to buy the already made horse that is a superstar, because that doesn’t work so well.”
What are your ambitions?
“Good old Normandy next year, we keep trying. I have a Grand Prix horse now, Cadenza, whether he is good enough to make a team, I don’t know, but he is certainly good enough to get me in the Grand Prix ring and going down that centre line. Then I have Sauvignon, my Sandro Hit mare, and she is pretty phenomenal. She should be back in work in a couple of weeks. She had a fracture of the wing of a coffin bone, not a big deal. She hasn’t done a Grand Prix start yet but she is very talented. Beyond Normandy I have a very exciting seven-year-old, by Don Kennedy, he is competing Medium, with an average score of 73/74%. He’ll be Small Tour by the end of the year, and has caught the eye of the Americans, there is some pressure for me to change citizenship… But the aim is Normandy while I have something that goes down the line, because I do make my own horses, they don’t come along all the time. When you have one, you have to make the most of it…”
This article first appeared in the October 2013 issue of THM.