Rebecca Ashton interviews Judy Reynolds
Photos: Rebecca Ashton, Roslyn Neave, Kenneth Braddick
Irish Olympic dressage rider Judy Reynolds has been the quiet achiever, creeping up the world rankings and winning some top level shows. Success was put on hold a few years ago when her top gelding Vancouver K sustained an injury, but they’re back better than ever, scoring personal bests and helping Ireland qualify the first dressage team ever for an Olympic Games at the Europeans in Rotterdam earlier in the year. The pair scored 76.351 in the Grand Prix for 10th, 78.252 in the Special for fifth and fifth in the freestyle with 85.589 and now have their eyes firmly on Tokyo.
It’s quite amazing what you’ve done personally, and the team. How does it feel?
Surreal. That we achieved that with the team is pretty amazing.
And it happened quite quickly.
Yeah we talked about it a couple of years ago, about wouldn’t it be great if we could do it, and then for it to come about, really in the space of a year is quite amazing especially because both of those horses of Heike’s (Holstein) and Anna’s (Merveldt) are in their first year in Grand Prix. That’s really a fast progression. Kate’s (Dwyer) horse has been doing it a little bit longer but they all did so well. It’s Kate’s first championships so it’s great that she was able to keep to all together and do what she did. It’s fantastic that we are able to achieve the team qualification.
And for me personally, two personal bests…
And JP is 17. So…how? How do you keep him sound and how do you know how far you can push an older horse?
There’s no pushing with him. It’s more calming him down and holding him back really. He is incredible and his will to go and to work is phenomenal. It’s kind of now he’s reached a maturity level where his brain and body have come together. He’s Jazz/Ferro so that’s a pretty tricky combination but I think it also makes for tough horses. We did have a year out through injury when he was 15-16 and thought, oh that’s a bit old for a horse to come back. It happened four days before the Europeans in Gothenburg and he was out for almost a year.
It was rotten timing too…you’d come 18th at the Olympics then you went to Central Park and won then Devon CDI then a great World Cup final.
And we had a fantastic Aachen just before those Europeans. We’d had a couple of top five finishes there and we were 14th in the world and we were going to the Europeans thinking we had a chance because it wasn’t such a strong year. If ever we had a chance to do well, that was it. Then the injury!
But he actually came back better. Aachen was my first show back, which was either crazy or stupid! He showed how enthusiastic he was! I don’t understand why he came back better. Maybe it was a blessing in disguise that he had that time out. He’s never been a horse that had had much time off. Not that he didn’t get holidays, but he had never had an extended break. And I think also, Patrick (Judy’s husband) kept saying to me, maybe we’ll get a bit more time at the end and get to the next Olympics. The way it’s looking, touch wood, it has worked out. He’s just one of these horses that, I think as long as his body stays healthy, his brain and his will are there. He just has this will to go.
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What’s your management of him now that he’s older. Has it changed?
It hasn’t changed particularly. After he was injured, we did change some things, but we do really keep it quite simple. I believe in just good riding and good basic horsemanship. He has a very good farrier to keep his feet in the best shape, he has a good physio, we have a vet check him regularly even if he doesn’t have a problem, just to stop anything coming up. I’m not someone who likes to inject horses unnecessarily. I don’t believe in that. He goes in the field, he goes hacking. After this he’ll probably have a month or two of tootling around a bit. He’ll be ridden for five days a week, but no pressure. I have to keep his fitness, especially as an older horse, so I don’t like to let them down too much. Older horses should keep moving but we’ll back off the pressure. He very rarely does movements at home. I’ll only really start doing movements in probably the last two weeks before the show.
Really? So what do you do for half an hour everyday?
Sometimes it can be quite boring! Occasionally I ask some else if they want to ride him and they get excited and jump at the chance and so I’m really very happy for it! Off you go! Trot/canter transitions for 40 minutes!!
So lots of transitions…
Exactly. Transitions within the paces, transitions in and out of the paces. That’s what we do; that’s his basic work. Then there’ll be little bits of travers or travers on a circle and stuff like that. But actual movements, no. That’s two weeks out of a competition.
Being Irish, how did you end up in the dressage arena?
I did a lot of everything as a kid. We grew up doing working hunters, show ponies, hunting and all the rest. Then I had a pony that didn’t jump so we started to do a little bit of dressage on the side and I loved it very quickly. I got hooked. I love that information back and forward, the relationship with the horse, what you can teach them. To be honest, I wasn’t brave enough to be an eventer.
I was in Ireland, you’re talking twenty odd years ago, there wasn’t much dressage so you became quite good, relatively speaking, within the competitions. I had a very good school master by then and it was great. I got to learn everything but at that point there wasn’t that much competition in Ireland, maybe Prix St Georges. You went to a show knowing you’d be first or second…unless you fell off…then you’d be second anyway! I finished studying music at university, thinking I was actually quite good at this dressage thing and decided I’d go to Germany for a season.
I went to train with Anna Merveldt. She was living in the south of Germany at the time. I went to my first show and came last. So, ok, I’m not so good at all! I was overwhelmed going to the show. I remember Ulla Salzgeber was riding at that show and I remember thinking, ok this is a little bit different!
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Was it really scary warming up with all these people, thinking you’re getting in the way?!
Totally. I was totally out of my depth. I wasn’t as good as I thought I was, but I’m stubborn. So I chipped away at it and by the end of the year I started to get some good results and I thought, god I’ve learnt so much in a year, there must be so much more to learn. I went for a season, went home for a couple of months and went back again. I did that about four times, then I sort of stayed.
At that point that was never going to be my career. Not at all. When I was down south with Anna though, people started to come and bring their horses to me.
So you mustn’t have been too bad!
There must have been something there! I started to earn money that way. It was really Patrick (Judy’s husband). We had started to go out by then. So he said he was coming over if that’s what I was doing, and it just very organically became my career. I didn’t really set out to do it. I’ve never done my bereiter exams, I’ve talked about it but never really got around to doing it, then the teaching developed.
And you were teaching show jumpers a bit as well. You taught Bertram Allen?
Yeah we shared a yard. I still do help the showjumpers out a bit in between. And I travel to Ireland every month to teach and people keep giving me horses to ride, usually the crazy ones. I seem to attract crazy horses.
Do you like the crazies?
I do actually.
Don’t you have to look after yourself as an Olympic rider?
No I’m actually the nutty one who will get on the four-year-olds, and the things that bronc and plunge and climb walls. I don’t know, I like a challenge. I really enjoy the process of showing a horse that may have had some difficulties, that there is a better way. It’s very much done through training the basics. I’ll get on a horse and regardless of the level, I might spend six months doing transitions, circles, corners, straight lines.
I’m not someone who does it fast. I don’t do it with pressure. It’s purely with time, and afterwards, with my horses, anyone can ride them, because they are correctly trained, they’re not doing it out of fear. They’re not doing it for any other reason except that they understand. And I really like that, that anyone can get on my horses and ride them. So yes, I take my time and I also believe that if you have that straight lines, corners transitions, circles, the rest is just a combination of that. The movements are then not tricks but the progression of that work.
You get horses in sometimes and they can do all the tricks, but it can’t go straight ahead. So, I really do believe that’s the foundation of everything and we really do take our time with that. I feel that’s the right process.
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How many horses have you got in your barn?
We like to keep it relatively small. We normally have 10-12 horses so that I can ride all of them, because I don’t really want to have 30 or 40 horses and see them only so often. I want to know the horses, know what they’re like in the boxes, really have influence over every aspect of their life. I usually ride eight to nine a day then generally a bit of teaching thrown in there as well.
Any rider fitness work?
No not really. I’m not that great at that stuff though we keep saying we must. I get beaten up by the physio and the osteo on a regular basis.
Who’s been your biggest influence either within or out of the sport?
Well within the sport I’ve had three. It’s funny when you look back on your path, when I was in Ireland I trained with Gisela Holstein who is Heike’s mother. They gave me my interest and start in dressage. With Anna, I really learnt how to ride and with Johann Hinnemann, he really gave me a direction and refined it. I’m still with him now. We live about half an hour from him. I go to him as and when I need. Patrick helps me on a more regular basis.
Why did you pick Hinnemann?
That was really an organic thing because when I was with Anna, she was training with him so I got some exposure to him there. Anna decided to move to Italy and I didn’t want to make that move. I wanted to stay in Germany so I started travelling up to Hinnemann’s yard and then I ended up moving closer to him.
What’s it like to warm up with Isabell, for example? All those questions us mere mortals want to know!
It is intimidating in the beginning, but over the years, we get on quite well because of all the competitors here, I probably see the Germans the most. I live only about 45 minutes from Isabell, so we’d often see each other at competitions and she would be at national competitions helping her riders as well. So actually, that’s become just a normal thing. Isabell’s actually probably one of the nicest to ride with because you can predict where she’s going. There’s no kind of hairy turns or things like that!
How do you handle your nerves or is it just another day in the office?
It is and it isn’t. It was a little bit of a different dynamic here being on a team, having not had much experience with that before, so it was a different sort of nerve thing.
Because it was pretty much down to your ride, wasn’t it?
Yes. But having to qualify for things like the Rio Olympics over the last few years, we’d been under that sort of pressure before, so I knew I could handle that, but on Tuesday, Patrick and I went back to our hotel and did our normal show routine…
Which is?
It’s basically riding in the morning, depending on the time, go get breakfast, try to have a rest or sleep for an hour or half and hour and chill and then get ready and come back. So we did that which was really good to get focused so I was really looking forward to it actually.
A country like Ireland, which isn’t traditionally a dressage nation and now you’ve all achieved this historic team qualification. Is there a secret or is everyone just working at their own thing and then you’ve come together?
There’s been great support from our federation over the last couple of years, really helping us with funding and putting us on a path because before that it was really just do your own thing. But we’re all aware of this goal coming up and we all worked towards it. This year Anna has been travelling to Ireland on a regular basis to help Heike with her training. It has been a team effort in that sense.
So, next stop Tokyo?
He’ll have a break and we’ll probably do a little bit of World Cup over winter but I don’t know if we’ll aim for the final. We just need a couple of shows to keep us focused and heading in the right direction. Tokyo will come around really quickly. We have to earn our place in the team so we’ll all have to prove our form next year. We’ll look at that closer to the time. I think the judges have been announced so we’ll make sure we show under each one of them, that they’ve seen us. If you haven’t seen one for a along time, you do want them to see where you’re at a little bit.
It’s not easy, doing all that competing and working so hard without big money behind you…
We have fantastic and generous sponsors. County Saddles are incredible. They only need to give us two saddles and we have seven. A couple of years ago all our tack was stolen. We were at a big yard and they took 80 saddles in one night. County came to us within three days with a trailer of saddles and said take and keep whatever you need. It was about two months before the World Cup Final. They made me a custom saddle and fast tracked it so I had it for the World Cup.
We have Horseware. They give us so many things. We have a great feed sponsor in Gain and supplements from TRM (And Patrick throws in that they take some of supplements themselves…..though I’m not sure that’s recommended!) as well as Roekl and Alessandro Albanese.
You need it in such an expensive sport especially when you’re doing it on your own. It makes a massive difference. And because we don’t have a huge yard with massive amounts of horses it means we do need the sponsors to keep going. It’s not easy but we love it. It shows that you can do it.
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You have to be on the continent though?
That’s why we’re still in Germany. I’d love to do what I do from Ireland, but at the moment, I don’t think it’s feasible if you want to ride at this level. I believe you need to compete against people who are better than you to become better and I don’t want to become stagnant. I think we’ll eventually go back one day, it is home, but not while we are competing at this level.
And finally, why’s Vancouver called JP?
Long story. He came from Holland. “Vancouver” so they called him Fanny as a stable name which wasn’t going to work for us. My Dad had sold a Morgan car around that time so we thought we’d call him Morgan but that wasn’t going to work in Germany, everyone would answer you, “morgan!” so then there’s the company JP Morgan so that’s how he got his name! It’s totally random. (At this point Patrick explains that everyone thought they called him JP for Judy/Patrick). But no, we’re not that self obsessed! But everybody just knows him as JP. I need to come up with a better story really!
