Opportunity is everything.
I know because I’ve been on both sides of it.
My parents are professionals so I grew up in the barn with a lot of access to great training and horses and I had a standout junior career because of it. I won the Maclay Finals. I won individual gold at Young Riders. And I walked right into being a professional and had horses available to me straight through to riding on the Nations Cup team at Spruce Meadows when I was 25.
And then after that, I didn’t have the horses. For 10 years, I didn’t compete in a Grand Prix.
That’s a long time to be out of the action. It became about the family business and making a living and teaching and riding. At one point in my career, I was known as a hunter rider.
But I never gave up on getting back to the top of the sport. Being a grand prix rider, riding on the Canadian team, that was my always goal. Always the dream.
So yeah, opportunity is everything. And you have to take it when it comes.
My big break came eight years ago. Ilan Ferder asked me to be his rider and it really wasn’t a hard decision.
I left Canada and moved the U.S. part-time to ride for Ilan Ferder Stables at the shows and when the pandemic hit, I moved to Florida full time. And it’s a great time right now. I have huge support behind me, and great horses at a very high level.
Did it unfold the way that I hoped? For sure.
Did it happen immediately? No.
It was work. But I think everything that you do is work. And I like being a hard worker.
You have to be in this sport, because the work never stops and it’s rarely easy. Even with all the opportunity I have now there are always moments when it’s not that much fun. Moments when you get frustrated and you have to dig a bit deeper to make it happen. And sometimes that won’t be enough.
For me, that was 2022.
It was probably my worst year on record. I had the least amount of success that I’ve had in all the years I’ve been riding for Ilan. My results were inconsistent. I wasn’t at the top of my game, I wasn’t riding my best. And I thought it was never going to end. I thought I’d never see the light at the end of the tunnel.
But I still got to compete in Rome and Aachen that summer, some of the best shows in the world, and I still gained from it. And now I have that experience and since then I haven’t had too many setbacks. This year has been my most consistent yet in terms of results. I won my first 5* Grand Prix. I was named to my first Olympic team.
So maybe it’s a positive attitude. Maybe it’s the understanding that it’s not always going to go well and that you can’t question it when it’s not going well. You can think, what do I need to do to be better? Why isn’t it working out? But there has to be some level of acceptance that it’s not always going to be good. It’s sport, it’s horses. There’s ups and downs. Sometimes you’re not as strong, sometimes you’re not as fit.
You have to take the good with the bad. You have to really, really enjoy the good and accept the bad. And if you can focus on that, it’ll work out. Eventually.
I think to do sport your best, you have to be the best version of you. Healthy sport is keeping yourself happy. Remembering that I have an obligation to keep other people happy. I have an obligation to keep the horses happy. I have an obligation to keep my owners happy. I have an obligation to keep Ilan happy.
Hopefully that comes easier to me. Hopefully I don’t consider that really hard work.
But when you go to bed at night and you wake up in the morning, you have to be happy with yourself. With who you are. With the choices that you make and the people that you surround yourself with.
Because at the end of the day it’s all about the horses.
That’s it. That’s the short and the long answer of it all.
I live for these horses. And it can be the four that I have in the Grand Prix. Or it can be the ones that I have in training at home. I’m constantly thinking about the horses.
That’s what inspires me every day—and inspires me to keep going.
Ten years ago, I was known as a hunter rider. Now, I have four horses that are capable of jumping at the Olympics and people maybe don’t even know that I rode hunters.
I can’t say that there’s anything that I wanted to do that I haven’t done yet. If I was 10 years old and I had a checklist of things that I wanted to do, I’ve done them all. I’ve been on winning Nations Cup teams. I won at Spruce Meadows. I won a five star Grand Prix. I competed at the Paris 2024 Olympics. My checklist is pretty complete.
So I’m just going to keep making the most of this opportunity.
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