March 31, 2025 
Tore up from the floor up is the phrase that keeps occurring to me.
Here I am with shaking, hungover hands trying to write this column, the very last of our WEF season.
I tried to get out of it. I wrote to my editor, “I need to get out of this.” I sent some emojis like <drunk emoji> <green sick emoji> <barfing emoji>. She wrote back that it was probably ok because she’s going to a turtle sanctuary.
A turtle sanctuary? I haven’t even gotten out of bed. And didn’t I just see, mere hours ago, this same editor of mine on the dance floor with limbs in a frenzy, throwing condoms at ten-time Olympian Ian Millar?
A turtle sanctuary? It’s just a bit bizarre after the night we all had—and by we I mean like all the cool people and top trainers and riders in Wellington, because we were all there. We were celebrating and raising money for the Kevin Babington Foundation, which provides grants and support for injured riders and spinal research.
And I do really like turtles. In fact, just a few days ago I parked my golf cart in the middle of the road, risking catastrophic injury, in order to move a turtle from one side of the busy street to the other, as he had only made it a few feet and was sure to get crushed before he ever achieved his destination.
A turtle, with that maddening, restrictive shell, his little legs swimming in the air as I lifted him, carried him across, and set him in the grass. It really gets you thinking about evolution. It seems a peculiar choice, rather akin to setting out for a turtle sanctuary when you’re super hungover from an epic, season-ending party.
Then I started to think about Hemingway and about how he probably wrote everything he ever wrote either drunk or hungover, so what’s my excuse?
And I do have so much to say! What about that last Grand Prix on Saturday night, that GP with more than half the world’s top ten and Kent and Henrik vying to see who will be World Number 1 next month and the whole world out on the coursewalk so one could hardly move at all except to bump into someone?
That Kukuk had a task set for him, I’ll tell you. In the early morning hours, he squirted a brand-new human out into the world, his first time doing that, although I guess technically he did not do the squirting. The birth happened via a human female and I’m telling you he had a choice: lose this GP and you lose the woman, because who is gonna put up with her man jumping a large field animal over some fences while she’s in the hospital tending to their first child?
But win the GP and not only do you do a repeat (he won this same GP last year), but you get to keep the woman, bring home several hundred thousand dollars in cold hard cash, and have the whole place crying weepy tears over how beautiful life is and how everything turns out just the way it should!
Yeah, I was in form on Saturday, treating the whole experience like a drunken, rowdy American football game. But it wasn’t only me—I heard the atmosphere described as “palpable.” There had to be thousands of us, a soldout crowd, and at least half of us were sporting the Kent Dolls “KENT 4EVA” caps.
We had high hopes until Greya knocked what everyone described as a “random oxer,” like seriously a jump no one had touched all evening! Until last-to-go Ben Maher decided maybe he should tip that one too. If you guys had decided to get the B element of the triple, we would have all understood. Think about that next time before you go breaking hearts like you did!
Let’s fast-forward to the jumpoff. First, Ashlee Bond laid out a fast round and I thought, “Well, she has it!” Then when Laura Kraut turned out an absolute blitzer of a round, fast and so exciting the palpability was screaming its little head off, I thought, “Well, she has it!”
Then came Kukuk. He did that German riding thing where they ride so smooth and so steady and on such a neat track that you actually think they’re going pretty slow, but that’s just perfection lulling you into a sort of mesmerized complacency. He beat Laura, which hardly seemed possible.
Then who comes galloping into the ring like they’re running for their lives, but Daniel Coyle and his well-accomplished mount Legacy. I swear they would have torn the roof off the place had it had one the speed at which they entered the ring. I was thinking Secretariat the way they parted the sand of the arena 31 lengths ahead of anyone else who had entered.
“Well, he has it!” I shouted, thinking this was no time to keep my thoughts to myself.
But man the air was let out the balloon quickly—they plowed the first fence. Stupid guy forgot to have a baby that morning!
So the glory went to Kukuk. He won the last GP of our season, part of the Rolex series of events, and also the inaugural US Equestrian Open Grand Prix. This last GP had as many labels as dollars up for grabs!
I find it a tad confusing.
But now I get to rest my befuddled head and say goodbye to you until next season, provided my editor makes it back from that turtle sanctuary and hires me for next year. Because—what the WEF?!
