ACE

Ace is my new boy, of course. Allan decided that I am getting too old to waste any more time with my dressage, and that since we enjoyed competing Jazz, and we can't take our money with us when we die, that we should buy a really talented dressage youngster. Seriously, he bounced me into it, I was very reluctanct!

I had  a lot of trouble finding any to look at that were as big as I wanted, to mature around 17 hands. I went to see one which I was told was definitely that big and if it was even 16 hands I'd be surprised. When I said to the owner that I would not waste her time seeing it out of the stable, she got really angry with me and started to argue about how big he was! "Well how big do you THINK he is then!?!??!" she almost shouted. "I don't know, and it doesn't matter, he isn't big ENOUGH" I said. Thank goodness it was local I'd have been mad if we had travelled too far.

Finally I found a dealer with a website, quite local, who had Ace for sale and I emailed asking his price. They had recently reduced him from £15,000 to £12,000, but that was still out of my budget, so I emailed and told them I only had £10k max (only??? It's a FORTUNE, I know, but these horses cost a mint!). A couple of days later they wrote and said that if I was prepared to see him before Christmas, and did not try to negotiate, that they would let me have him for £10k if I wanted him.

They took him to an indoor school belonging to a friend of theirs. It was a long way from them, but the ground was completely frozen and it was impossible to see him any other way. It was a huge bonus for me, of course, because I saw how he behaved away from home in a strange place. He hadn't been ridden for over a week, and she let him off loose for a few minutes and then got straight on him. Since temperament was, after Jazz, hugely important this time, it was very reassuring to see him behave so well. And my golly gosh -  how he moves!

It turned out that they had not sold a horse in over three months, and that unless we bought Ace they were not going to meet their December mortgage payment. Since he is, as you can see from the video, an absolutely lovely horse, with fabulous paces (he had wolf teeth bothering him in the video, they've gone now and his head is steady) He's all uphill, and has a great temperament, so we went back to see him at home a couple of days later, and we bought him. The owner trained her own horse with Stephen Clarke, the UK's top dressage judge - he did WEG and the Olympics. The video of Ace is at Stephen Clarke's place. He had been broken around five weeks at that stage. He's a July foal coming up five this year, so he was broken late, which is good, because he is very immature for his age and hasn't been overworked. Stephen Clarke has agreed to train me with him, so I know that the owners are telling the truth when they tell me that he assessed Ace as being Grand Prix small tour standard, if not higher. His father is an international Grand Prix, Riccione. A German dressage rider has told me that Riccione offspring are very much sought after in Germany for their trainable temperament, and that in her yard there are two. She also said that she would expect to have had to pay £20,000 (not euros, pounds) for a horse of his quality.

So, off you go - na na na naaaa na, we told you you'd like dressage in the end :-) You were right.

More about what he is like tomorrow. It's a horse, Jim, but not as we know it :-)

C