Second to One | Insights into the Lives of Assistant Trainers
The Euro Experiment

By Erin Gilmore | ShowBiz Magazine, August 2010

Reality sets in while standing, old-fashioned pitchfork in hand, in the middle of a dirty horsebox bedded two feet deep with straw. It’s 6:30am and that “box” is one of fifteen to be cleaned before 7:00am, when there will be a short coffee break and then half a dozen horses to groom, exercise and put away before the barn gets a meticulous sweeping by noontime.
 
If the preceding scenario isn’t familiar to you, you’ve never been an assistant trainer who’s headed to Europe with high hopes and a loose grip on reality. The allure of working and riding in the land where show jumping is real sport can cause even the most levelheaded assistant to walk away from a cushy U.S. job and search for higher knowledge in a
foreign land. 
 
American show jumping, as a sport and as a business, improves in quality and scope with each passing year. But there’s still nothing like experiencing the European system firsthand.
 
However, experience includes everything from breaking the ice in water buckets at 5am to showing young horses on a national circuit. It all depends on where you land and how wide open your eyes are. 
 
No Illusions
Trainer Chrissy Christensen had no illusions when she decided to work in Europe for one year. By splitting her time training in two different disciplines, she learned how two top systems operate.  The 26-year-old trainer is now based at the Menlo Circus Club, Menlo Park, CA, where she trains dressage and hunter/jumper horses under the umbrella of Jennifer Dixon’s Dixon Stables.

While working in England and Belgium in 2007, Chrissy spent six months with international dressage rider David Pincus in England, and six months at the barn of Belgium’s most successful Olympic show jumper. During her time in England, she studied for and obtained her British Horse Society Instructor Certificate while receiving daily dressage lessons in exchange for working student duties. >>