Swingtime Finds His Calling
By Erin Gilmore | Sidelines Magazine, November 2010
The flashy bay jumper was turning into one of those “problem” horses. It wasn’t his fault; he was athletic and careful, and bred to jump to grand prix heights. But he too easily turned the corner from careful, to tense and worried, making for a complicated ride that bordered on unsafe.
Luckily for the horse formerly known as Timeless, Alicia Jonsson-Foster was in his corner. The California-based grand prix rider imported Timeless, (barn name Aiden) from Europe as a 7-year-old. A World Cup Finals veteran and active grand prix rider, she watched the then-stallion clear solid 1.60m fences in Europe, and was impressed with his show record as a young horse.
Alicia bought Aiden as a potential grand prix jumper that could take the pressure off of Don Francisco, her grand prix veteran. She jumped around the meter 1.40 classes with Aiden at HITS Thermal in 2009, but as she remembers “we just didn’t mesh. My other two horses are 17.2 hands each and very forgiving, and at 16.2, he was a different ride. If he touched a rail, I could feel him tense up immediately. We were having some issues and I could see that he would take a stronger rider than me to get around.”
As she searched for a better solution for Aiden, steady steps down from the meter 1.30m, to the 1.25m and 1.20m showed up on his competition record throughout the spring of 2009. Alicia tried Aiden with a selection of top grand prix riders, but nothing lasted.
Finally Alicia sent Aiden to Olympian Will Simpson, hoping he could figure the gelding out. At Spruce Meadows, Will won two large 1.30 classes with him, but the gold medalist admitted that it was “real work” to get him safely around the course. And whenever anyone else would ride him,
Aiden would get nervous and overly anxious at small mistakes.
Alicia could see that Aiden wasn’t enjoying his job. He returned to her barn while she mulled over the problem of what to do with him. His personality had taken a dive, and he was learning to stop. Even though he had the ability and athleticism, the gelding was becoming harder to jump, and had developed the telltale unhappy-horse habits of tail swishing and ear pinning when a person approached. It was clear that he was learning not to like jumping. A 1.40m horse that only a pro could ride would be a difficult sell, and Alicia was hesitant to market him as a lower level jumper.
In her heart, she knew that the strikingly beautiful bay gelding would be unhappy either way and stood a good chance of ending up a pasture ornament, or worse.
And then something happened that she would have never considered. While hacking around at the 2009 Woodside Fall Finale, Woodside, CA, Alicia cantered Aiden over a few jumps in the hunter ring. As soon as he crested those flowers and gates, hunter trainers started asking who he was. According to them, her 1.40m jumper had quite the potential to be a hunter.
“I’ve never seen a horse take to it the way that he did,” remembers Alicia. “People had always joked that he was so pretty he could be a hunter,
but when I went into that hunter ring on schooling day, it was instant. I could feel the change in him right away.”
After Aiden’s reaction and the feedback from “hunter people”, Alicia switched to hunter classes that week. In true jumper fashion, the grand prix rider took entered him into the Modified Open Hunters and a sizeable medal class. “Entering that ring was far more scary for me than ever doing the grand prix,” laughs Alicia. “But after those classes we had four people interested in him.”
Although the rounds were far from perfect, they placed in every class, and Alicia immediately felt her horse’s comfort level go up. She knew that he had a chance as a hunter, and better, her rounds had caught the eye of accomplished hunter trainer and rider Hope Glynn.
“I happened to be there at the show and thought he was beautiful,” she recounts. Hope and her husband Ned saw the potential for something great, and after the show they took him home with the support of their clients, the Hellman family.
With five daughters who all ride, the Hellmans bought Aiden on Hope’s word that the unhappy, anxious jumper had the potential to become a star in the hunter ring. They patiently supported Hope as she began a winter of retraining.
Aiden arrived at Hope and Ned’s Sonoma Valley Stables in Sonoma, CA muscled up and hot. When he entered the ring he’d start prancing, chewing and sweating. Hope’s only goal during those first few months was to convince him that he could relax.
“An athletic horse is the easiest thing to work with,” says Hope. “I brought him home and for months rode in a big snaffle over crossrails until he relaxed and took a deep breath. He spent the whole winter doing two-foot jumps with me, and then we slowly worked our way back up into the
3’6” ring.”
At Thermal this year, Avery Hellman began competing Aiden, who had been reregistered with USEF as Swingtime. Along with his new name, Swingtime’s second career began on a high note – he won a $1,000 A/A Hunter Classic and was champion in the A/A Hunters with Avery’s sisters Olivia and Eleanor.
And with Hope in the irons, Swingtime has quickly become a star. Since March she has won or placed in every hunter classic and derby entered. Sonoma Valley Stables is well known on the West Coast for regularly leading the hunter divisions, but until now Hope hasn’t had a horse to compete with on the USHJA International Hunter Derby circuit. Swingtime has changed that.
“Next year we hope to take him to the bigger derbies and have a chance of qualifying for the finals,” she says. “The derbies are a real forte for this horse. He’s brave, he’s athletic and he’s especially great in the handy round because I know I can make all the tight turns with him!”
Better, Swingtime is happy again. He craves attention from his bevy of owners, and has consistently shown that he’s at home in the derbies. The ear pinning, tail-wringing behavior disappeared when he left the jumper ring behind for good.
“You hope that everyone has that same attitude with horses, that ‘let’s see what’s best for them’ plan,” says Hope. “It’s kind of a shining light when you find that. In this case, he came from a good person and went to a good family, and that’s what’s made for his success.”
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