About New Spring Farm Trakehners: Hera earns *Pg* designation

Cheryl and Hera Set Another Goal and Reach It:
The ATA *Pg* Designation in Dressage
By Tim Holekamp

Hera and Cheryl at the trot half pass

Earning the USDF Rider’s Achievement Gold Medal on her homebred mare Hera in 2006 was great fun and very gratifying for all involved, as it represented the culmination of a great effort on Cheryl’s part to learn dressage from the ground up, starting over twenty years ago with lessons with our great friend Darren Chiacchia, then making a big shift toward the FEI goals about four or five years ago with intensive training from Gunnar Ostergaard and later helped by Jayne Ayers.

Hera is 14 years old this season, in excellent health and sound, so she could go on at Grand Prix, polishing the Special test and making a freestyle routine have both been considered, but we do have other plans for both rider and horse, the latter needing to leave a living legacy of her remarkable abilities and mellow temperament. We ARE a breeding farm after all, and we DO have a remarkably well-bred and talented young dressage stallion in Baron Verdi. Because Hera had a foal when she was four, she should be still fertile, and could give us four or five foals with special talents.

However, first there was one other hurdle that Cheryl wanted to leap over with Hera, and that is the ATA’s Exceptional Performance Horse designation known as the *Pg* rating. Deceptively simple, the requirements are just five scores at Grand Prix over 60%, but they must come from five different judges at five different shows. Unless one has planned a two year campaign just for this, it is not very easy to find the venues and judges necessary to get this one done. But perseverance won the day, and back-to-back scores at the Hoosier Horse Park of 64+% in May, 2007 put Hera over the top. Surprisingly, this makes her only the second mare in the 35 years of ATA’s history to qualify for this rating in dressage, the other being Hilda Gurney’s Lavinia (another homebred!), elevating Hera and Cheryl to ego-swelling company, for sure.

July, 2007 update: Assuming that Hera would quickly settle in foal to our Baron Verdi turned out to be only a breeder’s optimistic fantasy, as she managed to outfox the ultrasounding vet several times with off-timed heat cycles and various ovulatory oddities. The summer began to roll upon us and with Hera still open, Cheryl decided to keep her in work and give some effort at further performance goals with her. The primary project consisted of putting together a home-made Grand Prix Freestyle, music selected and manipulated from the film Chocolat. Cheryl sat down in the living room with video of Hera and the movie’s soundtrack and just amateurishly but accurately dubbed together pieces of music onto a CD with our home audio player/recorder. Then she drilled Hera in earshot of her boombox for a few weeks until she felt the mare catch on to the dance-to-the-music idea. Before even this was accomplished, she had entered in our one big local recognized show, the Missouri Dressage Classic. On July 13 they performed the Grand Prix Special and were scored 66.2%, producing confidence to “go for it” the next day. The moment arrived. First Grand Prix Freestyle ever, for mare and rider. They had one or two little bobbles, but the final score was 74.25%, with an “8” given for degree of difficulty. Amazing! Spectators came up to us later and said tears came to their eyes. This is what freestyle is all about, I think, and Cheryl and Hera have really found something special that they can do to entertain dressagefolk. Now if only we could get Hera in FOAL!

See also: Cheryl and Hera Finish the Gold Medal Job
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Tim and Cheryl Holekamp
New Spring Farm
7901 Highway 63 South
Columbia, MO 65201
Sales horses: newspringt@aol.com
Breeding to Baron Verdi: newspringt@aol.com
Breeding to Windfall: holekamp@aol.com