Area 8 Annual Meeting Mary King Review

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Mary King
by
Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

For those of us that live in the grey, wet, cold, north-central part of the country, (otherwise known as Anywhere But Ocala) mid-January is the eventing doldrums.  The holidays are past, spring remains out of sight, and enthusiasm for riding recalcitrant winter horses in freezing indoors or frozen fields is thin on the ground.

It’s not a time for mounted clinics, but Cathy Wieschhoff, incoming chair of USEA Area 8, took a page from pony club--and generated a whole bunch of excitement—by inviting none other than the current top-ranked eventer in the world, Great Britain’s Mary King, to give 10 hours of unmounted instruction at the Area 8 Annual Meeting, January 7-8, in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Mary told us that she always, always, wanted to ride.  With her father struggling from the affects of a traumatic brain injury suffered months before Mary was born and her mother caring for him while holding a succession of part-time jobs, Mary had to work to find rides, right from the start—so she bicycled around her Devon village, searching out ponies in fields, then asking their owners if she could ride them.  She competed the vicar’s cob, joined Axe Vale pony club (“not one of the smart clubs, we swam horses in the river and had loads of fun”), and on a pony club coach trip at age twelve found her personal nirvana:  Badminton Horse Trials.

After a tough stint working for British eventing legend Sheila Willcox, a cooking course at the Cordon Bleu, a sailing course on a Tall Ship, and a season as a chalet girl at Zermatt, Mary, age 19, rented some disused cowsheds and 3 acres of land from a local farmer.  (That’s still her yard; the cowsheds are gone, but the land is the same.  She owns it now.)  She bought a few young thoroughbreds for training and resale; she also delivered meat for a local butcher and cleaned campsite loos.  When she made it to Badminton in 1985, on Divers Rock, whom she’d trained, she and her mum camped in the back of her lorry, which did not have living quarters, but which they’d equipped with cots and a camp stove.

Mary showed Area 8 eventers a video of that first Badminton round, pointing out “how badly I’m riding—you’ll see, I ride much better now,” and praising Divers Rock for carrying her through to a remarkable 7th place finish.  She began to attract sponsors, get more horses, win more prizes—now, twenty-eight years later, she’s on the verge of her sixth Olympic games.

“You’ve got to be balanced,” she stressed, not only in the saddle, where “the primary job of the rider is to stay out of the horse’s way,” but also as a person—able to cope with the ups and downs of a sport which eventually lays every participant low.  Not long after the 1985 Badminton, Divers Rock had to be euthanized; she never competed him again.  She showed the audience clips of her greatest triumphs, from her 1992 win at Badminton on King William (“There it is—the happiest moment of my life”) to her 2010 WEG team gold medal and her remarkable one-two finish on homebred King’s Temptress and Fernhill’s Urco at last year’s Rolex.   She also showed a series of harrowing falls, from King William at Badminton in 1991, when she’d kept his head too high and he blindly cantered off the edge of a very long drop, collapsing at the bottom, to the 2011 European Championships, when she came too fast and flat to a square table coming out of water, on Imperial Cavalier, who flipped.  She has always studied video of her falls to learn what she did wrong and how to put it right.  She repeatedly told the audience how much she’d improved since beginning her international career.

After that, it was time for a Training, Breeding and Conditioning open forum.  Mary’s philosophy is extraordinarily simple.  Tell the horse exactly what you want him to do.  Teach the horse what you want, by rewarding him, and what you don’t want, by either correcting him, or, if necessary, punishing him.  “Make it very clear, black and white,” she said.  “Horses don’t like grey.  They like to know what’s expected of them.”

Simple, but not easy.  “As a rider, you’ve got to be strict with yourself,” she said.  “It’s easy, if the horse isn’t quite straight, or doesn’t quite bend in the corner, to say, ‘oh, that’s okay, we’ll get it next time.’”  Instead, she said, riders must discipline themselves to always expect and only accept from the horse exactly what they want.  When the transition to trot isn’t right, immediately go back to walk, and ask again.  When the horse ignores a soft leg aid, kick him hard, then ask softly again.  Don’t nag, but don’t be lazy.

She stressed the importance of keeping horses’ confidence high, of not overfacing them or making them feel they can’t succeed.  A remarkable example of this: King’s Temptress’s showjumping warm-up at Rolex.  Explaining that Tess “really isn’t a very good jumper,” and with only seven rides between Fernhill Urco and Tess, King, who’d already warmed Tess up on the flat, quietly jumped four fences, none of them over 3’6” high.  “If she has one down in warm-up she starts doubting herself,” King explained.  “Also, it’s hard for her, and I don’t want to wear her out.”  Rolex was the first time in Tess’s career that she showjumped double-clear.

Much of Mary’s regime comes from the “broad base” Sheila Willcox gave her.  Her horses are barely backed late in their three-year-old year, then turned out until late in their four-year-old year; they don’t compete until age five.  Five years olds, and some of her older horses if they’re fidgety, “event from the field,” and everyone gets turned out, in groups, every day.  In winter they’re put out for several weeks without shoes, never coming in at all.  She doesn’t do routine chiro or hock injections; she feeds glucosamine on the advice of Great Britain’s team vet, but isn’t convinced it does much good.  With a wealth of one-day events in Great Britain, she’ll skip all but the most major competitions if the footing is hard.  Her horses get their walk work done on roads; they gallop up a long field a 20-minute hack from her home—once up for the prelim horses, four times in a row for the advanced ones. 

Mary deliberately keeps her yard small, with no more than six horses in work at any time.  She wants to do all the schooling herself—her grooms help with hacking and galloping—as she feels that the training she gives them and the relationship she develops with them are significant parts of her success.  She’s also concerned about balance in her personal life: being a “good mum” to Freddie, age 13, and Emily, nearly 16, a good daughter, and a good wife.  She rode at the European Championships while 5 months pregnant with Emily, and noted that her competitive drive did not diminish when she became a mother, but she also tries to be finished riding by early afternoon, so she can be with the children after school.  To make her schedule simpler she no longer teaches students.  “I like teaching horses better, anyhow.”  She plays tennis every week with her husband and several friends.

On the second day of the Area 8 meeting, Mary critiqued videos of several amateur riders in the audience.  She pointed out inaccuracies of basic position, and also stopped and rewound the clips at some points, to show how a mistake in setup led five strides later to a very awkward fence, or how a rider throwing her upper body forward on landing caused the next fence to come down.  She encouraged everyone to videotape themselves.  “So often, people don’t realize that they’re holding one hand higher than the other, or bobbing their head, and so they don’t fix it.  You can tell them, but they don’t really believe it—but when you see yourself doing something, you think, ‘I must fix that.’”

Some speakers educate and others entertain.  Mary did both, charming the large audience while empowering them to fix their faults, hold themselves accountable, and always remember how very lucky they are to be eventing at all.  She was a brisk clean breeze, blowing the doldrums away.