The first USEA Pony of the Year award was presented in 2007 to the legendary Theodore O’Connor (Witty Boy x Chelsea’s Melody), a Thoroughbred/Anglo-Arab gelding ridden by Karen O’Connor and owned by the Theodore O’Connor Syndicate. Now, a trophy bearing his name is presented each year to the Pony of the Year. This year, the SmartPak USEA Pony of the Year award went to Señor Santana, a 15-year-old Quarter Pony gelding of unknown breeding, owned and ridden by 13-year-old Riley Jones of Thompsons Station, Tennessee.
Before he was Pony of the Year and before he met Jones, “Santana” was a rescue horse. He was found on a farm in middle Tennessee in a nine-acre field with 37 other horses. “They had no grass and were eating trash,” Jones described. After Santana was rescued, Jones’s family purchased Santana from his first adoptive family when Jones was just 7 years old.
Santana was fairly green when he partnered up with Jones, having done a little western pleasure and a bit of jumping. Because Jones was still quite young, they started out just walking and trotting together, and as their partnership grew they started to do more. They graduated to hunter/jumper classes, and from there they began eventing, competing at their first event in 2018.
Because neither Santana nor Jones knew anything about eventing, they learned about the sport together. “There haven’t been many times where someone else has gotten on him, which I think is really cool,” she said.
In 2020, Santana and Jones completed 13 USEA recognized Beginner Novice events, finishing outside the top four just once and winning three events. In all, Santana finished the 2020 season with a total of 57 points.
Jones recalled a fun weekend at the FENCE Horse Trials in July where they finished on their dressage score of 28.3 to win the Beginner Novice Rider division. “The course was very hilly and I was actually riding two horses at the show. It was fun because I had really nice rides on both of the horses, but it was different because so many of the horse shows we go to are flat, especially in the Southeast, and it was very different to see so many hills!”
Even though the 2021 season has barely begun, Santana and Jones have already added another ribbon to their wall. They traveled to the Sporting Days Farm earlier this month to compete in their first ever Novice level horse trials, finishing in fifth place. “There was one really big jump on cross-country, and there was a log going down a hill to a ditch – those were really challenging. Santana was perfect, as always! He got a little purple stain on his white patch from the soap that we used, and I told my mom and [my trainer] Annie that his unicorn was showing through!”
“It was really cool [to win the USEA Pony of the Year award,]” Jones said. “Obviously a lot of the credit goes to him because we wouldn’t be able to do this sport without our horses. It felt really surreal – it didn’t feel real – until we got the email confirming that he won.”
Señor Santana was honored along with all the other USEA year-end award winners in the USEA Year-End Award Ceremony on Friday, January 8. You can view the awards ceremony on demand here. To view the 2020 SmartPak USEA Pony of the Year leaderboard, click here.
The USEA would like to thank SmartPak for sponsoring the USEA Pony of the Year award.
When super groom Max Corcoran mentioned in 2005 that it would be fun to participate in a USEA Classic Series event, her employer and eventing legend Karen O’Connor took that to heart. “I did a lot of grooming for the classic format when Kentucky and all those other competitions were proper long format,” Corcoran shared. “When Gretchen [Butts] started offering the Classic Series at Waredaca [Gaithersburg, Maryland,] she asked if I would come up and do some lectures to help people understand what the 10-minute box was and how to pack for it. I did that a few times and said to Karen, ‘Man, it would be so fun to do one of these.’ And so Karen's like, 'You want to do one? Yeah, you're gonna do one next year.'”
Has this horse quality? The answer is definitely yes. This first impression is so important. As a selector for the Goresbridge Go for Gold Event horse sale, I have an abbreviation ‘GPO’ which stands for "Good Pull Out." It means that the first look prompts the potential client the need to bring the horse out of his box for a further look.
It was a beautiful but chilly weekend in the pines at the Setters' Run Farm Carolina International. After a record-setting 19.4 in the CCI4*-S dressage, Will Coleman became the first three-time winner in the event's history when he led from start to finish on Hyperion Stud's Chin Tonic HS.
West Coast eventers experienced tremendous success in 2022. Tamie Smith recorded top-10 finishes at Badminton in England, at the FEI World Championships at Pratoni in Italy, and at the Maryland 5 Star at Fair Hill. Helen Alliston won the $60,000 Adequan USEA Advanced Final, and Tommy Greengard captured the USEA Intermediate Championship at the USEA American Eventing Championships (AEC), presented by Nutrena Feeds. James Alliston returned to the Land Rover Kentucky Three-Day Event for the first time since 2017 and finished third in the CCI4*-S.