show jumper
Cuban Exports: Rum, Cigars, and…Fancy Show Jumpers
The Associated Press reports that Cuba has added another luxury product to its traditional export list of fine rum and fancy cigars—Dutch Warmblood show jumpers. Colts and fillies are purchased as yearlings from the Netherlands, trained at government-sponsored equine enterprises, and auctioned off to buyers mostly from Latin-America. Fidel Castro’s communist government banned horse racing, gambling, and professional sports when it gained power, but amateur equestrian sports continued. The sport of show jumping declined during Cuba’s economically-troubled times, but in 2005 the government saw a possible way to bring needed foreign currency into the country. At a recent auction at the National Equestrian Club, thirty-one horses sold for a total of about $435,000 to buyers from Brazil, Canada, Guatemala, the Netherlands and Mexico. Cuba splits the proceeds with a Dutch equine company, and is now reinvesting much of its share into a new initiative to breed the horses in Cuba rather than importing. Besides increasing profit margin, it allows the country to select on breeding prospects which best handle the heat and humidity of the Americas. Click to read the complete AP article by Anne-Marie Garcia. Posted February 13, 2015
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Legendary Show Jumper Snowman Took the Kids Foxhunting
Snowman and Harry de Leyer. Painting by Joan Porter Jannaman, courtesy of the International Museum of the Horse, Kentucky Horse Park
Harry de Leyer’s first look at Snowman was between the slats of the truck bound for the killers. Harry had had trouble with his old station wagon, and he arrived late to the horse auction in the Pennsylvania Amish farming country. It was over, and there was only one trailer left in the parking lot. It was always the last trailer to load.
Midst the fearful and fidgeting horses crowded together on the bare floor for their last journey, one plain-looking gray stood apart for his calmness and self possession. Harry had driven to the auction in the hope of finding an inexpensive school horse for his riding students at the Knox School on Long Island, so he asked the trucker if he could see the gray. The gelding was missing a shoe, had bloody knees, and rubs on his chest from a heavy harness, but he was well-made and had a kind eye. The trucker had paid the “killer’s price” of sixty dollars. Harry was indecisive, but something in the horse’s composed demeanor spoke to him. Harry paid the man eighty dollars—the most he had planned to bid for any horse—and took him home.
Legendary Show Jumper Snowman Took the Kids Foxhunting
Harry deLeyer and Snowman
Harry deLeyer, born in the Netherlands in 1928, died last summer at the age of ninety-three.
After the Nazis rolled over the Low Countries and much of the European Continent in the spring of 1940, Harry's family farm became a way-station for the Dutch resistance during World War II. Fallen Allied airmen attempting to return to their bases in England and Jews attempting to escape capture by the Nazis were sheltered in a cellar secretly dug out next to the barn and covered by a manure pile. After Allied bombing raids, twelve-year-old Harry would ride out at night, helping to search for surviving Allied airmen. One pilot died of his injuries at the deLeyer farm. Harry' father buried him and mailed the dog tags to his family in North Carolina. Five years after the war ended, the pilot's parents sponsored the deLeyer Family to emigrate to North Carolina. A few years later, the deLeyer family moved to Long Island, and Harry became a riding instructor at an all-girls school. And he needed one more school horse.
