The Danish stallion Sezuan by Blue Hors Zack – Don Schufro convincingly won the qualifier of the WC-Final of five-year-old dressage horses. One top score followed the other for the brown stallion of the Danish warmblood breed, ridden by Dorothee Schneider (Framersheim) and stabled not in the far north, but in the south of Germany: at the stud Peterhof in Perl-Borg/Saarland.
The final mark of 9.86 underlines the super quality of the five-year-old. All scores were higher than 9, the judges even honoured his canter with 10. 9.7 twice – for overall impression and submissiveness. And two times the mark of 9.5 – for his walk and his trot. Sezuan was granted a wild card to participate at the World Championships. The Danish breeding association thoroughly checked before he was proposed to the FEI. The couple professor Edwin Kohl and Arlette Jasper-Kohl withdrew the popular stallion from the breeding business at the end of July to facilitate the preparatory training for the World Championships for him and for Dorothee Schneider.
Second place went to a state stud stallion from the Neustadt/Dosse National State Stud: DSP Belantis is – so to speak – a Brandenburg colleague of the Celle stallions. He descends from Benetton Dream – Expo`se, and Landstallmeister Dr. Jürgen Müller entrusted five-times Olympic Champion Isabell Werth (Rheinberg) with the training. Her rider Beatrice Buchwald introduced the five-year-old stallion to the “primary school level” under the supervision of Isabell Werth. The scores in the WC-qualifier confirm that this co-operation is pretty fruitful: four times 9.6 for the three basic gaits and overall impression and 9.3 for submissiveness.
The Dutch stallion Eye Catcher finished third and confirmed that sometimes the name can be program. The noble chestnut by Vivaldi/Partout was honoured with the highest trot scores of the day – 9.8 – only Soiree d’Amour who came in fifth under Kira Wulferding achieved the same high mark. 9.52 was the final score for Eye Catcher and Kirsten Brouwer.
Dorothee Schneider, the trainer of the winner of the WC-qualifier Sezuan, has not very much time to relax – apart from the Danish stallion, she is also riding the Rhenish-bred Stanford in the WC-contest, and immediately after the two five-year-olds had accomplished their test, Schneider mounted Showtime. He participates at the contest for former WC-finalists and already won the opening competition on Wednesday.
World Champion as spectator in Verden
It was just a short break for Soccer World Champion Thomas Müller after the World Championship-weeks in Brazil, exhausting for him, but simply wonderful for the fans. His wife Lisa is dressage rider and nominated for the Piaff-Förderpreis of the Liselott-Schindling-Stiftung in the show season 2014. The Bavarian Vice Champion Lisa Müller has long since “infected” her husband with the passion for horses – both are breeding horses and perfectly combine the enthusiasm for soccer and for equitation. Lisa and Thomas Müller will be given a valuable and lively present by the Hannoveraner Verband here at the venue of the World Breeding Dressage Championships for Young Horses: A filly by Zack/De Niro, bred by the Sahlmann and Schmitz-family in Bleckede. The first encounter between the little mare and her new owners will be on the occasion of the Gala Evening Show on Saturday in the Riders’ Stadium of Verden. The Hanoverian horse will then move to Bavaria in autumn, and Thomas Müller, who already expressed his delight about this present at the Hannoveraner Verband, has time enough to find a perfect “nursery” for the little Hanoverian horse in Bavaria.