When she was first appointed head of the Westfalien State Stud, Susanne Rimkus made the bold move of sending her top jumping stallions out into competition. At a time when it was believed that the job of breeding stallions should just be that, breeding, the new director (who already had caused something of a stir just by being a woman in a crucial post in a male dominated horse breeding hierarchy) said, no, she wanted her stallions out there showing what the Westfalien could do. Now six years down the track, she can afford to be well pleased with the result….
"It
was great luck that the program started so successfully. We had the
good horses and with Heinrich William Johanson we had the good rider
who was able to succeed very fast with the stallions. It was even more
impressive because the stallions that first started in the sport were
not used to competition. They were used to public appearances at the
stallion parades once a year, but they didn’t have any experience
of competition. Now our young stallions they start at the age of three
or four, and they build up to the bigger events – so it was really
lucky that we had such success with the older stallions."Has the program generated more interest in breeding jumping horses?
"Yes, the goal of this concept of bringing stallions into the sport is to get more mares for the sires. It is the first front in advertising our stallions and attracting mares – our second aim is to promote Westfalien and Rheinish horse breeding in general or for the German horse breeding in the biggist picture… but the first aim is to get more mares covered by our stallions and earn more money for the stud."
"It is also very important to get the right mares for these stallions, so our clients – the breeders – see the special qualities of these sires and they can bring them the right mares, the mares with sporting, jumping bloodlines. In former times the information to the breeders was not so good, and so some of the mares these stallions got were a bit mixed up, and the products were not really sport horses. For us it is very important that the foals from our sires are truly sport horses later on."
Was there a problem with the breeders looking to dressage bloodlines because that is where the money is for the very young horses?
"Yes, for dressage foals that have very nice gaits and are a nice type, the people pay more money and it is easy to sell them as foals. The jumping bloodlines are very difficult to sell as foals because the people who want jumping horses, wait until they are four and they can test them. It is very important for us to encourage the breeders to breed jumping horses because there is a great need for such horses in the market."
Do you have a jumping mare identification program?
"No, not especially for jumping, We have our young mare performance testing and they have to do both sides, jumping and dressage. We give notes for the breeder so they have that information, and we can give them advice when they come to us with a mare with good jumping blood, we can advice them not to use a dressage stallion, please use one of these jumping stallions."
For so long the strength of Westfalien jumping blood lay with the two ‘P’s – Pilot and Polydor, is this still a vibrant line? Do you have good enough stallion sons to keep their influence going??
"It is very difficult with Pilot. We have few stallion sons, and they are very difficult genetically, the foals are often a bit small with a lot of white markings. Our breeders love Pilot on the mother line but it is really difficult to get mares for our Pilot stallions. We have some interesting Pilot stallions but they don’t get to cover many mares, so there are not many foals, and effectively no sport horses. If a stallion covers ten mares, then next year he has five foals and from these five we have perhaps two who get into the sport, and they may be injured and nothing is left."
"With the Polydor sires we had the same problem but the program with Potsdam for example helped him very much. Potsdam is now one of the most used jumping sires we have, with good numbers of mares, so he will have many youngsters entering competition, and they have to show if Potsdam is a successful sire, we know he is a successful sporthorse, but he has to prove the other. In the first years of his career as a sire he has had many mares, but the problem is again to find the right mares for this stallion. It is a bigger problem with Gralsrutter, because he is a rather special stallion, he is not so big, has not such long lines, so we need special mares who are elegant with long legs for him. But Potsdam is not so complicated in the partnership for a mare. For us it is not just to get many more mares, but also to get the right mares."
For breeding dressage horses you have looked outside the traditional Westfalien lines with horses like Laurentianer, is it going to be the same with the jumping bloodlines, will you have to find new blood?
"I am already doing that. I was born in Schleswig-Holstein and I have a good knowledge of the Holsteiner, which is Germany’s top jumping horse because they are just selected on jumping. So this is a very good chance for us to use this closely selected genetic material and provide jumping genes for our larger population of horses that are easy to handle and move nicely over the back – so it is a very interesting combination."
"I started with the Holsteiner sires, or mixed sires, we have the Contendor sons, Cordobes I and II, which are branded with the Holsteiner brand. We also have a young stallion by Accord, who has a Power mother, and Power is a Pilot son, and we are having good success with this young horse. From his first year on he has had more than a hundred mares each year, and now he has three year olds ready to go into the sport and into the performance tests for the mares, and we have many good daughters of him with jumping talent and they are very easy to handle and comfortable to ride, so this is a product which seems to be good. The direct crossing of Holsteiner blood over Rheinish or Westfalien blood, in the first generation it will be a bit more difficult because they are extremes coming together – and so the products are sometimes not so harmonious, but in the second generation they will be very interesting, and even from the first generation we will have very interesting horses. But some are not so harmonic, and I think we will have breeders who when they see the foals will say ‘oh no, we will try another way’. But it is good to have these stallions and they will combine with Westfalien or Rheinish jumping lines."
It does seem that in jumping – unlike dressage – you can very successfully combine very different bloodlines – a French stallion, Furioso with a German Gotthard, produces a Voltaire… but the most successful dressage products seem to be concentrated and quite close lines…
"Maybe there are more good jumping lines in all the other countries, whereas the dressage horses are centred on Germany. Belgium, Luxumbourg, France, all these countries have good jumping horses and they have interesting lines, so you can have a bigger pool. With dressage bloodlines, most of them come from Germany and it is a smaller pool with less choice."
Have you been tempted to introduce French blood into your program?
"We have two Anglo Arabs, the problem is that the breeders don’t trust them too much. Both of them have produced very good foals, but the French horses, especially the Anglo Arabs are special horses and – like the Thoroughbreds - they need special riders because they are of high Thoroughbred blood. The Selle Francais we say in Germany are not so easy to handle and our breeders say, if I have a young horse to sell and no-body can ride it that is a problem. Also the type is sometimes not very modern and type is a very important factor on the German market. Most of our riders are part time riders and they want to have a lovely horse, they want to be happy when they open the door of the stable and their horse looks nice and so it is very difficult to sell a horse with a big head…"
You
have always been keen to get Thoroughbred blood into your breeding program,
has this been successful?"No the Thoroughbreds are a really big problem. In Germany the Thoroughbred breed is developing in the opposite direction from the riding horse. We have problems with the modern Thoroughbred’s neck which is too low set, and they give that to their foals and the breeders and riders are not happy with that. So we started to concentrate more on half bloods from other breeding areas – like Laurentianer, and we have another Lauries Crusador son, Laomedon who is very well used by the breeders, with very good foals. The breeders trust more in the half blood than in the full Thoroughbred, but the problem is that our breeders say ‘please buy another Laurentianer for us’ and I say, ‘well if you don’t use the Thoroughbreds, where shall I find another Laurentianer?’ You have to use the Thoroughbreds and breed some half bloods so I can buy them."
"The biggest problem for us with the Thoroughbreds is that when the breeders use them, it is not with their better mares. The Thoroughbreds need the best mares with very elastic gaits, really uphill in their construction but often the breeders who have these mares use the famous fashionable stallions, and the other breeders who are not really informed about the market, use the Thoroughbred stallion, and with the bad mares, they have bad foals. It is a really big problem."
"In the Holslteiner bloodlines there is much Thoroughbred blood, so I get this with my jumping stallions from Holstein, or I use Hanoverian half bloods. Now we have several very interesting stallions who have Thoroughbred mothers. One young stallion, Gino Genelli he was successful in sport, winning jumping and dressage on level S, now he is at stud for the first year, and he was used very well, and I am hoping his foals will be very nice so he can really start into the market."
You are happy with the direction your breeding is taking?
"Yes but the danger is with these ‘fashionable’ stallions. We don’t help ourselves when we keep saying ‘oh everything is becoming worse because the breeders will only use the fashionable stallions’. We have to think of projects that will put the other stallions in the market. We did this, this year for example, with the first season stallions we kept the price as low as possible to encourage the breeders. We have a scheme, where if the breeder has three mares or more and he comes to the stud and uses young stallions, he gets fifty euro per mare back, so he is encouraged to bring three or more mares but also to give the young stallions a chance. And this year it worked well, many of our young stallions had 50, 60 or 70 mares, some using artificial insemination had more than 100, so we will have many foals this year and the stallions have a chance to get into the market. So you have to think about projects to help and not just cry and say everything is bad."
Looking into your crystal ball –which will be the most famous Westfalien dressage and jumping stallions in the next ten years…
When she finishes laughing, Ms Rimkus, tries to answer my impossible question:
"It is very difficult. With the jumping stallions we really had a hole. Everybody concentrated on Polydor and Pilot and nobody was thinking to build some new lines. The foals from the new blood are still to young to show which will be the lines of the future, but I think one of the young jumping stallions will be Ferragamo, who was first treated as a dressage stallion because he is very very elegant and he has very good gaits, and everyone thought he would make dressage horses, but experience shows that he works better with jumping lines and he makes very modern types, very nice jumping horses which are easy to handle and have a very good canter and good form over a jump. I think Ferragamo will be in our area one of the better jumping sires of the future."
"In dressage, Florestan is number one, and the Florestan sons, and especially the grandsons will become more and more famous. We have a very young one, Feinsinn, who is from the mother very interesting blood – Bolero and Grande – so he will mix it up a bit, and then the other is Furst Piccolo, a Fidermark son, he has extremely good foals, the first are yearlings now and they are not small like him – his mother and her mother are good framed mares, but he was the first foal of his mother, and the first foals are often a bit smaller. His foals have very long legs and they are extremely dynamic in their gaits, very nice faces and proud horses, which is perfect for dressage – dressage horses must love to present themselves. I think our Florestan line will produce many interesting horses."
"Laurentianer is another hope, but with the other blood lines we must wait – Rilke has very interesting foals, and he has a very good mother line, so I hope he will make good dressage horses, and because the character is often sometimes something the stallion gives to his children, then we hope Rilke’s foals will have his very good temperament, and that is very important for dressage. We have a Sandro Hit son, with a lot of Thoroughbred blood on the mare’s side, and he is very well constructed with a very fine mind, a nice and kind horse – he is only three years old so we have to wait and hope. We are always hoping, perhaps in ten years we will be discussing totally other horses but I don’t think so."
"The E line is very important in our area, they are all sport horses – Ehrentanz, Ehrentush. This is a bloodline of horses that also jump quite well because of Ehrensold, Ehrensold is also the dam sire of Ferragamo. The E horses are versatile but the problem is that the foals are sometimes not so charming – they develop under saddle, and many breeders do not have the patience for that and we have to encourage them again and again to use this valuable blood. Both the stallions have had very expensive horses on our elite auction for year after year, very very expensive, and so we make sure they get good mares. But these are also sires that require the right advice to the breeder as to which mare he will send to these stallions. These are very interesting stallions but they will never be as famous as Florestan because most of his foals are beautiful and move well, even the people who do not know much about horse breeding can see that this is a harmonious product. The other bloodlines are not less valuable for producing sport horses so we have to work to make them famous so that the breeders can sell their foals to the good riders."
"What makes a sire special is that he makes more good foals than bad ones – and that he improves on the mare, and Florestan has a very large percentage of good foals. Of course he has some which are not, but he is a ‘stamp’ stallion, he stamps his foals, nearly all of them have the type of their sire, you can recognize them. Here comes a foal – ‘oh Florestan!’ This is something that makes it easier for a sire. The other thing is that the Florestans are easy to handle, easy to ride, even if they don’t look harmonic, the riders say they feel good. This is the most important thing for the normal market, the rider who wants to ride after he has done his work of an evening, who wants to have fun, who wants to make a good picture on the horse, they are easy to sit on, and that makes success."
"Florestan will also produce top sport horses. Top sport horses have to have a good character but they are allowed to be a bit more sensitive and so I think the good sport horses from Florestan will come from the mares with a lot of Thoroughbred blood. Horses that are a bit more hot, these will be the horses for the highest competitions, but Florestan has many other horses for the levels A, L and M and that makes many riders happy. He has the best chance of producing the top horses because he gets the best mares."
"There are some sires who should have the same chance but they don’t get it. Some people ask where are all the Florestans in the sport, like the Rubinsteins for example, but they forget that Florestan has only been in the artificial insemination program for six years. So his first foals from this are five years old now. Before that he was in natural covering and he didn’t have many mares. The people should wait a few more years and they will see the Florestans on Level S – I hope so, but we can’t influence that, nature will show it."
As always talking with Susanne Rimkus is a fascinating experience thanks to her breadth of knowledge and her enthusiasm for her horses and her role at the State Stud. Once again, we thank her for her time and the opportunity to interview her.