An interview with Chris Hector
“The first and foremost thing about making an event horse is finding one that is sound. Whether that is going to continue to be so important in the CIC format is another question. I think I like the CIC format… I used to be a big fan of the Three Day Event, but now I’d be quite happy to do the event without the roads and tracks or the steeplechase. Keep the same emphasis on cross country, and that will produce the same atmosphere, without injuring our horses. With the new format, we may see better horses stay in the sport for longer. Even still we need sound horses. They are going to have to trot up twice at a CIC.”
“Probably second to soundness is temperament. You look at all of the horses at the top of the sport. They are not the biggest movers, they are not necessarily the best jumpers – look at Top of the Line, he is by no means one of the better movers, yet he can get scores of 30s and 40s. Because it is a trainable horse, you can teach it to go better on the flat. Sure you need the basic ability. They need to be careful, but if they are trainable that goes a long way.”
“Certainly they have to be more careful now to get through the showjumping where they have to jump a metre twenty five, metre thirty. The horse that just got around a 1.20 track isn’t going to jump 1.30. They need to be able to jump a metre thirty comfortably, and able to do it twice. So nowadays we are looking for better jumpers – and if that means sacrificing a little movement on the flat, as long as they are trainable, that doesn’t matter.”
So have you shifted to the Warmblood camp?
“I think a good Thoroughbred will beat a good Warmblood in eventing, any day. In saying that, I think you will consistently see cross bred Warmbloods – maybe quarter or half Warmblood – will be the norm. There will still be Thoroughbreds, and they will better than a cross bred horse.”
Where do you find these good Thoroughbreds – off the track? Or would you rather have them started in preliminary grades?
“It’s difficult for me because I don’t have any money. I spent five years trying to build up a business, getting horses off the track for $500 or whatever; my whole life has been about that. I just got to the point where I needed to get more money to buy better horses, and I broke my leg, and that cost me about thirty grand! There goes my money and now I am back to where I was before!! Whilst I was breaking my leg, I bought a really nice Thoroughbred from Ebony Tucker. It was probably the most expensive horse I’ve ever bought but by other people’s standards, it was by no means an expensive horse.”
“Ideally if you could get a horse at Pre-Novice, that would be great. Without being rude, you want them before the riders have ‘altered’ them too much. If you can get them then, it cuts out a lot of time. Not necessarily Pre-Novice, maybe C or D grade showjumping, where a horse is showing a bit of ability over a fence and seems to have a good attitude, and a careful jump. That’s what I’d be looking for.”
“Off the track, I think for me, that is always going to be where I find the majority of my horses. Occasionally when I get lucky and sell a horse, or find a nice owner who wants to buy me a horse, then I would probably be looking at a horse that had been started by someone who had done a good job but didn’t have the desire to go on. That would be ideal.”
If they are acceptable movers, you can manufacture the dressage?
“Yes. You just have to look at what Heath can do with a horse like Flame. He took an average little Pony Club horse, and he created a trot on the horse that was a sensational change. That is an extreme case, and Heath is pretty extreme.”
“I believe that if you’ve got a horse that has a trainable mind, that you can improve the dressage enough to get a 7, and 70% is a pretty competitive score on dressage day.”
“One thing they have to have is a good walk. Look at the three star test at Taupo – there were 20 marks in walk – so if you are getting six to eight for walk and you can train the horse to be in the right position, you are looking good. You can train the horse to do the changes, you can teach them the lateral work, even medium trot you can teach. There is not a lot of just trot. Everything is sideways or mediums, there’s no just trot down the long side.”
“Look at a horse like Nikki’s Wishful Thinking – beautiful dressage horse, but he had a piddling little trot. He had this beautiful expressive medium / extended trot, very good laterally, and a very nice canter. He was sitting third individually in the dressage at Atlanta, yet he didn’t have a nice working trot. If they are trainable, that is more important than having a huge trot. Look at Jeepster, it took Stuart eight years to create a trot he could use in a test and make a better score. Having a BIG mover is more difficult than having a nice mover that is trainable.”
Do you get professional help with your dressage?
“We’re very lucky in NSW because thanks to the NSW Institute of Sport we get help from Heath and Wayne. Before Taupo I had a lesson with Stuart Tinney, and then he helped me at the event during the week. I can’t afford to have a lot of lessons. I’d quite like to – I like to make sure I am not getting into bad habits. Just little things like rider position – a lot of what Stuart and I worked on was getting me to sit in a better position, keeping my hands and arms still so that it is doesn’t look untidy.”
It’s harder for the male riders, they can easily look untidy…
“Yeah I’m good at that…”
But at Taupo you sat very neat and elegant?
“We worked on it – for about 12 hours. It was a huge thing. Stuart said that I would be able to get a mark a movement just because it didn’t look so hideous, in the past, instead of looking at the beautiful picture of Miss Dior – which she is – the judges would be looking at my elbows flapping, hands going all over the shop.”

Shane and Miss Dior at Taupo

For your showjumping – what’s the strategy?
“Getting a horse to leave them up. Recently I found Alexa Bell quite helpful because she had us doing a lot of square turns. Basically that just makes you use your outside rein a lot more in the turn so you are presenting your horse square, you are not still turning around the corner and therefore drifting and losing power. When they are straight they can produce a more technically correct jump. What you are aiming to do is give the horse the best opportunity to get to the fence in a balanced way, pretty much that is all you can do as a rider.”
Do you like to go to showjumping shows?
“As much as I can. We don’t get a lot of time in NSW through the regular season, but we are very lucky, we have a lot of shows on the south coast of Sydney, you can go to a show every weekend for five or six weeks in a row. I would like to go more often, and I think that will probably happen more now that we have to jump better. Also because we are going to have better horses for showjumping, we can enjoy those shows better. Showjumping shows can be the most boring thing unless you’ve got six or eight horses. You wait around four hours for a D grade class, you have the last fence down and you go home. It’s not a fun day. Whereas if you’ve got a few horses that jump well, it does become more enjoyable.”
When it comes to cross country schooling, do you use the events themselves as schooling exercises, or do you school cross-country?
“It depends on the horse and the issue. The only thing I would use cross-country schooling for, is water. That’s something you cannot create in a training environment. Getting a horse confident and jumping into water is something you need to do at an event or at a specially built water jump. The other thing is ditches. If you’ve got a ditchy horse, I’ve found you don’t need to jump big ditches, but you need to continually jump ditches to get them confident. When I had It’s A Knockout; he was hesitant to ditches to say the least. I did a lot of schooling with him. When I was building the course at Worrigee, I think every second fence had a ditch in it – my theme was ditches. I wanted to be confident at ditches, so I just jumped them. That’s pretty much the only things you can’t do at home.”
“Apexes, arrowheads, banks, you can train at home. I guess what we are going to see a lot more of in the future is accuracy. When you look at all the tough fences at Taupo, the only reason they were tough was that they were on a turn to an accuracy question. I think you are going to have to start to take it for granted that the horse is going to canter up and jump a big fence, whatever the shape of the fence, they are going to be able to do that – once you’ve got that you need to work on accuracy and adjustability.”
What do you do for a fitness program – where do you go for inspiration there?
“Again we are lucky that in NSW we get to talk with Wayne about things like that. I guess it is something that is passed down. I don’t go to Wayne every time I’ve got a preparation and say ‘What do I do?’ You know how they used to train their horses on the hills, and how they used to gallop them. It is not new, horse riding. Riders such as Bill Roycroft and Neale Lavis, and the riders of the past, were horsemen, and we’ve got a lot out of that. Niki and I have bought a property that has a track on it, 800 metre track. Before I went to Taupo, I went to Camden, and there is a big hill there, we galloped up that.”
Phillip Dutton says that with the new format, there will be more fast work required?
“I actually do that in my gallops. We used to do lots of slow sets, working up to ten-minute canters, but not very quickly. What I do now, is that I do it for shorter periods of time but since about 1999, I have been using sprints in my program. I’ll still do my sets of canters, but I’ve got sections within that, say in a six or seven minute canter, 40 seconds of 650/700 metres a minute sprints. Talking to Wayne he says maybe I should be doing more sprints and maybe not for as long. Shorter, forward, back, forward, back, because you are going to need to adjust. If there are 30 fences in a ten-minute course, you are going to be twisting and turning and going back and forwards. We won’t do the long gallops we used to do, and do more shorter faster sprint work – probably a little more like what the race trainers do. We are moving away from the old fashioned Three Day Event and so we’ll have to adjust our fitness programs to meet the new challenge.”