{"id":10619,"date":"2013-10-03T12:24:10","date_gmt":"2013-10-03T02:24:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/?p=10619"},"modified":"2015-01-22T07:27:11","modified_gmt":"2015-01-21T20:27:11","slug":"choose-a-horse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/2013\/10\/choose-a-horse\/","title":{"rendered":"Choose a Horse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matt Williams<\/b> is one of the most successful Australian jumping riders of modern times, and has been selected for the Beijing Games, the WEG in Lexington and the London Games. Now living in the United States, Matt is in keen demand as a coach, and as a rider, and is working to produce the right combination to take him to yet another World Championships \u2013 in Normandy next year. We asked him to look at these three jumpers and decide which one he would like in his stable block.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

\u00a0The First Choice – Cruising<\/em><\/p>\n

I would take the grey horse (Athlet Z \/Calypso) as my third pick, even though he has very nice technique. Look at the way he is coming up through the knee. However,\u00a0I am not a big believer in technique, if you look at horses that are winning championships, like Hickstead, often don\u2019t have a technique that is classical, by any means.\u00a0It is nice to have that technique, but then often that great technique is the horse\u2019s\u00a0 downfall because they are a little bit more careful and not as brave.<\/p>\n

Choice number two is the Diamant de S\u00e9milly\/\u00a0Ouragen du Don. It\u2019s a scopey jumping machine and\u00a0I really like its breeding. When I look to breed a horse, that\u2019s the first stallion I want to use, Diamant de S\u00e9milly. For me, he is the next stallion after Galoubet for jumping horses.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The Second Choice – Diamant de Semilly\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The horse I would most like to take home is the chestnut horse, the Cruising out of a Galoubet mare. I\u2019ve loved Galoubet ever since Beijing \u2013 he\u2019s bred so many great horses. Cruising throws a type that has a difficult canter, but if you can ride that horse, they are very careful and they are very fast horses.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

\u00a0The Third Choice – Athlet Z<\/em><\/p>\n

With young horses, you look at the breeding because you want to see what the horse is likely to end up \u2013 does the horse have the breeding to have the scope\u00a0to go bigger? Looking at a horse that is already jumping a metre sixty, then I don\u2019t look at the breeding. I look\u00a0at the heart, what the horse is capable of. Conformation can be a factor for soundness, but to me the biggest thing is their heart. The horse I had at Kentucky, Watch Me, he was a beautifully conformed horse but his technique was terrible, his canter wasn\u2019t great, but that horse out of every horse I\u2019ve ridden, had the biggest heart. He wasn\u2019t sound and yet on the last day he came out and jumped clear. On the other hand, you can find horses with the most beautiful jumping technique, but they knock a fence down every time \u2013 and that is a depressing horse for me. I\u2019ll take something that fights for you\u00a0 every time, that\u2019s why I like the Cruising, the Irish horse still has a lot of fight, and with the Galoubet blood throwing in extra scope, that\u2019s a pretty nice mix.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matt Williams is one of the most successful Australian jumping riders of modern times, and has been selected for the Beijing Games, the WEG in Lexington and the London Games. Now living in the United States, Matt is in keen demand as a coach, and as a rider, and is working to produce the right […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10621,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[780,67],"class_list":["post-10619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-show-jumping","tag-jumping-breeding","tag-showjumping"],"acf":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10619"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20617,"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10619\/revisions\/20617"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}