{"id":25127,"date":"2016-05-20T14:30:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-20T04:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/?p=25127"},"modified":"2017-02-10T10:03:07","modified_gmt":"2017-02-09T23:03:07","slug":"harold-the-horse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/2016\/05\/harold-the-horse\/","title":{"rendered":"Harold the Horse"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"_MG_1108\"<\/a>Words and photos by Rebecca Ashton<\/h3>\n

Although Scott McKenna has had a successful dressage career on \u201cnormal\u201d horses, riding up to Grand Prix with another young prospect about to start at the top level this year, he is possibly better known as the rider of Harold the Horse. So how did a bit of polar fleece and a YouTube clip make this kiwi barrister a global sensation?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIt all started with a fund raising show with real dressage horses for the local Riding for the Disabled about seven years ago. My little brother Sean was the MC, because he likes to talk a lot. He decided that it was going to be too boring for everyone just watching dressage horses so he came up with this idea of having a horse costume and we would demonstrate all the different dressage movements so that the non-dressage people in the audience kind of knew what was going on. My brother is very much at home acting the fool in front of a crowd.\"gangnamdance\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cMum made the costume and it all went really well. I was the back half originally which was great because no one saw me. We expected that would be the end of it, however about seven months later the NZ Horse of the Year organisers were asking around for one of the dressage riders to just do a little demo in the main showjumping arena during the night entertainment. None of the riders wanted to do it because the showjumping ring is horrendously spooky and all of the horses go crazy. The old costume was shoved into one of the cupboards of the horse truck having not ever been moved since we used it…..because we like to keep things\u00a0tidy!<\/p>\n

\u201cMy brother was there. He wasn\u2019t riding but he would come to the Horse of the Year Show to pick up girls. So we volunteered and we didn\u2019t tell anyone that it was going to be a costume horse. The organisers announced it, assuming that it was going to be me on my Grand Prix horse that I had at the time and we came out in the costume. It came over brilliantly though and they loved it. After that for the rest of the night they wanted us out on the oval doing something. We were trying to climb over the puissance wall, we were cracking whips with the cowboys who were galloping around, we roped a cow. Horse of the Year have had us back every year since.\"RA_20131019_0189\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Adelinde Cornelissen and the pony<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cAfter that we did the dressage forum at Manfield with Stefan Peters so we came out in the costume to interview Stefan. There were some Australians from Queensland who had come over for the masterclass and saw Harold the Horse and then we got contacted to do the Queensland Festival of Dressage. They put it on Youtube and from there it went around the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe exposure from that meant we got invitations to perform at the World Championships for Young Jumping Horses, we did the World Dressage Masters at Mechelen, we were the opening act for a couple of auctions in Holland and Germany, we did the stallion licensing in France for the Selle Francais studbook and we did some extremely rich lady\u2019s birthday in the south of France which was probably one of the best ones. So, a few free trips around the world just for dressing up in a horse costume and acting like an idiot!\"RA_20131019_0149\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cHarold has revolutionised dressage. He invented the triangle halt as opposed to the square halt, he\u2019s the first horse to have done a canter pirouette and one tempis at the same time and along with Tor Van Den Berge, we invented strip tease dressage. I\u2019m hoping that will catch on and become an Olympic sport eventually. I think this is how we bring crowds back to dressage. There\u2019s been a lot of discussion lately about how we might do that. Problem solved. Next I\u2019ll take on the crisis in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing a dressage star, the fillies naturally pay a lot of attention to Harold, so he now has two young offspring, Paddy and Penny the ponies. They have already started successful careers in the arena so we hope to see them out more.<\/p>\n

As for future appearances, we don\u2019t have anything scheduled at the moment but we\u2019re working on a new act. Once we have that ironed out hopefully we\u2019ll get a few gigs.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Although Scott McKenna has had a successful dressage career on \u201cnormal\u201d horses, riding up to Grand Prix with another young prospect about to start at the top level this year, he is possibly better known as the rider of Harold the Horse. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25129,"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":[4],"tags":[1366,1243,1365,1367],"class_list":["post-25127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dressage","tag-adeline-cornelissen","tag-dressage","tag-harold-the-horse","tag-scott-mckenna"],"acf":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25127","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=25127"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32343,"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25127\/revisions\/32343"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horsemagazine.com\/thm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}