Ridge resident wins trophy

100-mile ride nets award for Roush

By Brian Hamilton, brianh@theunion.com
July 27, 2005


Though the Western States Trail Ride is most commonly referred to as the Tevis Cup, the name of the trophy presented to the overall winner of the 100-mile, one-day ride, Michele Roush says that, given the choice, she'd rather win the Haggin Cup.

And considering she's a veterinarian, that personal preference seems an appropriate one.

Roush wrapped up her third finish in six starts in the annual event on Sunday, crossing the finish line in ninth place and earning her prized Haggin Cup, the award presented to the top-10 finishing horse determined to be in the best physical condition following the ride.

"I've always thought anybody can go out and ride fast," said Roush, a North San Juan resident. "To me, (the Haggin Cup) is a bigger deal than the Tevis Cup. It's judged on both horse and the rider. It's a comprehensive award."

Roush rode Cayenne, a horse she first rode just months earlier in an endurance riding event in Nevada, in the 51st annual Western States Trail Ride, crossing the finish line at 12:12 a.m. Sunday morning - nearly 19 hours after starting the ride at 5:15 a.m. Saturday morning.

"At that race in Nevada, I rode three different horses on three different days," Roush said. "And on that third day, I rode Cayenne. He did the Tevis last year, with his owner from Utah, so I knew he could do it.

"One of his strengths is that he is very good downhill and the Tevis is a downhill race, pretty much."

In January, Roush rode in the World Endurance Championships in Dubai, United Arab Emirates atop PR Tallymark, a horse owned and ridden by Steve Shaw of Santa Cruz in this year's Tevis Cup.

"I didn't really know (Cayenne) really well, but I certainly know him better now than I did last Friday," she said. "He just goes and does his own thing.

"Tallymark is high maintenance, where I have to do a lot of positioning with him to do his best. But Cayenne, just works it out and seems to do what he needs to do."

Greenwood's Cathy Richardson claimed the Tevis Cup, as the first to the finish at Auburn's McCann Stadium, riding SMR Fif d'Or across the finish line at 11:06 p.m. Saturday. Richardson was also the 2001 winner of the Haggin Cup.

Though complete results of the event are not yet available, Roush said that nearly 200 riders and horses started the event, with 88 finishing.

Among the local finishers, Colfax's Char Antuzzi rode Galahad across the finish line at 3:28 a.m. Sunday, while Grass Valley's Kimberly Nunez was right behind, as she and Tenook's Magic Wind reached the end point at 3:30 a.m. Sunday. Grass Valley's Frank Smith rode his 10-year-old mule Batman to the finish by 3:30 a.m. The finish was Smith's eighth completion of the course.

Robert and Melissa Ribley, also of Grass Valley, each finished the event at 4:58 a.m. Sunday, with Melissa riding Oak Hill Tidbit and Robert atop Oak Hill Rambler.

Three other area riders and their mounts were pulled from the event at Robinson Flat, the 36-mile mark of the event. Penn Valley's Beverly Altevers and her mount Flash of Elegance were pulled from the race, as was Grass Valley's Ina Hutchings and Rebel Dancer, along with Colfax's Chuck Mather and Dance of Hallani.

To contact sports editor Brian Hamilton, e-mail brianh@theunion.com or call 477-4240

Shaikh Majid In UK Endurance triumph

Khaleej Times
From A Correspondent

26 July 2005



IN HEAVY rain Shaikh Majid bin Mohammed Al Maktoum won the FEI 160-km Euston Park Endurance ride sponsored by Emirates International Endurance racing. He rode the French bred mare, Al Wadha, on who his brother Shaikh Hamdan had won the 160-km ride at Newmarket last year.


The 160-km course had been designed by James MacEwan and John Robertson who was also the FEI technical delegate.

The ride started and finished at Euston House whose parkland was the location of the central vet gate. The route was divided into six loops 35-37-35-19-17 and 19-km. The first and third legs of 35km were over the same route as were the fourth and last leg of 19km.

The courses ran over the farmland and woods of Euston Estate, courtesy of Lord and Lady Euston, and the tracks through Kings Forest courtesy of the Forestry Commission.

The ride officials included Ian Williams, Director of Endurance at the FEI. He praised both the organisation and the course. ?A well organised and well run event which produced a top class 160-km ride.

?More incredible is that their were no gates to open and no road work, an accomplishment rarely achieved by rides in the UK. The numbers might have been few but the competitive level was very high.?

At 5am on a cool summer morning 36 riders were flagged of by Maggie Maquire Vice-Chairman of Endurance GB, who also presented the awards. Two stalwarts of endurance in the UK, Lesley Dunn and Margaret McKiddie, led the first stage.

Dunn went on to finish third on Franzara and McKiddie?s horse, Bonnie Anne, was eliminated lame at the end of the penultimate stage.

From the second leg the UAE riders dominated the pace with Shaikh Hamdan, Shaikh Ahmed and Shaikh Majid leading.

They were closely followed by their father General Shaikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai Crown Prince and UAE Minister of Defence, and his wife Princess Haya bint Al Hussein.

In the later part of this leg Shaikh Mohammed retired his young horse Alidar whom he felt was not sound and Princess Haya also retired her favourite horse Al Aghar who was in top form.

The three brothers and Mohammed Ali Al Shafar had established a comfortable lead by the end of the third stage but at the end of the fourth Shaikh Hamdan retired his mount Horisk De Grazette on the advice of Shaikh Mohammed who considered the horse had done sufficient and performed very well. The heavy rain was persistent as the three UAE riders completed the final two legs. The grey gelding Mukatel ridden by Al Shafar tired over the final stage to cross the finish third but was eliminated lame at the final vetting.

The two brothers rode together over the final 19-km and crossed the finish simultaneously, Shaikh Majid just a length ahead. Shaikh Ahmed was riding a young horse, the French bred Jaysk, and he commented: ?I was not sure if he would succeed at this distance but he did, due to my father?s excellent training.?

Only five riders completed and Dr Fred Barralet, President of the Veterinary Commission, said: ?A lot of retirements at the midway stage were made by riders who felt that distance was adequate for their horse who could well be competing in the Europeans next month.? The heavy rain that started at midday also influenced some riders who retired before the finish. Katie Smith, the recent winner of Florac, described the going as very slippery and very difficult. The winning ride time was 8.32.01 an average of 18.98kph.

In fourth place was Spaniard Antoino Moreno who was riding the USA bred Jassas, owned by Shaikh Mohammed.

The last rider to finish was Susan Hawes from the UK more than three hours after the winner.

Tevis: Roush claims Haggin Cup

Richardson wins first Tevis Cup, Auburn's Hall takes second in his 25th Tevis finish

By: Todd Mordhorst,
Journal Sports Editor



After a solid 16 hours on the Western States Trail Saturday and into Sunday morning, the top Western States Endurance riders celebrated Sunday afternoon at the Gold Country Fairgrounds.

In a festive awards ceremony, Michele Roush took home the coveted Haggin Cup. Her horse, Cayenne, was judged to be the most fit horse among the top 10 finishers. Roush, from North San Juan, just slipped into the top 10, taking ninth and her mount won a very close vote among the Haggin Cup judges.

"I just try to ride the horse for what that particular horse has," Roush said. "Yeah, there's always a thought in the back of my head that if I can get in the top 10, I'd like to show for best condition."


[More ...]

Jas and Bilbo go the distance

Henry Hoskins
Monday, 25 July 2005

Endurance riding is a tough, demanding sport, racing a horse over an 80 or 160 kilometre course.
Starting in the wee hours of the morning and with four vet checks required during the race it certainly isn't for the faint hearted.

But Jas Carfter loves it.

"What other sport can you ride through the mountains and watch the sunrise," she said.

Crafter recently returned from the NSW State Championships in Manilla where she placed second in lightweight division on Neroli Mitchell's horse 'Bilbo'.

Starting at 2am in the morning Crafter rode for 10 hours and 52 minutes to qualify for the Tom Quilty, the most prestigious endurance event in the country.

Over 70 riders turned out for the event competing in four categories; lightweight, middleweight, heavyweight and junior riders.

Carfter became involved in the sport four years ago through friends Neroli Mitchell and Peter Cooper.

"This was my first 160km race, previously I've only ridden in 80km races," she said.

And Crafter says she'll be a definite starter in the Quilty in Queensland next year.

The sport requires a good understanding of you horses health.

"Obviously you have to listen to how your horse is going," she said.

"Your horse has a vet check the day before the race and four during it so if your push it too hard you'll get vetted out.

"Myself and Peter (Cooper) are just always careful to listen to how the horse is travelling.

"Towards the end of the race I was with the leader but Bilbo was doing it a bit tough so I pulled him up to scratch around to eat grass for about half and hour."

Crafter says Arab horse are generally the best breed for endurance racing due to there slow heart rate and slow muscle twitch.

She generally competes in the middleweight division which she says is more prestigious but rode in the lightweight for Neroli Mitchell to get racing points for 'Bilbo'.

"I'm wasn't sore after the race because you have to be riding them everyday so they are nice and fit," she said.

"You don't just go straight into a 160km race, you build them up over a period time running them in 40 or 80km races."

The sport doesn't have a high profile but has been going since the 1970's according to Crafter.

"There's no other sport like it," she said.

"There would be a race on every weekend around the state but you don't really hear about it.

Going the distance is its own reward

Going the distance is its own reward
No shame in Tevis Cup finish for back-of-the-packers

By: Gus Thomson, Journal Staff Writer
Sunday, July 24, 2005 10:50 PM PDT


Rider John Matthews finds a spot to sit after finishing a problem-plagued final stage of the Tevis Cup trail ride. Matthews was Sunday's final finisher. Photo by gus thomson/ Auburn Journal

The glory of finishing the 100-mile Tevis Cup endurance ride was escaping John Matthews as he sat hunched on the dirt floor of Auburn's McCann Stadium infield before dawn on Sunday.

Seconds earlier, his legs had buckled and the Manhattan, Kan. rider had dropped to the ground while his horse was being examined by a veterinarian at the finish line.

Matthews had made it. He'd get the silver buckle to show he'd ridden the Tevis trail - 100 miles in one day. But just barely.

Matthews and his horse, Knight Legend, completed the arduous trek through the Sierra to Auburn as the clock ticked down the final second on the 24-hour deadline for finishers. Nursing a bottle of Sierra Nevada beer soon after his dramatic drop to the ground, Matthews joked that the ride had been a "piece of cake," but the pinched expression on his face and forced words betrayed troubles on the trail.

"It was kind of a long trail ride," Matthews said, in deliberate understatement. The 69-year-old Midwesterner will go down in the record book as the 51st Tevis Cup ride's final finisher. The fact that Matthews and his horse finished at all turned into a testament not only to inner reserves of grit and determination but the willingness of others to help a fellow rider in trouble on the trail.

Matthews was on track to finish the ride with minutes to spare. But after he dismounted near No Hands Bridge at the American River Confluence about five miles from the Auburn finish line, things went terribly wrong. His horse bolted up the trail, leaving Matthews nearing the end of the ride without a mount.

"My saddle was slipping," Matthews said. "He got away from us and went down the trail. He wanted to go home."

One of the oldest riders in this weekend's competition, 80-year-old Jim Steere of Petaluma, soon approached and temporarily put aside his own plans for the final ascent up the walls of the American River canyon to the Gold Country Fairground to help Matthews find his horse.

Minutes later, Matthews' Wesob was found about a quarter mile up the trail. A rider farther along had caught the horse and tied its reins to a tree.

Steere continued on, to finish seconds after 5 a.m. - and 15 minutes ahead of the 24-hour cutoff. Matthews struggled up the same route and beat the clock by the slimmest of margins, marveling at the help he received from the octogenarian Good Samaritan.

"I didn't think I had a chance," Matthews said. "I don't believe I'll be riding when I'm his age. He's a marvel."

With little over a half-moon to guide them, the final finishers in the Tevis Cup ride suffered no shame as they made their way into McCann Stadium. They were far from stragglers. In fact, the flow of finishers was relatively steady as the riders who had slowed their mounts and timed their trek finished at their own pace.

Decatur, Texas rider Jonni Jewell arrived at the finish on Hank at 4:46 a.m. Jewell said that with no mountains to speak of in Texas, she brought her horse out to Southern California in June to get ready for the 17,000 feet of climbing it would face. The extra work paid off, with Hank stumbling on occasion over mountain trails but going the distance.

"It was tough on him but he's tough - amazingly tough," Jewell said.

Dave Rabe, of Carson City, Nev., celebrated with a Miller High Life at the finish line. Along the way, he was quaffing gifts of tequila, beer and wine from onlookers to help fuel the journey.

"People out there are really nice," Rabe said. "If you're conservative and pace yourself you have a chance to finish."

Rabe finished with about half an hour to spare - no disgrace in his books.

"Who cares if you finish 20th or last?" he said.

Tevis first-timer Logos Hall of Altadena logged a finish 10 minutes before the ride's official shutdown.

"I started getting nervous (about finishing) this afternoon," Hall said. "We did one vet check at a time. There were some stumbles but she got right back up every time."

Before an official finish, there was a final veterinary checkup at the stadium and then a chance to make a celebratory loop around the infield to the finish line. By 5 a.m. no one was in the stands to cheer on the finishers. Some took the victory lap with smiles denoting the victory they had achieved over the heat and rock-strewn dangers of the trail. About 250 horses and riders were signed up for the annual trek. Less than 90 finished.

Veterinary checkpoints along the route could make or break a rider's chances for a buckle.

With glow-lights the only signs of their movement along the trail, riders filed in to the Lower Quarry veterinary checkpoint as the final hours counted down. They were met by veterinarians like Chico's Jim Edwards, who has been volunteering for the ride for 37 years. At that point, veterinarians have to make tough calls on whether to keep a horse in the ride or pull it. Five horses were pulled out at the Lower Quarry checkpoint during this year's Tevis Cup competition, including two-time champion Potato Richardson's Garcon - a leader at the time and on track for a possible win.

Edwards said Richardson's horse had fallen farther up the trail and when it rolled over, suffered shoulder cuts and a bruised muscle that left it favoring a leg. Riders know that veterinarian decisions are final and several horse doctors can be brought in to explain in detail why the call to take a horse out was made, Edwards said.

"Usually they're very convinced that we're very convinced," he said. "Potato took it well."

Navaho Nation: After the dust settles

By Kathy Helms
Diné Bureau

Enduring temperatures of over 100 degrees, reporter Kathy Helms had to lead Buddy through the bottom of Navajo Canyon after he broke his bridle

WINDOW ROCK ? Tom Robbins said it best in his book, "Still Life With Woodpecker": "It's never too late to have a happy childhood."

Bearing this in mind, I set out for the 10th Annual Navajo Nation Council Ride which left from Navajo Mountain Chapter House on Monday, July 11, with a do-or-die attitude.

I spent Sunday night camping under the stars with my tent-mate and lead wrangler, Stephanie, 11. We oohed and aahed at the clarity of the Milky Way and talked about the fact that stars are actually different colors though distance makes them appear white. Excitement kept us talking way into the night. Also, we were having trouble adjusting to the sound of horses chewing hay and banging on water buckets

[More ...]

Tevis Trek Goes Hi-Tech

Ride's tone changing from cowboy hats to molded saddles, GPS

By: Gus Thomson, Journal Staff Writer
Sunday, July 24, 2005 4:05 AM PDT

Jogging his horse DWA Sabku into the Foresthill checkpoint of the annual 100-mile Tevis Cup Ride, Christoph Schork, of Moab, Utah, wears high-tech sport clothing and a helmet as opposed to the cowboy attire used in the early years of the 51-year-old ride. Photo by Karina Williams/Auburn Journal

The Tevis 100-mile endurance ride is more than just one rider, one horse these days.

In its 51st year, the ride this weekend is a parade of high-tech equipment far removed from the 1950s and 1960s, when riders in cowboy hats, boots and western shirts spurred their mounts on the trail.

Many of today's horses sport saddles padded with the same shock-absorbing materials runners pound the pavement with in the soles of their shoes. Their horseshoes can be just as much a plastic composite as steel. And for several years now, Tevis horses have been guzzling electrolyte drinks similar to Gatorade, as they make their way from Robie Equestrian Park, south of Truckee, to Auburn.

High in feather-light, injection-molded saddles, riders' cowboy hats have been doffed in favor of lightweight helmets, padded and protective trail-running shoes have replaced cowboy boots, and running tights, shorts and sweat-wicking shirts from the endurance running world have replaced the jeans and pearl-buttoned Western wear of yore.

For many horse-rider teams navigating the twists and turns, ups and down, and heat and cold of the Sierra, a global positioning system and heart-rate monitor are standard equipment. And canteens have given way to plastic bladders with flexible straws strapped to the back of riders.

Pilot Hill's Steve Elliott was on the sidelines during this weekend's Tevis Ride, but as owner of Equine Performance Products he's on the cutting edge of many equestrian innovations. Elliott's working with a design factory in Italy on a new, high-tech saddle and was one of the early champions of GPS and heart-rate monitoring for horses.

"It's like an onboard black box," he said.

Elliott sees opportunities in the future to increase nutrition. Horses, like their human counterparts, are already gulping down glucosamine to strengthen and rebuild cartilage.

But when the starting line is staring a rider in the face and a horse is prancing in the first light of dawn to set out, all the accoutrements of the modern world take second fiddle to some basic tenets.

"It all comes down to good conditioning and luck," Elliott said.

That means some of the high-tech tools are finding some resistance from riders in an event that is steeped in tradition.

Three-time Tevis winner Hal Hall of Auburn, one of the veterans of the Tevis trail, doesn't use GPS but will strap a heart-rate monitor on his horse occasionally.

Like many riders, he's a purist on the trail during the Tevis - riding not only to test his own mettle and the endurance of his horse, but riding against the best equestrians the event has put on the route over five decades.

"I don't want to be regimented by a number," Hall said. "They can't tell us if our horse has a stomach ache or a sore foot."

Hall was trying something new on this year's ride - reflective clothing designed to keep the UV rays off the body.

Two-time champion Potato Richardson of Greenwood distances himself from the GPS crowd, who can track distance, elevations and temperatures with an onboard unit.

"When I go out, I just want to have a good ride," Richardson said. "When someone says 'How far did you go?' I say 'I don't know.' Instead of more gadgets, I want to get to know the horse."

Virginia rider John Crandell III, said he's played with the monitors and GPS systems but would rather be reading a twitch of a horse's ear than a digital read-out.

"When the metal hits the road, I'm a minimalist," Crandell said. "Sometimes the numbers can distract you."

Cool's Erin Klentos, another two-time Tevis winner, said that GPS is a benefit for on remote trails but in and around the Western States, she has no need because she's ridden those trails all her life.

"And I didn't inherit my mother's ability to lose her car in a parking lot," Klentos added.

The Journal's Gus Thomson can be reached at gust@goldcountrymedia.com