REGINA – The thrill of victory was abruptly gutted when her trainer said one of the shoes on her championship-winning horse was overweight and she was disqualified.
“For a split second I thought he was serious,” said Marcelle Richman of Idaho, whose trainer quickly admitted he was just pulling her leg.
She chuckles about the incident now, which happened at a different show, but the horror of being disqualified after winning a national championship horse event is no laughing matter for owners at events such as the Royal Red Arabian horse show, which recently brought over 700 horses from all over North America to Regina.
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Consequences dire
And while horse owners are devastated by losing a championship, the consequences are much more perilous for errant farriers.
“If he did that, he’d die young,” joked Richman about how she would react to an overweight shoe ruining a win. “I’d take care of his wife and kids, but he’d die young.”
Roger Newman, the official farrier of the event, said owners do not react lightly to seeing their dreams stripped away.
“They go into shock. They don’t oversee everything that happens at their barn and they rely on their farrier to make the decisions and do what he thinks is right,” said Newman, after de-shoeing a winning horse to ensure it was wearing legal footwear.
After an event at a show like the Royal Red, the winner and another horse are taken aside to have their urine and shoes checked. While drugs can have a Ben Johnson effect on a horse, allowing it to perform better than it would naturally, a heavy shoe can improve a horse’s appearance before the judges by giving it a snappier trot, the way high heels can accentuate a woman’s walk.
Honest mistakes
No shoe can weigh more than 14 ounces (397 grams) and the pad can’t be thicker than three-eighths of an inch (one centimetre).
Most illegal shoes are the result of mistakes and neglect, Newman said. When they run into one, event farriers will do everything they can to legally reduce the shoe’s weight.
“We’ll clean up the shoe – soap and wash it, swab it with a wire brush – we’ve even flossed the nail holes trying to get it as clean as we can,” he said.
But “when it’s over, it’s over.”
Newman, who lives in Wisconsin, said he feels badly when a shoe comes up overweight, because he has a good notion of what the owner’s farrier will face once the two are reunited.
“It’s an experience thing that the farriers at home need to be very aware of when they come to a show of this nature,” he said, urging other farriers to understand the owner’s point of view.
“These people get up at four in the morning, bathe these things, come from zillions of miles away and put their whole life into it,” Newman said. “When it goes awry, it’s bad news.”
