In most sports, the effort is obvious: the strain on a runner’s face, the rhythmic bunching of a rower’s muscles, the water churning in a swimmer’s wake. In riding, it’s more subtle. The rider directs the horse with the smallest of signals, and the motion should look smooth and effortless.
However, it takes the same years of training and hard work to get to that point. So when Becky Neufeld learned she was the top senior trail rider in Canada and Europe for the Appaloosa Horse Club, she was elated as any competitor whose hard work is rewarded.
“It’s just a huge overwhelming feeling of something well done,” Neufeld said. “It’s something I never thought I could do.
“For many years, I didn’t have good enough horses. You watch the people on TV and you always think you have to have money to accomplish this, and no, you don’t need money. You do the best that you can do and you work with your horse the best that you can.”
Neufeld has been riding since she was 14, first on the quarter horses her parents had, then on Appaloosas.
Her current horse, Lincoln, is 12 now, and Neufeld has had him since he was a green-broke two-year-old. With help from her riding coach, Kris Simpson, Neufeld trained him herself.
“I took him from a big scaredy-cat to being able to throw him in the horse trailer and go to these places and walk down huge concrete alleyways. He gets into a class and he gets looked at, he gets noticed, the judges like him.”
Lincoln gets three months off, from October to December. In January, she starts working with him again to get him ready for the show season. During show season, she rides him every day, anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half. She works him in Western one day and English the next, to get him used to both styles of command.
From local saddle club shows, Neufeld’s moved up to larger competitions. In 2007, she won the provincial title, a feat even more impressive because she’d given birth just two months earlier to her daughter Berlyn.
Neufeld and Lincoln were amateur champions at the provincials again this year, an accomplishment they repeated at the national championships in July. The national competition in Brandon was the farthest she’s ever travelled with her horse; it was a 36-hour-drive, non-stop to Manitoba.
Neufeld gives credit to her riding coach and her husband Andy, who looks after their daughter while she’s showing. And she doesn’t forget to credit Lincoln with doing a lot of the work.
“It’s just like people who do swimming or play hockey, he’s my passion.”
