Alice Simpson and Koopman’s Rumba (CA)
Team #1056: Alice Simpson and Koopman’s Rumba
From: Fulton, California
Ages 79 & 21
Combined Age: 100
Test: Second Level Test 3
I have been a horse lover since childhood. But owning or keeping a horse was not an option when I was a child. It wasn’t until my family moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1961 that my parents bought me my first horse, an aged Thoroughbred, for $105 including the saddle and bridle, when I was 15 years old. Challenger was the first of many.
I read books on dressage and still own some of the classics that I bought then. But dressage sounded too hard. The vocabulary is obtuse. It wasn’t until I entered veterinary school at UC Davis in 1966 that I started riding dressage after riding Western for several years. I boarded my horse at the same boarding stable as a self-taught rider who had a small grade mare that he trained himself to Grand Prix, relying on large part on the book by his hero, Alois Podhajsky. I rode with him almost every day for two years, learning the nuts and bolts of dressage but nothing about equitation. In the late 60s and early 70s, when the only people, with a few exceptions, who knew anything about dressage were ex-military officers, I rode in clinics with well-known clinicians from Europe, including Hermann Friedlander, Hans Moeller, Charles de Kunffy, Baron Hans von Blixen-Fineke, Franz Rochowansky, and Michael Handler. But I have never had a coach or trainer and was never able to afford a quality trained horse, so always bought young, unstarted horses and started and trained them myself.
I joined the California Dressage Society in 1968, a year after it was founded. My first dressage show was the same year in Kyra Downton’s backyard in Atherton, at Second Level, which was a lot easier in those days. The highest level I ever reached was Prix St. Georges, in 1977, on a Hanoverian/Thoroughbred mare named Windspiel I bought as a two year old in 1970 from Fritz Floto in Canada. I schooled her at Intermediare Level, and she could do tempi flying changes with ease. I even competed in a USET screening trial in Los Angeles that year with her. The judges told me, as tactfully as they could, that my horse was good enough for the Team, but my riding was not. I also had begun breeding her, and she had a one-month-old foal back in the barn as I was competing. I continued to breed her, and two other mares I bought, but quickly discovered that breeding and competing with the same mare every year are not possible.
Since then, I’ve ridden a lot of lower-level tests with young horses I bought or bred. I am currently riding Koopman’s Rumba, a Hackney Horse I bought 18 years ago when he was three years old. I also bought his full brother, one year younger, and trained them both to ride and drive. I retired Rumba from driving in 2015 after he suffered the first of a long string of unusual injuries. For years he spent as much time in rehab as in work. He recovered from one thing only to have something else happen to him. Between his injuries and other demands on my time, I never taught him flying changes, so we never made it beyond Second Level. We’re working on the changes now, because why not? Neither of us, however, moves as well as we did when we were younger!
Photo by Kelly Kenneally Photography
