What if you had a show and everybody came?

For Show Director Doug Huls of the Arizona Quarter Horse Association, that’s not far from his experience each winter at the show he manages alongside the AZQHA, the Sun Circuit.

Last year, Huls says this nine-day event was the largest AQHA circuit competition worldwide. This year’s event, which will feature eight AQHA shows spanning Jan. 26-Feb. 3, will require 100 additional stalls.

The World Cup Finals of dressage and jumping for 2015 have been withdrawn from Guadalajara, Mexico, and International Equestrian Federation announced on Jan. 11 that Las Vegas has been asked to step in to host the only annual global championships of the two Olympic disciplines.

RANCHO SANTA FE — Three-time Olympic medalist Gunter Seidel has a new Grand Prix ride in 2013, Coral Reef Wylea.

Formerly known as “Winci”, the 13-year-old mare, acquired for Seidel to ride by Gwendolyn Sontheim Meyer and her Coral Reef Ranch of Rancho Santa Fe, had been owned and trained by Klaus Balkenhol, the German Olympic gold medalist and former U.S. team coach. Winci was ridden by Balkenhol’s daughter, Anabel, at national shows and at Grand Prix at two CDIs in Germany last year — Lingen in June and Aachen in July.

BURBANK — Now that the sun has set on a a remarkable year in dressage — an “Olympic year” that featured among other headline moments the retirement of an icon, Ravel — a new chapter for riders, horses and event managers is quietly opening.

“The year after the games is always a quiet year,” says Glenda McElroy, owner of Cornerstone Event Management and the chair of the L.A. Chapter of the California Dressage Society. “It’s kind of the rebuilding year — a lot of people have new horses, new goals.”

DEAR DANA: Days now are shorter and I can’t ride my horse as much as I could before. It is so much colder, and my horse has a lot more energy. It feels like I need to work my horse twice as long, and I have half the time. Any suggestions?
–Dean

HEY RAY: I have a horse that is fairly responsive and soft to my hands until he gets distracted or scared, and then I have nothing but a hard-braced neck, head up, lousy brakes and poor steering. I practice suppling every time I ride but it doesn’t seem to help when he gets distracted. He also seems to look for things to spook at when we are at shows and stares at it as we go by. How can I keep him focused on our work in a snaffle when he feels like a ton of bricks in my hands?
–Anonymous

35th in a series
Last issue, Les presented a pair of exercises aimed at ribcage and hip control on the fence. This week we continue with awareness of lead-changing with the back leg first.

Exercise number three is basically sidepassing, but it will have one big difference for most of you. While most novice riders start sidepassing by moving the shoulders and catching up with the hips, I’m not going to let you do it that way.

When you attend the great line-up of activities at the Horse Expo Pomona Jan. 31-Feb 2 at Fairplex, be sure to visit the Horsetrader.com and California Horsetrader booths — #7207 and #7209 in Building 7. We’d love to meet you and also share the most exciting launch EVER of Horsetrader.com. (Horsey reviewers who were asked for a pre-launch response are calling it “the Google® of the horse industry!”) We’re very excited to put it to work for you, starting at Expo Pomona, so please stop by. We’ll also have “Horsetrader Dollars” you can use to place you own ads on the new website – plus, meet and greet our popular columnists!