OLDS — For the first time, Canada is sending a junior equestrian vaulting team to compete in the world championships in Flyinge, Sweden July 25-29.
In equestrian vaulting, athletes combine dance and gymnastics on top of a horse that is cantering in a circle. The competition has two phases: the compulsory exercises and the freestyle, all done to music.
The team going to Sweden is not only Canadian, its members are entirely from Alberta, including many from Mountain View County.
Local squad members are 14-year-old Katey van den Bosch of Olds; Lynda van Noordenburg, 16, of Didsbury and Jaydee Fluet, 16 of Sundre.
Also on the team are Emma Sparrow, 11, of Rocky Mountain House and two Cochrane residents: Daniel Klotz- Dedora, 16; and Emily Consaul, 17.
Three of the squad members have also qualified to compete as individual competitors at the world championships: Klotz-Dedora, van Noordenburg and Fluet.
Also competing in the world championships are Averill Saunders and Ryan Bracken. Both live north of Sundre.
One of the team members, van den Bosch, sat down for an interview with the Albertan.
She’s been vaulting for about six-and-a-half years.
“I got started because my sister was doing it. She did a summer camp with one of her friends and then I saw it and I wanted to start, so then I did,” she said.
Her sister, Ruby van den Bosch, 16, is no longer equestrian vaulting. She’s now show jumping.
But Katey has continued vaulting.
“I kind of fell in love with the sport because you get to spend a lot of time with the horses and then you also get to do a lot of dance and gymnastic stuff,” she said.
“I’ve always wanted to do gymnastics, but I also wanted to keep riding horses so it kind of was a good in-between sport.”
Last summer, van den Bosch suffered an equestrian vaulting-related injury.
“I sort of dislocated my shoulder,” she said. “It just kind of like popped out and went back in.”
She and a teammate were practising in a gym.
“I was flying somebody, like doing airplane with them, and then they kind of pushed their arm out and they kind of popped my shoulder out,” she said.
So van den Bosch conceded that equestrian vaulting can be risky, but that’s where the training kicks in.
"You learn at a very young age how to be safe on a horse and you know when, if something’s going to go wrong, to play it a little more safe,” she said.
Van den Bosch would like to keep equestrian vaulting for as long as she can, but said realistically, for most competitors, it kind of peters out in young adulthood.
“I think it’s hard, because it is a very demanding sport on your body,” she said. "(For) most people, it lasts till their late 20s and then there’s not much (after that).”
“Once you go to senior world championships or the World Equestrian Games -- once you’ve done that a couple of times -- there’s nothing else to do, so then that’s normally when people stop vaulting,” van den Bosch said.
So her career likely lies elsewhere.
“I probably will coach it or have a barn where I train the horses for vaulting,” she said.
"It’s a very hard way to train horses, I would say, because they have to be OK with everybody jumping on and off and going all around their body.”
Van den Bosch said the local team has one such horse: Zorro. He will by flying to Sweden a few days ahead of the competition with Jeanine van der Sluijs so he can get over the jet lag in time to be ready to compete.
Van der Sluijs and Angelique Vick own Zorro, and together run the Meadow Creek Vaulting Club near Olds.
“Our horse Zorro who we’re flying to Europe, he’s a one in a million horse and is very special. Ever since Day 1 he was really good about everything,” van den Bosch said.
“He’s only been a vaulting horse for about a year-and-a-half and already he's OK with having three people on him at the same time.”
Van den Bosch also has an older brother, but he’s not an equestrian vaulter. She said he “drives tractors on the farm.”
