Breanna Van Rooyen will be travelling to South Africa in October as part of Team Canada's equitation World Cup team, competing in the sport's highest-level competition.
Once there, the Olds-area rider will be training with her teammates, getting acquainted with South African saddle seat horses in preparation for the competition in early December.
“We're just going for some training, just to kind of get to know the horses,” Van Rooyen said of the long lead-time. “(This competition) is basically our Olympics.”
The Canadian team will be competing against the United States, South Africa, Germany and Great Britain. There will be 10 riders on the Canadian team, plus two alternates.
The competition will last four days with two days set aside for riding the horses in patterns and two days set aside for rail work – in which the riders walk, trot and canter the horses around the arena.
Even though the sport requires riders to pick a horse randomly and then find as much out about their unique characteristics in 30 minutes as riders can before riding them in performance, Van Rooyen said this trip will take that blind riding a step further because South African horses are even more unpredictable and difficult to ride than Canadian ones.
“The hardest is having to ride a horse that you don't know,'cause they're different horses than (we're riding) beforehand (during the month-and-a-half of practice). They're not the horses that are in the competition. South African horses are a lot more game than Canadian horses,” she said.
Van Rooyen said the difference between the sport in Canada and other parts of the world is quite dramatic, with South Africa having the most interest in it. There, a television channel is dedicated specifically to showing the sport. In Canada, because the sport is less well known, it's more difficult to find horses that are suited to the sport –saddlebreds, Morgans and some Arab horses.
Van Rooyen said this competition in South Africa will be the biggest one she's attended yet. She said the one she attended two years ago in Kentucky was mostly attended by horse enthusiasts, “whereas in South Africa, it's like a stadium, everybody from around town is going to be there and it's just going to be a bigger event.”
Van Rooyen got involved in the sport at a young age and progressed from general riding lessons to saddle seat – in which she's become quite successful.
In order to train for the sport, Van Rooyen takes every opportunity she can to ride different horses, to simulate a competition environment.
