SUNDRE – Following barely a few weeks of training after recovering from a nearly fractured heel, a former area equine athlete placed second on the global stage to win a silver medal in the individual female young vaulter category at the Fédération Équestre Internationale (FEI) Vaulting World Championships.
Previously calling home a quarter section north of Sundre in the James River area, Averill Saunders relocated this past December to Germany, where she plans to stay for the time being.
The championships were held on July 26-30 and hosted in Sweden at a venue in Flyinge (pronounced flu-inga), located just east of Copenhagen in neighbouring Denmark.
There was also a senior division, but only for European athletes, while the junior division was for international contenders. So while Saunders usually competes throughout the year with seniors, she had to drop down into the youth category as she is not European. Next year, that approach will be reversed so the youth division will be for European athletes while the senior events will open up to international vaulters, she said.
Saunders was riding Rockemotion with lunger Nina Vorberg from Germany and according to results posted on the FEI website scored a total of 8.644, putting her behind just one athlete – Alice Layher of Germany, who won gold with a total score of 8.848.
She completed three tests: compulsory, freestyle and technical. The vaulters endeavour to demonstrate a display that features aspects including strength, balance and flexibility.
All things being considered, “I think it was pretty good overall for me,” said Saunders, adding she this past April had suffered a heel injury during a dismount at another competition.
“I was out of training entirely for nine weeks,” said the 19-year-old, adding she only had about four weeks of training prior to the championships to get back up to snuff.
She had originally started the season earlier this year with the objective of winning the championships.
“I thought it was a really realistic goal for me, being that I was having a lot of success competing with the seniors all season,” she said. “Then, being able to drop down a category to the youth, we were quite optimistic about my ability to win the championships.”
But the badly bruised heel that a scan would later reveal had been disconcertingly close to being a fracture, forced her to readjust.
“Then I had to compete the next day as well and I went and did the dismount onto it again, not knowing how close I was to the fracture,” she said, adding she hadn’t yet seen the scan’s results.
“I was really lucky not to have broken it,” she said, adding that decision unfortunately exacerbated her injury and prolonged the required recovery period.
“In hindsight, that really wasn’t a smart decision on my part. But I mean, heel bruises and ankle sprains are a pretty common injury in this sport,” she said.
“Most high level vaulters are kind of managing heel bruises throughout the entire competition season,” she said.
But in this instance, the injury was much worse because of how close it was to a break, which would have taken her out of competition even longer, she said.
“So, it was super important for me to take the full nine weeks off with no running, jumping or even vaulting on the horse in a way that would put me at risk for falling off or having an unplanned dismount that could lead to a fracture,” she said.
That meant redeveloping essentially from scratch the more familiar yet technically challenging program that she’d been practising prior to the injury.
“We kind of pieced together my program in a way that allowed me to be confident and enjoy the experience, but it wasn’t entirely what I would have liked to have shown this year,” she said. “But because of the injury, I kind of had to take a step back and decide what was more important.”
She ultimately concluded that more important than putting her health at risk for a gold medal, was to simply make sure she enjoyed the experience. So, her program was somewhat simplified to be more realistic and improve her odds of still coming away with a medal.
“For me, it was more a matter of fitness and strength; I really lost a lot of that over the nine weeks because I really couldn’t train at all,” she said.
“The four weeks that I was able to come back to training back prior to the championships, I was not necessarily training for the vaulting so much, but more trying to get with the cardio and the strength and the fitness and the body coordination back, knowing that if I had that back at the level it was in April, that the vaulting would just come together.”
After struggling a bit through her compulsory test in which she had to repeat an exercise after a collapse, Saunders emerged in fifth place.
“It takes so many years to develop the strength and coordination to be able to execute the exercises effectively,” she said about the compulsory program.
But she shone during the technical test, which she based on a past triumph.
“I had a lot of success with this program at the World Equestrian Games in Herning (Denmark) last year,” she said, adding she had won the silver medal in this test at age 18 competing against more experienced seniors.
“I was the youngest competitor in the female division there. Coming out just behind the current world champion in that program is really what I would say jumpstarted my professional career in this sport,” she said.
“I kind of became known for the technical test after that championship and so this was a program that I’m really familiar with – I decided to keep this program for this season as well. I felt super confident with it,” she said.
Her freestyle program also had to be toned down from what she would otherwise have preferred, and in the end was almost identical to her technical program.
“We see this quite often with the youth athletes who are new coming into it,” she said. “That’s something I’ve really tried to refrain from doing because I like to show that I can effectively do two completely different tests.”
That of course demonstrates a higher level of development and by extension tends to score higher points with judges. Layher, who won the gold, had two very different routines between her technical and a riskier freestyle program, she said.
The championships in Flyinge also marked a few milestones. Not only was it the first top-5 finish for Canada, but it was also the first medal for the country in vaulting. Additionally, it was the first time a youth championship had been added to vaulting, as well as the 40th anniversary of vaulting being an FEI recognized sport.
But on a more personal note, she added her freestyle performance in Flyinge coincided to the day with her own personal 10th anniversary in the sport.
With the 2023 competition season essentially wrapped up, Saunders said she planned to briefly rest and visit friends and family in the area before returning to Germany.
She’s already got her sights set on competing in the Senior Vaulting World Championships that will be hosted in Bern, Switzerland next July, as well as an early season world cup event this coming January in Basil, Switzerland, which is the only major competition that runs through the winter break, she said.
“It’s an extra element of difficulty for us because it kind of forces us to have our programs ready in the middle of training season,” she said, optimistic about her prospects of qualifying for that world cup event.
“I’m trying to get a jump start on my training season now, and get the new programs ready for that to have some early season success,” she said. “Having a world cup title, it carries a lot of weight when you go into a senior world championship.”
Moving to Germany a “huge adjustment”
Saunders spoke on the afternoon of Aug. 2 with the Albertan from Germany, where it was about 9 p.m.
“It was a huge adjustment,” she said about the move.
“It took a lot out of me, but things are kind of starting to come together and it’s been really great decision at the end of the day,” she said, expressing no regrets about the decision to move for the sake of the sport.
“This is the absolute ideal training situation; it couldn’t get better than this. As long as I’m in the sport, I really don’t have any reason to leave.”
Having throughout the years previously spent plenty of time in Germany competing in a few championships in the country, Saunders said she had already developed a rudimentary capacity to speak basic German and added that being fully submersed by the language has further helped her along that learning curve even without taking lessons.
“I’m just starting to learn it a little bit more in a more in-depth level,” she said, adding that while her understanding has improved, her ability to speak is still a work in progress.
“Just being in an environment where there really isn’t an option to have English speaking just as like the background noise…kind of sets me up to naturally start picking up more things and slowly start to understand,” she said.
A Class of 2022 graduate at Caroline High School, she has not yet plotted a course for post secondary as her focus for the immediate future remains set exclusively on vaulting; a time-consuming commitment that requires eight-hour training days, six days a week. That simply wouldn’t allow enough flexibility in her schedule to accommodate classes at university; at least not yet. But perhaps in a few years once her German has improved some more, Saunders said she might well pick up her studies.
However, retiring from vaulting remains out on the horizon at least five or six years down the road, and she’s not planning to switch gears quite yet.
“I’ve always really loved Germany,” she said, adding that even once she eventually retires from the sport, she may well stay there involved in a different role within the sport.
