Mounted games: Taradale HS pupil's on top of world

Leah Zybendos (left), Emma Mathieson, Salem Notter, Olivia Brooks Hore (on Honeheke), Sky Notter and coach Amie Bentall after winning the World U17s Teams' Championship. Photo/supplied

Sometimes winning in sport isn't about trying to win every race but simply keeping up with the peloton in the hope of scrambling on to the podium every now and then.

"In our finals, we weren't winning every race but just getting seconds and thirds in trying to play the races right, whereas other teams would get a first and then in the next race they'd stuff up and get last," said Olivia Brooks Hore after she prevailed as a member of the mounted games world champion New Zealand age-group team in Auckland last Saturday.

Hore, Leah Zybendos, of Canterbury, Sky Notter and her brother, Salem, and Emma Mathieson, all of Auckland, clinched the World Under-17s Teams' Championship bragging rights at the Equitana.

The other Bay connection was coach Amie Bentall who, in 2013, etched her name on the silverware as a rider at the worlds staged at the HB Showgrounds in her hometown of Hastings.

Striving for that sort of consistency saw the Kiwis prevail by almost 30 points against nine countries. Australia were runners-up and Wales third in a field that included England, the United States, Canada, Ireland and Scotland.

For the Taradale High School year 11 pupil, a maiden world title is a great sense of fulfilment, considering she had pencilled in the championship at the start of the school year among goals to accomplish.

"I was quite good at vaulting - so that's when you're jumping on and off a horse at top speed," she said, after they competed in more than 30 relays of little races where one rider had to sit it out.

The Kiwis were the top qualifiers for the top-seven final although they did register a couple of "rough heats" which, as it turned out, became opportune moments to further tweak their template.

"After the first final we were winning by 10 points and by the second final we were ahead by about 30 points," said the 16-year-old who competed on Honeheke, a 12-year-old gelding rider CJ Wiltshire, one of a triplet sisters of mounted games riders from Hastings, lent to her for the season.

The chestnut mount's role, no doubt, was massive.

"He loves his job and he's really fast," she says, sad that Honeheke will return from their Poraiti property to Wiltshire's paddocks today. "He looks for the referee's flag and the whistle at the start of a race.

"I won quite a few national titles on him this season - the under-17 pairs and open teams' championship."

The team had been training for about six months and competed at regional meetings around the country to work on attributes such as cohesiveness and identifying each other's strengths and weaknesses.

The next world champs will be staged in Belgium this time next year. The Kiwis will be using borrowed mounts, as visiting nations had to here last Saturday.

It's not a done deal that the same champion riders will defend their crown. "It just depends on who will turn up for trials and some of them may not."

Hore has ridden horses from the age of 6 at Eskview Pony Club but switched to mounted games when she was 13 at Puketapu School.

A call up to a national under-17s team reinforced her love and commitment to the discipline.

"I love the speed and adrenaline of it all. I've also made some pretty cool friends, internationally as well."

She suspects the equine flutter comes from her mother, Rochelle Brooks, a nurse recruitment manager, who has had a horse or two in their paddocks.

Brooks drives her to competitions but father Lindsay Hore, a Hastings bank manager, is an ardent supporter even though he isn't "horsey".

Hore competed with a Kiwis U17 team at the Nations Cup in Kentucky in the US in September. She won bronze with Mathieson, Salem Notter, Annabel Harman, of Hawke's Bay, and Hayden O'Leary, of Manawatu.

Hore thanked Sport Hawke's Bay for funds to subsidise her costs.