LEAD STORY: Horse mad? Stowe wins at a canter

ANENDRA SINGH
SO you think you are crazy about horses?
Obviously you haven't met Michele Stowe, then.
When she was about 4 years old she'd take her toy horses out to the front lawn of their Hastings home, get on her fours, akin to an animal, and start munching grass.
``Yeah, Mum found me outside, grazing,' Stowe, 19, tells SportToday, erupting into laughter.
As her girl got older, mum Melanie says the youngster almost drove everyone at her Te Mata primary school bonkers with her imaginary horse.
``She'd be jumping over chairs, pretending to be a horse rider at lunchtime,' she explains, saying drawings and essays took a lion's share of space in her daughter's school books.
Living in the city, Melanie and husband Mark did their best to avoid rural areas so young Michele would not spot horses, but it proved to be a futile exercise.
``We would drive by and I'd come home from school in a bus and always told my Mum that there was a riding school along St George's Rd [Havelock North] but Mum kept saying that it was closed,' Michele Stowe says.
But one weekend, when she was about 5 years old, Michele spotted riders at the school and her mother had to stop telling porkies.
After almost three years of lessons, 9-year-old Stowe talked her father into buying her her first pony, Midnight Charm, from a family in Te Awanga. The pony's placid manner was an instant hit with Stowe, who did not have a horse float, so ended up riding all the way from Te Awanga to their home in Hastings.
``I was riding Midnight Charm and Mum rode behind me on her bicycle.
``I remember these hoons came up behind me and tooted their car horn and Mum and I almost jumped out of our skins,' Stowe recalls.
Sadly, Midnight Charm had to be put down because of a brain tumour that affected the pony's eyesight and hearing. Tears and sleepless nights followed but a few weeks later Stowe's powers of persuasion prevailed again as her parents delivered 3-year-old Moccacino, who had a propensity to bolt from paddocks.
``Steve Bentall used to bike past our house in his Lycra shorts with his dog, Ruby, and so he stopped one day to offer his property for grazing Moccacino,' she says of a gesture that saw a lasting friendship blossom between the two families, intensifying when Stowe encouraged his daughters, Amie and Rachel, to get into riding.
Stowe's penchant for riding prompted her family to return to the outskirts of the city with the acquisition of a lifestyle block in Kahuranaki.
This weekend, Stowe will compete in the New Zealand Pony Club Mounted Games, which are being staged for the first time in Hawke's Bay. The event, which has numerous North Island teams, a South Island contingent and an Australian side (who will compete on borrowed horses), will be held at the Flaxmere Equestrian Park, Hastings.
With seven years of experience behind her, Stowe will be in the Hawke's Bay mounted games team with captain Diana Hale, Emma Hinton, of Puketapu Pony Club, and Havelock North club's Ashleigh Forde and Amie Bentall.
Ashleigh White, of Havelock North, is a reserve.
Havelock captain Stowe and her club teammates White, Forde and Bentall, will be out to emulate their win at last weekend's 2008 Zone Games in Foxton, where teams from the lower half of the North Island (from Taranaki to Wellington to Hawke's Bay) competed.
Havelock, the defending champions, qualified for seven out of eight finals, winning five A finals and finishing runners-up in one, and third in the other to win by an overall 46 points from the second placegetters on 34.
Hinton and Bentall are currently in the development squad for the NZ team for International Mounted Games Association World Games to be held in Sydney this year.
Backed by the Lion Foundation, Eastern and Central Community Trust and several other Bay businesses, the national championship this weekend will be the product of six months of planning and preparation with 14 races to be staged each day and culminating in the championship tomorrow.
``Mounted games is great fun and sharpens the hand-eye skills of riders,' says Stowe, whose father's family have a history in horse racing.
Her great-grandfather, the late Lance Stowe, helped groom Cuddles and was instrumental in starting the New Zealand apprentice school for jockeys.
Stowe's father, Mark, grew up around the Lowry stables in Okawa until he was 12 years old.
Stowe, who has served as clerk at the Hawke's Bay Racecourse, makes a living by helping break in horses in between raising her 2-year-old son, James Verhoeven, who already has his own pony, Leo.
Stowe, who was the captain of her Havelock North High School team, does eventing and showjumping, too, having last year finished in third place in the A1 class of the National Eventing Championship in Masterton.
Says Stowe's Mum, Melanie: ``Anyone can do mounted games - from children to those who become fossils.'