A lookback...

Thought I´d pass the time `till the snows gone and we can get to more fun things around here with a look back at some of the horses we´ve had here over the years.

Not in any particular order of importance, height or number of bitemarks left, I´ll start this odyssée with Laritz Fighter.



I bought Fighter from a family friend for an astounding 10 sek ($1.50 ) in 2000. He was a 5 yo standardbred trotter who had pretty much failed on the racetrack. He´d never won a race and been to 2 different trainers. He had some problems with cross-firing (hitting his backlegs with front) and didn´t really want to be a racehorse. He was pretty frail mentally to begin with too.



At that time I worked alot with trotters (the main equine event here in Sweden) helping trainers with problemhorses and such at the track here in Stockholm. I broke Fighter to ride and didn´t really have any goals with him other than to make a decent saddle horse out of him. He stood 16.2 or there abouts and was pretty stout for a standardbred. He came along pretty nicely from the get go, and we got over some of his kinks, spookiness, trail freight and stuff.
working him in the indoor at Solvalla racetrack.

Later we moved the horses to a new farm were we had an abundance of pastureland and we let him out over the summer with the mares. Boy did he get beat up that first week! Gelded at 4, he was your typical boring gelding without any attitude or much personality. After that summer with the mares, he was back to being a stud again! He was full of life, alert and had developed a possitive attitude towards everything.

Milking-time

Moving the horses to another pasture.

I started working the cows alittle, some roping and wrangling the other horses. He really liked it and that fall I started working him alittle with an eye on the track. We had a great, sandy stretch of ranchroad about a mile long ending in a cul de sac. We started loping intervals with him there twice a week. And mixed with a lot of trailriding and jogging he got in great shape. Annelie did a great job of shoing him to keep him from cross-firing. She flipped the front shoes and put them with the opening forward and cut of some of the toe. This helped him and gave him a quicker rollover in front and thus clearing the back legs.

Early 2002 he was ready for a comeback on the track. We started him in a comeback race at a smaller track. They looked at me kinda funny when we showed up wearing boots, spurs and chinks. And just shook their heds in disbelief when we warmed him up with some loping and flexing exercises on the speed track, next to the racetrack in a stocksaddle and hackamore.

We had a catchdriver drive him in the race for us and I think he thought we were kinda exotic.
The horse did really good and though it was a handicap, Fighter starting 20 meters behind the others as he had won some money before, he managed to go clear around the field and win the race by a quarter of a length. He hadn´t raced for almost 2 years and I just couldn´t believe it! He won!

Laritz Fighter´s win!(nr 10)

We started him 12 times in all that year and though he didn´t win any more races, he set a new record and placed in 8 of the 12 races! The last two starts though he showed he didn´t want to race anymore so we retired him permanently from the track. In total he made 36 starts (12 for us) and placed: 1-0-6 he earned 108.150 sek ($15.000).
After a race at Eskilstuna (that´s Ida in Annelies harness)

He stayed with us as my saddlehorse for awhile and then I gave him away to a good home on the condition he was never to race again.