Laritz Arnie

We´re back to horses that has come and gone here over the years. This one we got from owner/breeder friends of ours. He was a brother to Laritz Fighter who we had here for a couple of years. This guy started his career at one of our most prominent trainers, Stig H Johansson, where Annelie worked when we met way back in the day....

Arnie with his buddy Farinelli
He was one of the most talented and gifted trotters in the crop of 1998. Unfortunatelly his mind and nerves didn´t really match his physique. As a lot of horses sired by champion Super Arnie, he was a bit of a hothead to say the least...lets just call it for what it was, he was a total criminal! Stig H new that he was capable enough, and spent countless hours devicing new training regimens, trying different way´s to get him to function on the track. After some inicial racing success, Stig H eventually gave up on him and he was moved to accomplished trainer Hans-Owe Sundberg. There the story continued. They had a special bar construction mounted on the seat of the sulky in front of him during training, to keep him from running off. Didn´t help matters that he got hurt in a ligament and had to rest for a couple of months. They finally had reached the end of the road with him and the trainer called me as a last resort. The old injury remained a problem and it was far from certain he would hold up.



We gave him a try, and I broke him to ride and started working with him. At first he was about the same in the saddle as he had been in the sulky. He innicially had only one speed and that was STAMPEEDE!! Broke him to a hackamore and started working him out in the open, riding the pastures, checking on the other horses, fixing fences that sorta thing, combined with a lot of bending and flexing exercises. He eventually calmed down enough for us to start consider training him more rationally for a comeback on the track, but his old injury flared back up. As this wasn´t a horse we felt we could trust to just anybody, we consulted the previous owners and decided to have him humanely put down. Both for the sake of the horse and piece of mind that he wouldn´t hurt himself or somebody else...

trainer Hans-Owe having his hands full

All in all he earned 190.000 sek($25.000) on the track and won 3 out of 29 races. He was disqualified in a couple of races and taken out of a few others due to him beeing unmanageable.