Riding for the Team. United States Equestrian Team Foundation

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      Rich Fellers began his show jumping career at age 11 when he received a two-year-old Appaloosa, Sure Chic, for his birthday and then taught him to jump up to World Cup qualifier level. Rich has had many successes since, including a team bronze medal at the 1991 Pan American Games on El Mirasol, and two U.S. Equestrian Federation Grand Prix Horse of the Year honors with McGuinness and Stealth Sprenger. But he is most closely identified with Flexible, the USEF’s International Horse of the Year in 2012. Flexible and Rich were the top-placed American combination in the London Olympics, finishing eighth. Four months earlier, they won the 2012 FEI World Cup Final, the first time in a quarter-century that the title finally came back to the United States. Affectionately known as Flexi, the Irish stallion competed in a record eight World Cup Finals. Flexi and Rich also were members of the winning U.S. Nations Cup teams at the Spruce Meadows Masters in 2008 and 2010. Flexi was the individual winner of many major Grands Prix over his long career, including the 2015 $126,000 Longines FEI World Cup™ North American League qualifier at Thunderbird Show Park in Langley, British Columbia, when he was 19.

      Rich and his wife, Shelley, are the parents of a daughter, Savannah, and a son, Chris. He helps them operate the Rich Fellers Stable out of Timberline Meadows Farm in Oregon.

      It started out as a gamble in 1989 when we took Harry and Mollie Chapman up on their invitation for my wife, Shelley, and me to work privately for their Oregon stable. It meant leaving a good business and a prime opportunity in Southern California. But we saw it as an offer we shouldn’t refuse and made the move. It was fortunate that Harry and Mollie came along to partner with us, because that really changed our lives in a big way.

      Both Shelley and I had grown up in rural areas: I was from Oregon and she was from Kentucky, so while thinking of starting a family we wanted to raise our kids in a similar type of region rather than bustling Southern California. I knew Harry for years; he and his daughter competed on a local Northwest show circuit during my youth and he ran the store where I used to buy my tack.

      Harry always referred to “the pipeline”: he had to have a pipeline of horses coming along. During the early 1990s, Irish bloodstock agent Dermot Forde met Mollie in the VIP area of the La Silla show in Monterrey, Mexico, and that led to years of horse shopping in Ireland. In 2002, we were looking for a horse in Cavan and saw Flexible in the young horse competition. He was a jumping machine, the only six-year-old in the finals of a competition for six- and seven-year-old horses, where he finished second. Edward Doyle did a phenomenal job producing him.

      The 2012 London Olympics was the realization of a long-held ambition for Rich Fellers and the brave little stallion Flexible. The combination was the highest placed on the U.S. team at those Games, finishing eighth.

      We bought him, and he spent 30 days in stallion quarantine at the University of California at Davis. Then he had to be trucked up to Oregon, so he wasn’t at his best when he arrived. As he stepped off the van, I said, “Wow, he’s so much smaller than I thought.” Flexi had been a stout, muscular 16 hands when I tried him, but he’d lost muscle tone, grown some hair, wasn’t shod, and looked like a little fat pony.

      George Morris was teaching a clinic at Harry and Mollie’s the day our horse came to his new home, so we took him to see Flexible. George looked at him and looked at me and didn’t know what to say. Harry wasn’t so impressed either. But that all kind of changed when Flexi showed us what he could do.

      I had some concerns, but I knew what I’d seen and what I’d felt when I tried him. Shelley and I were both confident he would be really competitive. Actually, he already was competitive and we’d watched him in action.

      Since he was very much a blood horse with lots of energy, we figured Flexi would shine in speed classes. He was by Cruising out of a mare named Flex who won the 1995 Irish National Championships (defeating Cruising while she was in foal to him!). From a bloodline perspective, Flexi is basically three-quarters Irish Thoroughbred. He started competing in Florida as a seven-year-old. I jumped him in a 1.30-meter class in the indoor ring in Tampa. John Madden was standing there and he wanted that horse. He picked him out right away.

      Rich Fellers’ victory gallop on Flexible at the 2012 FEI World Cup Show Jumping Finals was the first for a U.S. rider at that competition in 25 years.

      When Rich Fellers took the offer from Harry Chapman to ride for his stable in Oregon, it changed his life. He and his wife, Shelley, were very close to Harry, who died in 2018, and his wife, Mollie.

      Harry and Mollie said, СКАЧАТЬ