At the 2014 FEI World Equestrian Games in Normandy, France, Kent Farrington was part of the bronze medal squad with Voyeur on his first global championship team.
What is under your control is managing the horses and having people around you to support them. What you have to do is plan on being ready for opportunity when it comes your way.
I always own at least a piece of my horses. I’m a big believer in investing in yourself. No one wants it more than me. It says a lot when I’m going to put everything I have into my own career. I make my plan with what I think is best for the horses I have at that time and what I can do to win the most. I’ve tried to do that my whole career.
Kent Farrington’s vision of riding for an Olympic medal came true at the Rio Games in 2016, when he and Voyeur were on the silver medal team, and he came close to an individual medal, finishing fifth.
There are two things I try not to do—be boastful or live in regret—because they’re both a waste of time. I take the positive and go forward; learn from the experience of what did go well, recognize what didn’t, and keep moving. I have an interest in making something that functions well, and going to shows around the world is a dream for me.
Recovering from a broken leg in 2018 made me stronger and more confident in the decisions I make about what I want and don’t want to do with my career. I really realized how much I wanted to ride and love my sport. When you’re away from what you like to do for a long time, you dream about it all the time, and you realize how much you miss it.
In any sport, you raise your level of competitiveness by competing against the best people in the world on a consistent basis. Your skills are only going to rise as high as your competitors force them to rise. By constantly challenging yourself against the best, you’re going to improve. When I have a question, I go to the professional who I think would be most helpful in that particular area. I try to ask someone who has a lot more experience than I do, someone like an Ian Millar, who has done the sport at a high level for more than 40 years. He’s been everywhere and seen everything more than once.
McLain Ward is a good friend. Because I didn’t have McLain’s professional horse background (both McLain’s parents were in the industry) he was always someone I had to catch up with. That’s been the challenge for me since I was a kid, starting way behind from where he started. As you get older, the age gap narrows; we’ve become good friends, and we rely on each other for insight or if we have a question about training or a course. That’s part of what makes great competition. You want your friends and everybody to go at their best.
We’ve ridden on a bunch of teams together. We have a similar competitive mindset. I’m always happy when he does well, and he’s always happy when I do well. I think we both take it from a very professional angle. We try to leave no stone unturned. We lose sometimes because we’re trying to beat each other and not paying attention to what some of the others are doing. But it’s a great rivalry; it makes us both better.
These days, there’s a lot more money in the sport than there used to be, and I think that’s great. It obviously draws more attention and raises the level of sport from what used to be a sort of hobby sport into a professional sport.
To be number one at least once in my career is great; more for my team than for everybody else. They work really hard, long hours. It’s a job of passion more than a job for a salary. To know we made it to a place where we were at the top of the world at one time is a great thing for team morale, more than anything else.
Laura Kraut
It All Started with Simba Run
Areal horsewoman who was never afraid to get her hands dirty, Laura came up through the ranks after grooming and taking care of her own horses before becoming a professional.
She has represented the United States at three Olympic Games, winning a gold medal in Hong Kong in 2008. She was a member of the silver medal WEG team at Aachen, Germany, in 2006, and the 2018 gold medal WEG squad in Tryon, North Carolina. Her resume includes numerous World Cup Finals and stints on many Nations Cup teams. She also is a highly sought-after coach whose students have included Grand Prix rider Jessica Springsteen.
While Simba Run is her best-known mount and the one that kicked off her international career, she has had many other top horses including Anthem, Liberty, Cedric, and Zeremonie.
Laura, whose son, Bobby, is an aspiring show jumper, divides her time between Wellington, Florida, and the farm in England that belongs to her partner, Olympic double-gold-medalist Nick Skelton.
On a summer day in 1990, we were at a show in Germantown, Tennessee, where it was 105 blistering degrees. Geoff Sutton, who was the owner/rider of an interesting Thoroughbred show jumper, Simba Run, said to me, “I can’t deal with this heat. Would you ride my horse? I’ve been thinking about stopping doing this.”
I took Simba in the Grand Prix and that was the beginning of a beautiful relationship with the former racehorse who took me to the Olympics and earned more than $300,000 in prize money during his show ring career.
When I met Simba, all I’d ever ridden were Thoroughbreds, so for me, he wasn’t unusual. He was hot, he liked to root the reins out of your hands, he was very brave—nothing ever spooked him. He would jump anything you pointed him toward. In the 10 years I competed him, I don’t think he ever stopped at a fence. The more you did, the more he revved up. So a lot of riding him was learning how to do very little. He had the most unbelievable amount of scope. He made my career and taught me all about how to do this.
Laura and Zeremonie were on the 2018 FEI World Equestrian Games team in Tryon, North Carolina, where they had to compete in a jump-off to secure the team gold. It was the first time the United States had won a show jumping World Championships gold since 1986.
My sister, Mary Elizabeth, and I started riding because my mother, Carol, was obsessed with horses. When I was five, I got a $250 cart pony. He couldn’t canter because all he had done was pull a cart and trot. I spent the better part of a year falling off trying to get him to canter. Then I had another pony who was a stopper. The last pony we had, Plain ‘n’ Fancy, came from an Indian reservation. She was white with one brown ear and the pony of my dreams, because she didn’t stop or run away. She won a lot, even though the only thing that was fancy about her was her name.
She and I made an impression on trainers Kathy Paxson and Ann Kenan, who ran Hunter Hill Farm in Atlanta. When I was 12, they called my mother and asked if I would ride their very fancy ponies. That turned into basically a job that lasted until the end of my junior career.
I rode their ponies and horses, but I also worked hard out of the saddle. Back then, you did everything—riding was only 10 percent of what we did with the horses. We groomed them, iced their legs, cleaned stalls, rode them bareback in the field with no halter or bridle. We’d take them swimming. As I got older, I drove the truck and trailer. We learned every aspect of management, which made you appreciate the horses, not just the competition. And that’s important. In our world, you’re lucky if you have a one-percent win ratio.
I spent one semester at college before I told my father I thought it was crazy that we were going into debt for me to continue, since my future was horses. He told me, “That’s fine, but you’re on your own.”
It didn’t occur to me I wouldn’t make it. I went to work for Judy and Roger Young because my family had moved to Camden, South Carolina, and I lived at home. Then Mary Elizabeth and I moved into our own place. She was a