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, “No, he’s not for sale.” They did that many times, and I really respect that. I was always very good about letting them know when someone was interested, and they were always polite about saying no.
At the end of Flexi’s seven-year-old year in 2004, he had a vein blockage in his right foreleg and was out for almost two years. In 2007, when he was getting back into the sport, I had a very unlucky year. My two top Grand Prix horses, McGuinness and Gyro, suffered injuries. My “number three” horse at the time was Flexible, who was healthy again and had won a big speed class that summer at Spruce Meadows.
After Gyro was sidelined, we said, “Okay, let’s see if Flexible’s ready to start jumping some bigger classes.” That fall, he jumped in his first World Cup qualifier in the Equidome at the Los Angeles National Horse Show. He won, which was a bit shocking, not only to me, Harry and Mollie, my crew, and my wife, but I think the other competitors, as well.
He won several World Cup qualifiers in 2008, definitely making the transition from a speed horse to a Grand Prix horse. He went to his first World Cup final in the spring of 2008 in Gothenburg, Sweden, where he was fourth the first day in the speed round and we were very impressed. Even at 1.50 meters, the jumps looked quite large at that stage, especially since on the West Coast, World Cup qualifiers were a bit light. The second round of the final looked un-jumpable when Shelley and I walked the course. But Flexible just flew right around, and I had the winning time in the jump-off, although we had the last rail down.
I was shocked and amazed at how well Flexible was doing. On Sunday, I had four faults in the first round and going into the final round, I was still in good shape. There weren’t too many clear there. The last round, I remember people walking the final line over and over again—the whole track was very big and the final line was big and technical. But Flexi handled it.
I wound up second to Meredith Michaels-Beerbaum of Germany and her sensational Shutterfly. It was quite a thrill and a surprise for our whole team. That really launched Flexible’s spectacular career. He went to the World Cup finals every year after, 2008 through 2016, with the exception of 2014 (because he had major blood clots in his right hind leg in 2013).
In 2012, we were involved in trying to get on the London Olympic team. After the initial trials, we were third, but with some subjective adjustments, we were dropped down to seventh, and I found myself on the outside looking in.
I went to the World Cup finals in the Netherlands that spring before the Olympics with a bit of a chip on my shoulder and something to prove. We weren’t helped by transportation problems from a cancelled flight that meant a 20-hour trailer ride to Los Angeles and a re-routed flight that got us to s’Hertogenbosch much later than we planned.
We were concerned Flexi would be wrung out, but it didn’t seem to affect him. He won the speed round. In the big jump-off on Friday, there was a tricky combination that caught a lot of people. I had a fence down but so did several others. Even so, I went into the final two rounds on the Sunday within a rail of the lead. After the second round that day, Steve Guerdat of Switzerland and I were tied, which meant a jump-off.
George Morris, the U.S. team coach, asked me what I wanted to jump in the warm-up and I told him I didn’t want to jump. He looked a bit stunned and said, “That’s great.” I did walk/trot transitions as Steve was getting his superstar, Nino des Buissonets, ready to go in the jump-off.
When Steve headed to the ring I followed him and stepped up to watch him go as the groom held my horse. Steve was blazing fast and his horse, which Meredith told me was the fastest in Europe, jumped super. (Nino and Steve would go on four months later to win individual gold at the Olympics.) The crowd roared and I hopped on little Flexible.
I said I could ride the same track and do the same numbers. There was an option to leave out a stride in the last line. I felt if I tried to match Steve’s track, that Flexible would be faster because he’s quick across the ground and he wasn’t a big over-jumper. I left out the stride, as Steve