Mare who took amateur eventer to the top retires: ‘She owes me nothing and I owe her everything’
A superstar event mare who took her amateur owner to the very top of the sport is bowing out aged 16 as “she owes me nothing – and I owe her everything”.
Findonfirecracker and Sharon Polding jumped clear across country at Luhmühlen and Pau CCI5*, and completed 12 four-stars, with only four showjumping poles down in total. They also represented Britain in the CCI3*S European Cup and at the veteran European Showjumping Championships, where they won team bronze.
Sharon told H&H she has twice been offered a blank cheque for the mare, by Zenturio, whom she bought from her breeder Scott Mclellan, as a foal.
“She’s one in a million and I know that,” she said. “She’s done everything for me, and made dreams come true.”
Sharon bought “Dizzy” as she had Ziggisaurous, who is also by Zenturio and three weeks older, and wanted to run the foals together. Having backed her at four, Sharon started eventing Dizzy as a six-year-old, and they won the individual eventing and showjumping titles at the British Riding Clubs national championships.
“Everyone started wanting to buy her when she was a six-year-old!” Sharon said. “But it’s not about the money; I’ve been competing for such a long time, and bred and competed a number of horses up to three-star but never had one to take that step further.”
In 2016, Sharon and Dizzy jumped double clear in the Blenheim eight- and nine-year-old championships.
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“I’d started doing the [British Eventing] Bridging the Gap training, which is where I met Lizzel Winter,” Sharon said. “Lizzel had been doing the course-walks with me, which was invaluable, and she was standing there as I finished the cross-country. She looked at me and said ‘That’s a four-star [now five-star] horse’. I said ‘I’m never going to do it’. I was 40 when I had my daughter Poppy in 2011, and thought my opportunity to do that level had gone. But with our partnership, Dizz and I just took each step separately, and she was always so confident and successful, it was inevitable we’d take the next step.
“I always said I was never going to do four-star, then did, then it was ‘I’ve got to do a five-star’. So we went to Pau.”
By this time, in 2018, Sharon was only eventing one horse so was going to the top events with only a few runs under her belt that season, but she said her trust in Dizzy meant she was confident – at least in competition.
“I must be the only person that’s thrown up before the trot-up!” she said. “I was so nervous and kept questioning why I was doing it. I think I only went cross-country seven times that year; that’s the really difficult bit for an amateur, but that’s where the relationship comes in. I trust her so much, I don’t get nervous going out of the start box as I know she’ll look after me.
“I threw up before the trot-up because I was so scared – but as I went up the centre line in the dressage, I had tears coming down my face because I thought ‘oh my god. I’m really doing it; I’m doing a five-star’. It meant so much.”
Sharon remembered her friend Jacks, who went with her to Pau, lying across a table fence to demonstrate that it was as wide as her 5ft 7in height, but Dizzy made nothing of the course.
“My failing is that I never go fast across country but before Pau, I hadn’t been cross-country for about 10 weeks so I’d take it easy to start with. There’s always the question of ‘are they good enough?’ as it’s such a step up but she made it feel easy. She jumped both five-stars and never had a glitch; if she’d been with a professional rider, she’d have been an Olympic and world championship horse – but she was with me.”
Sharon entered Badminton in 2020 and 2021, which were both lost to Covid, and last year, when she did not get off the wait list. Ironically, she said, she would likely have got in this year as there is no wait list.
But Dizzy chipped a sesamoid bone last summer in the field, and despite the fact she recovered well from surgery and was rehabbed slowly, she was then not quite right again early this year. Sharon had thought about showjumping her, but decided to call it a day as she did not want to risk it.
“It’s been such a journey and experience; I wouldn’t have changed it for the world,” she said. “Before the Rio Olympics, there was the catchphrase ‘two hearts’, and that sums it up for me, totally and utterly.
“She was known as the fire-breathing dragon and she was a monkey; she used to buck me off in the dressage warm-up out of pure excitement and because she loved competing, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be on any other horse coming out of the start box. I’ve just looked out of the window and she’s bucking on the spot in the field as the wind’s got under her rug, and she’ll fly-leap all the way into the stable this evening, and I wouldn’t change any of it.”
Sharon added that her husband Robert calls Dizzy “the mortgage”.
“He knows I could have sold her and he thought I was mad, but it wasn’t about the money,” she said. “I’ve been all over Europe, we’ve been on an eventing team and a showjumping team, we’ve jumped in the main arena at Hickstead.
“It’s very sad but she’s done everything, she’s made dreams come true – and you can’t buy that.”
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Eleanor is an experienced journalist who spent over eight years working for local and national newspapers before joining H&H as news editor in March 2016. Passionate about equine welfare and exposing the truth, Eleanor has reported on all aspects of the industry, from Brexit to anti-bullying campaigns, and from dressage rules to mules. Her sport of choice is showjumping, in which she competes her own horses, and she also enjoys reporting at local jumping shows through to international championships.