British showjumper Angel Tough, 22, is proving to be one of the finest young horse producers in the country and, despite the recent sale of her top prospect, the seven-year-old Nicole IV, Angel retains plenty of ambition to reach the top of the sport.
“My goals have changed a bit now!” says Angel, who had qualified Nicole for a host of young horse finals including Horse of the Year Show and the Royal International Horse Show, as well as the recent under-25 British Championship at the London International Horse Show before she was snapped up by the world number one showjumper Kent Farrington of USA at the start of December.
“Nicole was a superstar, so we’re sad to see her go but she couldn’t have gone to a better home.”
Angel has been riding all her life, being home schooled through her teenage years in order to pursue her passion, and “showjumping has always been my dream”.
The Manchester rider was part of Great Britain’s gold medal-winning children-on-horses team at the 2017 junior and young rider European Championships. She now hopes to concentrate on some of the other exciting young horses she’s producing including stepping up her nine-year-old home-bred stallion Old Selui De Semily, aka Sid, “who jumps anything and everything”.
“I’ve been concentrating so much on Nicole this year that I took a step back with the rest of the horses. But now we’ll start to get them going again.
“You need an endless pot if you want to go to the top of the sport,” she says. “I’d like to, but we tend not to keep our horses long enough – we breed a lot and bring them on, then we do tend to sell them.
“I enjoy it, though. Every horse we have, I’ve ridden from the beginning, so it feels like an achievement when they get sold. I’ll get as much satisfaction watching Nicole jumping all the big classes on TV. She can take on the world.
“In the meantime, hopefully Sid and I will jump the under-25s next year and move on to some bigger classes.”
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