Q & A with Tom Holden

Cynthia Hampton: Today we are speaking with Tom Holden, a level three course designer who has a lot of experience with young horses. In fact, he's done the Dublin young horse championship for at least 16 years and he is our vice president. He's coming to us all the way from Ireland. 

Tom, please take it away and let us hear your thoughts about this current situation relative to our sport.

Tom Holden: At home here in Ireland, it's a sport shut down completely, so much so that there’s even advice on exercising horses that you should learn from before you're set up and especially with young horses so that you minimize the chances of having an accident and you don't take up hospital space.

You are allowed to travel with mares. This is the breeding season, so you are allowed to travel mares. You are allowed to travel horses because it's considered farming activity. You're not going to ride them out in public except within two kilometers of their own home. It is pretty well shut down. 

Hampton: What are your thoughts about how this is going to change the things that you're doing right now? How has it changed what you do yourself? 

Holden: I do quite a lot of coaching of amateur people who go show jumping. So that's gone. There's absolutely nothing happening there. And also do a lot of course design out here in Ireland and abroad and all of them are shutdown. From my point of view, it's all shut down, but I'm not in as bad a situation as some people. There are people with yards of young horses trying to get ready for the season and trying to get them out and get them educated and produced. They're going to have to do an awful lot of that at home. That's not so easy because horses need to get out to different shows. My thinking would always go to those people in our sport who have a huge amount of overhead and an awful lot of other problems in their lives. And then you've got to think about the people who are coping with all this on the front line. I have a daughter who is a physiotherapist. She is working in intensive care in London in a university hospital.

And so that will be a more important talk process for me just at the minute that she's okay and when people like her are okay. There’s no doubt it, there are people here in Ireland, and I'm sure in America, that are going to suffer quite badly because a lot of our people here are smaller operators with five or six to 10 horses. The bigger outfits would probably cope with it quite well because the horses are turned into a business situation. But an awful lot of the smaller operators are going to suffer. It's not going to be easy. They can’t travel with the horses, they can’t show them to people. Or if they do, they have to show them at home and that's not always the most ideal way. 

I can see this going on at least, at the very earliest, in June and probably to the end of July before shows will start up again, the production of horses starts and to compete production horses continues.

Hampton: Do you see any long-term changes to the future of the sport of show jumping?

Holden: There are consequences for certain. I think when these sorts of major social and economic problems arise, people reevaluate. And I could see a situation where maybe some new sponsors will leave the sport. But I can see a situation where owners would leave the sport and certain groups of sponsors who will leave the sport. This will be sort of the doorway for them to leave the sport and maybe not come back. I could foresee difficult times with the sport and economically going forward. As far as production of horses are concerned, like your four-year-old, your five-year-old and six-year-old horses at this time of the year we'll be doing quite a few shows and to be produced. Some horses are going to miss out on that. And ironically some horses will probably benefit from the fact that they're not going to do a whole lot as 4-year-olds and 5-year-olds, and will become more mature by the time they're asked to do a little bit more. So, I seem to think it is going to take almost all of this year for the sport, shows, et cetera to recover from this.

Hampton: From the point of view of breeders do you have any sense of how they might handle this situation? 

Holden: I don't, that's a really difficult one. I am not involved with breeding anymore. I used to have two broodmares. I would say the bigger breeders will continue. and they'll breed their good mares. They may use lesser stallions or cheapest stallions because of the uncertainty of the next 12 to 18 months. But the bigger breeders and more established breeders will continue to breed. The hobby breeders, like I would have been or my wife would have been, would get out. This would be the year where they can't breed and just get out.

Hampton: Can you tell me anything more – your impressions of this and what you think going forward we can all do to try to come together to support our equestrian community? 

Holden: I do think that there will be a lot of smaller operators who would be very vulnerable in these situations. Those that don't have a second of third income stream. Those who have put all our eggs into one basket to become as good as they can be at producing horses, educating horses or breeding horses. 

A lot of those people, while it may not be as apparent in America, but it definitely is here that we were a smaller country and have an awful lot of small producers of horses, like one and two and three horses and one or two broodmares. A lot of those people are going to suffer and they're going to have a hard time for the next while. Now our government is doing a good bit to try and support as many people as they can, but they're not specifically focusing on any industry like the horse sport, production of horses or breeding horses. They are doing a lot to try and have the individual people have some sort of income. It's based around the minimum wage, but at least there's a commitment from the government to make sure everybody can make some type of living especially if you've lost all income. The industry itself, the sport, etcetera, is going to have to be resilient and it's going to have to instead of bickering and fighting with one another, come together and work as a unit for its own survival.

We've never seen anything like this before. The only thing that you could remotely compare this to would be the world wars. They were horrific for a different reason, but we haven't seen an interruption to the sport or to the industry like this before. We're going to have to be very resilient but also innovative as to how we cope with it and how we grow the sport back to where it was. 

Hampton: Can you share any ideas and what we can all do to try to make our sport solid and better ways that we can help each other out? 

Holden: What I've been doing for people I know in the sport here; I've been doing training diagrams and training exercises and sending them off to them. And a couple more bits of training demands specific course designs that would fit in their own arena. They can have some realism to the way they are producing the horses and the jumping courses with appropriate competition practitioners. I'm designing the course up to fit their specific arena size. They give me the size and tell me how many and what fence material they have. I design the courses, exercises, short courses, et cetera. I suppose that’s all I can do but if everyone does their own small little bit, we’ll get to the far side of this.

Hampton: Thank you for being with us today Tom. 

Holden: It was really good to talk to you. Take care.