BY JENNEKE SMIT / KWPN
PHOTO: EVA VAN DEN ADEL
“If I had known then what I know now, of course I never would have sold Hattrick.” Breeder Harrie Vaessen could never have imagined that his homebred mare Hattrick would quite literally live up to her name
The three offspring he bred out of this Numero Uno daughter all turned out to be outstanding successes. Hello Mango, ridden by Scott Brash, won the Grand Prix of Doha earlier this year, while H5 Londontime also claimed his first 1m60 victory. It is a remarkable story about stack breeding, dressage bloodlines, Croky crisps, ignored advice, and Olympic dreams.
The foundation for these exceptional breeding successes was laid with the Variant daughter Genderose STV. “You wouldn’t believe how many times my horse friends thought I was crazy for trying to breed jumping horses out of a mare by Variant out of Uniform,” Harrie says with a laugh as he begins his story.”
Female successors
It was thanks to his father that foundation mare Genderose STV came into Harrie’s life. “My father knew absolutely nothing about horses, but at one point he decided my brother Ralf and I needed a young horse because we both loved showjumping. Together with a man from the village, he went to Studfarm ’t Vierspan, where they came across the mare Genderose. She was two-and-a-half years old at the time. Without any real knowledge of horses, he bought this dressage-bred mare for us. She was a beautiful mare with good movement, and I competed her up to M-level showjumping.”
At the age of three, Harrie bred her to Frühling, and from that cross he later bred Ultimate Dream (Dream of Heidelberg), an international Grand Prix dressage horse. “I also competed that Frühling daughter at M-level showjumping, and for quite some time I travelled the national jumping shows with my little trailer carrying both mother and daughter. I still remember competing at the Christmas show at Indoor Alverna with Genderose and her daughter Kimberley, where both horses qualified for the jump-off of the final. I then had to choose which horse to ride, but I picked the youngest one and paid the price with a fall.”...
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