By Jean Llewellyn / press release
During the General Assembly of the Selle Français on April 25, 2025, the Studbook’s president, Pascal Cadiou delivered a comprehensive presentation.
We have everything in France to stand out from the crowd. The game consists of birthing, breeding, training, and selling sport horses to French and foreign riders, whatever their levels. We compete with more than 70 sport horses selection organizations (studbooks) around the world who have this same aspiration.
Much more than a game, it is a profession, or more precisely, multiple professions: that of breeder, trainer rider, and merchant who participate in this industry. The land on which we practice our professions is linked to agricultural production and more precisely to the sports segment of the horse industry.
The know-how of the trades I am talking about is passed down from generation to generation and is part of our agricultural, sporting, and cultural heritage. It is this French know-how that leads to the production of sport horses that have been competing in the best category for a very long time. Whatever the social status of these women and men who all contribute to these brilliant collective results. They have one thing in common; they decided to roll up their sleeves and work to be the best.
We are lucky to have land throughout the territory where our meadows allow the harmonious development of our foals while respecting their natural needs. Near our farms there is always a rider specializing in the education and training of young horses who will commit his skills to the service of learning movement, physical and mental conditioning, with a view to its evaluation and possibly its marketing.
The Selle Français Stud-Book registers its missions and its support as a selection organization for the players in this sector by organizing evaluations in the field through structuring selection circuits, by training the breeders, the volunteers that they are judges and/or young breeders.
We partner with regional breeder associations to do essential work in organizing the evaluations and competitions of models, gaits, and abilities. In addition to being qualifying stages for our championships, early performance monitoring has a triple purpose: the situation of the individuals evaluated to see if the foal has demonstrated the evaluation exercises; it justifies the collection of zootechnical data for analysis, updating, development of selection tools, and support of the selection program; it can lead to sales as long as a buyer is interested in the qualities expressed by a foal in a workshop.
The commitment and work of the volunteers is to be saluted, whether they are in the jumping arenas, the evaluation judges awarding the points, or even those who enter the marks into the computer, those who are in the parking lot, in the boxes, at the microphone, those who check the booklets. All these actions contribute greatly to facilitating the selection and decision-making work of breeders who use the birth to three-year-old competitions offered by the Selle Français Stud-Book.
The basis of our missions is both enshrined in our statutes, but also and above all translated into our selection program which was renewed by the Ministry in January 2024.
We must thank Pierre Tribon, head of the Horse Office and the Racing Institution and his entire team who examined these approval files. We are grateful and can salute the kind support of this MASA service.
Reading the activity report gives a fairly precise image of everything that has been implemented to achieve our common objective. It is obviously available to all our members, but it is perhaps necessary to emphasize a few topics that marked the past year... To read the complete article you need to be a subscriber
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