GERMANY (by Adriana van Tilburg) The P.S.I Auction is the ‘elite’ auction for Warmblood breeding. This year they set a new record for selling the most expensive Warmblood in history, and also for the 35 years the P.S.I. Auction has been in existence. The six-year-old SPH Dante (Welfenadel x Dormello) was, in fact, born in Australia.
SPH Dante is a true success story for the P.S.I. Auction as Hof Kasselmann sold his dam Donner Carina (Dormello x Donnerschwee) to Australia when she was two years old. She won the young dressage horse championships at the age of five and six, and qualified for the dressage World Breeding Championships for Young Horses.
Grand-dam, A Little Lady (Aktuell) produced Legamento, the most expensive dressage horse of the 2005 P.S.I. Auction. Dante himself won the Australian Young Dressage Horse Championships – P.S.I. Dressage and Jumping with the Stars – as a four-, five- and six-year-old, and qualified for the 2014 WBCYH in Verden. “Dante already shows such an amazing talent for piaffe and passage at the age of six, more than many other horses will achieve during their whole life”, said Ullrich Kasselmann, describing the specialty of the top-priced dressage horse this year.
SPH Dante is already a world traveller, and his long journey is set to continue: First from Australia to Germany, and now to Russia, to Moscow-based Elena and Sergej Knyaginichev. They have already invested around €4 million during previous P.S.I. Auctions, having purchased Der Designer for €1.1 million in 2011 – a black stallion who first went to Inna Tzydrenkova (RUS) before finding his way to ichael Eilberg in Great Britain...
