Hillary Dobbs is a young 19-year-old woman who is truly spectacular. While I was in Washington, DC at the NIH, I was reading the sports page and she appeared. She is competing at the highest level of show jumping, the Grand Prix level, where the jumps are 5 1/2 feet tall! She has 5 Grand Prix level horses, Quincy B and Corlett among them. She has a twin sister, Heather, who is a professional show jumper. Hillary is also a sophomore at Harvard University! What a girl!Her father is the famous Lou Dobbs who is busy on book tour with his book War on the Middle Class. Hillary and her sister grew up on a 300 acre farm in northern New Jersey where her mother rode English and bred halter horses. Hillary has had training from Missy Clark and John Brennan of North Run Farm in Warren, Vermont. Missy Clark is very famous for the top circuit training and competing.
Hillary won one Grand Prix on Quincy B and 3 on Corlett so far. This begins her first year of such high competing and she'll commute from Harvard to Florida starting in January for the winter competitions. She is preparing for international competition, so she can gain experience and perhaps win a spot on our Olympic team. Here is what she says of her experiences, "A dream come true. This is a goal of every little girl who's riding ponies, all the way up. We'd see the best Grand Prix riders at every show on Sundays competing, and that's what we'd look forward to doing in the future."
Here's what her dad says, "At shows, she's up at 3 or 3:30am to work the horses. She thinks nothing of putting in 16- to 18-hour days. As a father, I'm begging her to relax and find time for herself, but as she says, she's living her dream. You give your children roots and you give them wings, and she's certainly spreading hers." Her trainer, Missy Clark, says, "She's a tough cookie. Jumping is rough and tumble. You're going to fall. You're going to have wrecks. You have to have the mind-set to deal with that. In addition, she possesses the quality I can't teach -- the ability to go in the ring and be a winner, to not crumble under pressure, to have that focus to perform when it counts."
And all this began at the age of 4, when mom and dad gave Hillary and Heather a pony named Poppy. By the age of 5, they were competing in lead line competitions!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=uSn2UPbClTg