WELLINGTON, Fla.--The seven-time Swedish Olympic rider Tinne Vilhelmson-Silfvén won the Grand Prix Special CDI4*, at the Global Dressage Festival 0n Jan. 15.
Tinne Vilhelmson-Silfvén on Devanto (Photo by Susan Stickle)Riding Devanto, Vilhelmson-Silfvén posted a new record score for the Holsteiner gelding at the level, 73.425 percent, despite a mistake in the first set of one-time changes.
Overall, they were rewarded with a smattering of eights in the test and a nine for extended canter.
Second went to Susan Dutta on Figeac DC with 68.596 percent.
Devanto was formerly campaigned at Grand Prix by Germany’s Juliane Brunkhorst.
Vilhelmson-Silfvén did her first CDI on him at AGDF exactly a year ago, and this was their eighth CDI test.
“IT'S A GIFT to get a ready-made horse,” said the 54-year-old Vilhelmson-Silfvén. “But that’s not to say it’s easier, because you really have to make them your own. You have to learn how they work, and they have to learn how you work. You have to give them time to understand you. I get to understand how a horse like Devanto, with all this power, how he reacts, if he reacts, if he’s too tense, or if he’s over ambitious. He’s very sensitive, and I like that.”
Vilhelmson-Silfvén is a regular on the Wellington circuit.
“In Sweden, we travel three days to every show, so you can’t go to too many one after the other,” she said. “Here you can go again and again and try to figure out and adjust your own way of competing. It gives you so many possibilities. Getting to know a horse, or having young ones, it’s super.
“You can also have your whole string here and ride them all at once, and still go home every day and ride the ones there. In Europe, you’re away for a week at a show and you leave the whole stable. Here I can choose to ride as much as I want,” said Vilhelmson-Silfvén.
It was the final competitor in the Intermediate I CDI1*, Susan Pape, who swept the class with a unanimous first place from the five judges.
The British rider, 58, rode Harmony Sporthorses’s mare to 72.265 percent at only the pair’s second international show together.
They had more than 2.6 percentage points in hand over second-placed Shannon Dueck of Canada on As You Wish.
