Ramona grad gallops into Junior Olympics
It’s a dream come true for Ramona resident Kaley Sapper. She’s competing this week in the 2017 Junior Olympic North American Junior and Young Rider Championship in Montana.
Sapper is participating in the Olympic equestrian discipline of eventing with her horse, Tuk, who goes by the show name Tuscan Sun. She and Tuk compete in the 1*, which consists of three phases: dressage, cross-country and show jumping.
“The first (phase) is all about control and obedience and just showing the judges that you’re fit to compete in the competition,” said Sapper, who graduated from Ramona High School last month. “Then the second is all about boldness and bravery. You go out and the jumps are solid jumps, wood jumps that don’t break and they’re pretty big, and so it’s all about bravery, speed, agility. Then the last day is all about carefulness, where you go in an enclosed space and you jump jumps that fall down and the goal is to not make them fall down.”
Sapper has been riding horses for five years and has been working with Tuscan Sun for about three years.
“He wasn’t the first horse that I owned, but he’s definitely the most experienced and the one that’s taken me the farthest,” she said.
To prepare for the championship, Sapper has been training at Next Level Eventing in Temecula with seasoned riders Tamra Smith and Heather Morris.
“They’re awesome,” Sapper said. “They’ve both ridden at the highest levels. It’s a very fun but serious atmosphere. When you go to the barn, it’s not to have fun, it’s to work, but you also have fun at the same time. It’s really neat just being able to learn from the best and having them there encouraging you, but also kind of beating you up at the same time, trying to make you better.”
Sapper said that she is the most confident about the competition’s cross-country phase, but that she and her trainers were still prepping last week for the dressage competition.
“We’re very good at the cross country,” she said recently. “Tuk’s a thoroughbred, those are usually race horses, so he definitely has the fast, strong capabilities. He’s got that blood in him. We’re trying to clean up the dressage and the stadium jumping a little bit. He’s not bad; he doesn’t enjoy it very much. So it’s difficult, but we’re working on it.”
Sapper said that she fell in love with horseback riding during her 13th birthday party when her mother Nancy gave her horseback riding lessons as a gift.
“For my 13th birthday my mom got me horseback riding lessons through Groupon and I really liked it and so we decided to get a horse up here,” she said.
While the birthday present was what initially got Sapper interested in horseback riding, it wasn’t until she attended a Gold Medal Equestrian summer camp in San Luis Obispo that she found her passion for eventing.
“We had lessons twice a day, five days a week, alternating between jumping and working on our dressage tests,” she said. “There were lots of crafts and activities for us to do and we all stayed on the property together. We got to know each other really well and learned quite a bit. That summer camp was really what got me towards this goal where it was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is the coolest thing ever. I want to get the right horse, I want to work really, really hard and I want to do this.’ That was definitely the summer that I wanted to make the dream come true.”
Sapper said that she had her good days and her bad days during training, but she was able to keep motivated by remembering just how far she had come.
“Sometimes you’re on top of the world and you’re like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to do so great, this is all worth it,’ and sometimes you’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, why am I doing this?’” she said. “You have those days and I think what really keeps me going is that I’ve had this dream for a long time and I’m so close. It’s almost like the closer you get to it, the harder it is because it’s like crunch time. You really have to get it together; you put all this work into it. You just really, really want to perform well. And so, you have your good and your bad days, but you have this goal, you’ve worked for it for so long, don’t give up.”
Sapper also attributed some of her perseverance to the eventing community as a whole.
“There’s not one particular person, but the entire eventing community is just crazy,” she said. “There’s this one woman who had
During her time training, Sapper was also completing high school at Ramona High and graduated in June as her class’ valedictorian. She said she was able to accomplish both her academic and extracurricular goals by knowing where to compromise her time and keeping her dream in mind.
“It’s all about compromise and time management and believing that you can do it, she said. “You have to set a goal for yourself and it can’t be unreasonable, but it can be a big goal and you just have to really, really want that goal and really work toward it. You can’t be perfect with everything, but it’s a balancing act, it really is.”
Sapper will continue her academics as a biomedical engineering major at California Polytechnic Institute in San Luis Obispo.
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