Savannah Jenkins Opens Desert Holiday with a Win in $5,000 Barnwalkers Welcome Speed
Savannah Jenkins has finally found the specific ride she needs for her mount Kainville VDS. It was the ride that landed her the win in an 83-horse field in Wednesday’s $5,000 BarnWalkers Welcome Speed to kick off Desert Holiday 1, presented by Brown Advisory.
Jenkins had the benefit of going late in the order, so she could watch the way the class was playing out. Top riders were putting in their best efforts and the time kept getting quicker, with Conor Swail taking the lead two separate times, and he was unsurprisingly the one to catch when Jenkins stepped in. Swail ended up in second with Gamble, owned by Asta Torokvei, while third went to Erynn Ballard (CAN) and Game Over, owned by Ilan Ferder.
Jenkins has had the ride on Kainville VDS, owned by Proper 12, LLC, for less than a year, and it’s taken some time to figure her out. But the 8-year-old Dutch Warmblood mare is proving to be very worth Jenkins’ efforts.
“We call her Bambi in the barn, and she is the sweetest, calmest, easiest horse that we have,” she said of Kainville VDS. “She is very attached to my husband, she follows him around with no [halter] – nothing – in the barn. [When I ride her,] she is so fast, and her brain goes 100 miles an hour. I don’t even ride her at home. There’s no trotting or cantering. There’s barely any walking.”
Despite not riding the mare at home, Jenkins has figured out the secret to getting the horse to perform well in the show ring.
“So she goes in the field all day, she does the treadmill twice a day, she rope lunges and she’s super calm. We’ve figured out our strategy with her because the more I ride her and I try to do this, it just doesn’t go well. So [Jonathan] McCreaa actually helped me in Michigan a lot with her and he has been such a huge help. I call him and text him after every round asking what I should do next. He has helped me help her in saying, ‘You need to listen to her; she has to listen a little bit to you but this is going to be totally different than all your other horses.’”
Some riders would see a situation like this, which requires a great deal of patience and change of mindset, as a horse to pass on, but Jenkins knew Bambi was going to be exactly her ride.
“When I went to Europe in May and I tried a few horses, my partner said, ‘She’s a lot like your horse you had [Quitana],’ who did everything for me,” Jenkins explained of why Kainville VDS stole her heart. “All my first Grand Prixs, World Cup Qualifiers, everything was with that horse and she was very similar. I haven’t felt that in the last four years.”
Arriving to this point of rideability and winning was a winding path, but with the help of McCrea and other professionals, Jenkins knows her job aboard the mare. “In the beginning it was 150 bridle changes,” she shared. “When I first started, I thought I needed to control the energy. But it’s so opposite; she wants me to be there with her. So now I don’t even have to try so much, she’s so fast and so the ride that I get in the ring is just let her do her and I just stay there. I try to get her the best placement to the jump and I stay out of her way. Being here at the Desert, being able to go up and go back down [in fence height] has been a huge change for our relationship.”
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