Spotlight Feature of the Month: Team Weber Extraordinaire
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Team Weber: The Optimal Competitors
On the international stage of the Combined Driving Event (CDE), Chester Weber and his posse are in the EC Spotlight. By Terry Temple. Training photos by Amanda Burleson. Competition photos courtesy chesterweber.com.
For seven consecutive years, Team Chester Weber has won the USEF National Championship in the crowd-wowing CDE Four-in-Hand. Last year at the Worlds, the flashy dominance of Chester's lead horse Jamaica helped the team take the gold in Dressage as they went on to take the Silver overall. Later in the year, the 18-year-old Jamaica, who was once just rescued from the slaughterhouse, was awarded the top equine honor in the sport: USEF Horse of the Year. To say Team Weber is on a roll, is a pun and an understatement.
Chester, his crew of long-experienced and dedicated horsemen, and his stable of impeccably matched horses have been competing and winning on the international level in Four-in-Hand for over a decade. On the walls and shelves of his home-base facility at Live Oak Plantation in Florida, the evidence is everywhere – trophies, winning cups, sparkling crystal, ribbons of every hue, mostly blue, are all lined up, row after row.The barns, the 4500 acres of oak-studded and four-boarded pastures, the training arenas, the miles of private roads: It's an optimal existence for horses and horsemen, and from the camaraderie they display on a fine April day, I'd say Team Weber is enjoying life.
The Setting
Deep in the impeccably developed Ocala horse country that is Live Oak, Chester's barns are a horseman's dream. In layout, materials, construction and amenities, the facility is optimum if not opulent. As the Team gets ready for a training session that will take these lucky ECers on about a two-hour thrill ride, there is an air of efficiency and expectation about the barn. It seems that everybody, especially the horses, knows what is expected of them and what they are about to do.
The Horses
With the exception of the new addition, Horus (a French trotter, right), Chester's horses are all Dutch Warmbloods, aka KWPN, short for the long Dutch name for this tall, powerful, lithe breed. Horus, a former racer, has incredible speed and has been brought in to see if and how he can augment the team in the Marathon and Cones. Slightly shorter and a little different bay than the rest of the Team Horses, the dressage event would not be as apropos for him as it is for Chester's Lead Team of almost identically conformed and colored geldings.
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