Young rider triumphs over tragedy
Fourteen-year-old Faith Hull was having a tough day in the practice jumping arena.
Her 14-year-old horse, a high-spirited thoroughbred named Leo, was not happy about having to jump fences and made a sudden move that bucked her out of the saddle and threw her to the dirt.
Watching how difficult it was for her daughter trying to tame Leo to convince him to do what he was asked, at one point her mom asked Faith is she wanted to sell him, but she refused.
“I was like, no, he’s going to be something,” said Faith. “If I can train him long enough, Leo has a lot of energy so I say he could go to when he was 20. The jumps will get lower as he gets older but right now I’d say he could probably do a three-foot-nine course if I asked him to.
“He’s jumped a three-foot-six course in the jumper ring. He was an on-track thoroughbred and he has a lot of energy.”
The three ribbons she won with Leo during the three-day Prince George Classic Dressage, Hunter, Jumper Show at the Agriplex last weekend made her happy but Faith was riding with a heavy heart. Her mom, April Johnson, died suddenly in May 26 of a blood clot at age 39, leaving behind her husband Neil, two daughters, Faith and 11-year-old Ava, and a 19-year-old son, Chase.
“I wish she was still here, she’d be proud of me,” said Faith. “I didn’t expect to place in any of the classes, so that felt nice.”
Faith’s love of horses was passed on to her by her mom and she missed having her around the riding ring to guide her through her performances with Leo. Her younger sister Ava took on some of those duties but it wasn’t the same.
“It was stressful, I cried the first day (Friday) because it was raining and Leo was being bad and I didn’t want to get on him,” said Faith.
“Susie (her coach) forced me on him and I won fourth place.
“My mom used to ride expensive horses at one of the big barns in Vancouver when she was my age. She’d ride them for exercise for people when they weren’t competing. She would get on any horse. She got on a horse that would rear every time she got on and she still went on three-hour trail rides in the rain with that horse.”
Faith is still getting to know her horse and entered Leo in three jumping classes, two with 18-inch fences and one with poles on the ground. She also put Leo through the paces in a patterns event and placed third out of 13 entries.
“The first (jumping) class he was terrible, all he wanted to do was canter and take off with me but I still got fourth,” she said. “The last two classes he gave his all and he actually did very well. In the first 18-inch class I got second place and in the third 18-inch class I didn’t place because I knocked the rail.
“It’s fun riding him. He’s got a really big forward canter and he pretty much goes over anything I ask him to. He’s sensitive and he doesn’t like being kicked and I have to get used to just kicking him over a jump. He’s never refused on me and he’s not one of those horses that stops right before the jump. He’s got a lot of anxiety and I just have to get him to relax more. I mean, he’s a race horse, built for speed.”
Faith and her mom spent about a year looking for suitable horse for jumping that was within their budget and when they found Leo he was emaciated, feeding off dead pasture grass that had long turned brown in the heat of an Okanagan summer. It’s taken her eight months to get Leo to the stage he’s at now and she focused on getting him up to a normal weight, feeding him high-fat alfalfa to help restore the muscle mass he had when he was being groomed to race. That was not a priority for his previous owner in Kelowna.
“She didn’t care enough to feed him,” said Hull. “He was underweight and now he weighs 1,500 pounds. We probably put 250 pounds on him in eight months. We got him for $650, which is really cheap for a horse like him. They trained him to race in Kelowna but he was actually too slow to race and he never raced.”
The Prince George CADORA Club that put on the P.G. Classic got behind Faith and waived her entry fees for the show. Faith spends a lot of her free time volunteering around the stables and the club is now paying her an hourly wage for that work. One of the club members who also boards horses at the Agriplex donated a bail of Timothy hay to keep Leo well-fed and he goes through a lot of it, up to 30 pounds per day.
“It’s tragic, hard-luck story,” said club president Jodie Kennedy, a PGSS teacher who taught Faith last year in a Grade 8 humanities course. “Faith’s mom was her main helper with her horse and so we’ve given her a little honorarium to help her with her board and we let her ride in the show. She and her mom really worked to find her horse and it’s heartbreaking.
“It sounds like the rest of her extended family is going try to help her keep going because they can see how positive it is for Faith. We’ll watch to make sure she’s OK and make sure she doesn’t lose the horse. She’s taken really good care of her horse and she’s had to have a lot of patience because he’s excitable.”
Faith was born in Vancouver and moved to a ranch in Quesnel when she was 18 months old. She and her family came to Prince George in 2012. She’s been jumping ever since then and also has some Western riding experience.
“I like jumping and I’ve always liked horses, it’s one of those kid things, my mom would put me on a little pony and just run me bareback down the hills and I was fine with that, I like it,” she said. I don’t think I’ll ever get over horseback riding and I don’t see myself not doing it.”
Faith entered Leo in one event at the Spruce Ridge Pony Club show in Prince George in May but was disqualified when she missed the start line, so she considers last weekend’s Prince George Classic her first real show. She planned to enter the Rosenol outdoor show July 7-9 at Rosenol Performance Horses, south of the city, but the event has been canceled due to a lack of volunteers. She and her family are still getting over the shock of her mom’s death and Faith is not sure how many shows she will have this year.
“It depends how stressful everything is,” she said. “I needed help with this show and had to get my sister to help me.”
The three-day show was sponsored by the Brink Group of Companies and Wood Wheaton Supercentre, Kennedy said those sponsorships helped keep entry fees low for youth and junior-aged riders who came from Williams Lake, Quesnel, Vanderhoof and the outlying communities to enter events.