H&H interview Show
The show cob supremo talks to Nicola Jane Swinney about finding raw talent, facing keyboard warriors and being on first-name terms with her surgeon
cob supremo Lynn Russell
BEFORE you begin to build a house, you need a solid foundation and sturdy scaffolding. The same applies to producing a horse from a raw youngster to the show ring, says Lynn Russell.
“If you have good scaffolding and good foundations, you’re going to have a decent building,” she says. “If you buy horses raw, you can see the bone structure so you can see where you’re going to have to work. If you feed them correctly and work them properly, you get the right frame and you get the right picture.” Lynn buys her youngsters out of Ireland at three or four years old — which means that she rarely produces horses for other people and has the freedom to pursue her real passion, which is bringing out those raw novices.
“In all the years I’ve been showing, I’ve brought out at least one novice cob every year; this time I have four,” she says. “I buy mostly from Ireland — in this country, I think people sell horses for a reason; in Ireland they sell them for the money.
“A cob should never be a hogged small hunter. A lot of cobs today have cannon bones that are too long, don’t have enough timber below the knee and don’t have the depth through the girth. People think if they stack a load of weight on them they’ve got a cob. A show horse should be well covered but you shouldn’t be able to poke your finger in it and it disappears.”
She warms to her theme: “The danger is that people stack the weight on across the top of the shoulder. You can’t get a saddle to
‘Remember, no one gives you anything for nothing. Young people think, “I’ve won a class, someone will sponsor me”, but it doesn’t work like that’
sit properly and the horse can’t move freely through the shoulder.”
LYNN is clearly passionate about this and there is a bitter backstory. When she won the maxi-cob championship at Horse of the Year Show (HOYS) last October with Jovian, an unfortunate photo appeared on social media and the keyboard warriors launched into a deeply unseemly tirade. “Fat” was the least vitriolic of the adjectives used to describe the Irish draught known as Pinkie.
Like many in the showing world for the long haul, Lynn has had to grow a thick skin, though it’s obvious even now that the remarks upset her. But it all paled into insignificance when she lost the eight-year-old to a colon torsion two days after I visited her yard at Dunsfold, Surrey. It is hardly surprising that she is vitriolic about Facebook and its ilk.
“It’s killing the job,” she says, with understandable vehemence. “I think people who show professionally or judge, or have anything to do with the horse world, should be very careful with social media. It’s become nasty and somebody will chuck a lawsuit at someone and end up with a lot of money.
“That said, it can be useful. I sell tack on Facebook — a lot of second-hand stuff, some of which I sell to raise money for charity — and I use it to advertise clinics and for staff [this is timely, as her one full-time groom walked out a week after this interview].”
Of course, horse people are used to the heartache that comes with the triumphs, and Lynn will pick herself back up. She is an honours graduate of the school of hard knocks — literal as well as metaphorical. She has survived three horrific accidents, as well as the lumps and bumps that come with the day job. She was double-barrelled by a horse she had in to sell, which booted her from one side of the yard to the other and into intensive care for a week; another when a horse managed to wrap a lead rope around her waist and dragged her across the field; and when a youngster reared up and fell over backwards onto her, breaking all the ribs on her left-hand side. She is on first-name terms with the surgeon who put her back together each time.
But as well as a survivor, she is an innovator. Disappointed with the selection of saddles available, she designed her own working hunter version and had it made by master saddlers. She designs made-to-measure bridles and has her own line of products with Nettex. For her sponsor Baileys, she writes a blog immediately after every show.
“The thing people always ask me is ‘how do I get a sponsor?’,” she muses. “You have to remember that no one gives you anything for nothing. I work very hard for my sponsors, I endorse products, I’ve bought a good camera so I can take decent photos for them to use on their tradestands and websites, and my own website links to all of theirs. Young people think, ‘I’ve won a class, someone’s going to sponsor me’, but it doesn’t work like that.”
HARD work is what Lynn has always done. She was one of the pioneers for retraining racehorses for the show ring and has built up such trust with a network of trainers that they will tip her off if there’s a promising one coming out of training.
She has a lovely eight-year-old, Mr Ooosh, whom she qualified for the SEIB Insurance Brokers Racehorse to Riding Horse final at HOYS last year, but — because she won’t take shortcuts — she withdrew him.
“He’s sensational but like many exracehorses he has a problem with standing still,” she admits. “When I qualified him at Keysoe, Nicky [MacKenzie, SEIB marketing director] said I deserved the ticket after four hours of riding him in just to get him to stand. But I withdrew him from HOYS because I didn’t think he’d cope with it and it was wrong to take him when someone else could have that place.”
Yes, Lynn Russell is tough but she has a strong sense of fair play and a lively sense of humour that bubbles not far beneath the surface. She works hard and always has done. She believes in putting something back into the world that has been her life for more than three decades; in March she is hosting a novice showing show at Sands Farm Equitation Centre in West Sussex.
And when she brings out those four novices this season, they will have the right amount of furnishing on that strong scaffolding and she will have laid the foundations for future show ring champions.