A Saving Grace

By Delores Kuhlwein

Nancy Chapman of Gainesville, Florida, went over her first trail pole in the year 2000, and the rest was history.  She’d had a bad riding accident over fences in the past and was transitionally paralyzed, she explains.  “A friend of mine said before you throw yourself on your sword, go try what I do (which was trail), so I watched it and started bawling, because I thought, ‘I can do that.’”

To her, it was like an equitation over fences class, and she never looked back.  “Everything happens for a reason,” she shares.  “I could not have kept jumping fences to 73 years old, but this I can do. And I’m the luckiest person alive.”

And now, she admits, “Trail is it for me; it’s absolutely my obsession and my passion.”

Trail has so many parallels to her hunter jumper background, she says, because “it’s rhythm, it’s track, it’s lift, and just because those poles are 6 or 8 inches off the ground, it’s no different than galloping to a 3-foot-6 oxer. I always had more guts than brains, so this is much safer for me. The geometry of trail comes easily for me, I don’t have any struggle with the math – I can visualize and I can see my way through.”

Her dedication to the event paid off at the recent All American Quarter Horse Congress not once but twice.  First, she knocked it out of the park with her gelding, Acrobatt, as Congress Champion in the L2 Amateur Select Trail, and then she followed it the very next day with a win in the 4 & 5 Year Old Non Pro Trail Stakes with “Battman” to the tune of $3832.54.

Her trainer, Nick Mayabb, also cinched a L3 Bronze Championship with him in the Junior Trail, and Nancy says Battman is the one to credit for her own success.

“He did it,” laughs Nancy.  He’s a Savant – absolutely a trail Savant.”

She explains she bought Battman not quite two years ago after she spotted him in a paddock at SeaRidge Farms, and he belonged to her good friend, Deb Craig. “I said, what are you going to do with that one, because if you ever decide to sell him, I want him.”

“A few months later, I got a call from Deb, and she said, ‘Were you serious?’ She said, ‘Well, you haven’t ridden him or vetted him,’ but I just knew. I’ve had a lot of good horses over the years, and they find you somehow, this – the horse show gods saved the best for last.”

In her final trail class at Congress, the 4 & 5 Year Old Non Pro Trail, Nancy went first in the draw, and she wasn’t expecting that, she reveals.  “So I felt like I was a little raggedy at the start, but he is such an honest horse, if I just stay in the middle and stay out of his way, usually he helps me. He’s a very rhythmic horse, and Nick has him so square and lifted, as long as I don’t do something off the reservation, he comes with me, and he’s a natural. Basically, I just have to stay out of trouble and remember where I’m going, which is always a challenge for me. He can lope all day long, I have some physical issues that make the trots really miserable, so I don’t fight it and he does it for me.”

Nancy also explains that she tells Nick Mayabb he got her at the right time in her life because she spent most of her life being a brick and not a sponge.  “I have Mark Dunham to thank for teaching me to be a sponge. I told Nick, if I had not learned to be a sponge before I came to you, I’d have been out of here in a second – you would not have put up with me.”

She says she really wanted to learn how exhibitors were riding trail today, riding off the leg with lift yet allowing flow. “We have a lot going on in the event, so a few months into it, and I looked at him and said, ‘Had I known it was this hard to coordinate my leg and hand, I don’t’ know that I would have started,’ but he didn’t fire me, he didn’t throw me out, and he didn’t quit. So I’m stuck and I have to follow it through!”

Nick’s strategy for the team was to send them in there, Nancy explains, without going over any poles in the warmup pen.

The most remarkable feat, Nancy concludes, was that she had won Trail her rookie year in 2001 at the Congress and was Reserve in the Western Riding.  “But even more importantly, I was fourth in the Amateur Trail that year.  At that time I thought the novice was not a big thing – I wanted to be with the big kids,” she admits.

Because of that last experience, she now feels like she has bookends – from the beginning when she was just starting out, and that from 2023.  “I have bookends for my mantle for my fireplace. Who knows in this life how much longer we have to go, and I’m waiting to wake up from my dream.”