Lari Shea and Sherif - Tevis Cup Winners 1989

Training for the Toughest Test
by 1989 Tevis Winner Lari Shea

Did I expect to win the Tevis Cup when I entered my twelve-year-old Arabian gelding, Sur Sherif, in the 1989 Western States One Hundred Miles in One Day Endurance Ride through the rugged Sierra Nevada Mountains? No...I was simply determined to finish.

That might have seemed like a modest goal, considering how fast Sherif was, how well he moved, and how quickly he recovered after exertion. But Sherif had a way of being his own worst enemy and allowing his psyche to get him hurt. In the 1987 and 1988 Tevis Cup races he was hyper, distracted, unratable, and out of control. Both years he hurt himself, and I think it was because he fought me along the trail. Both years he was pulled by the vets.

Sherif was not just your run-of-the-mill endurance horse with a ho-hum upbringing. He came to me at the age of eight with very little training, quite a history, and more than his share of what people call "an attitude." In 1985, when Jim and Shirley Scott of Willetts, California, gave him to me, he was a very low-mileage eight (I'll tell you why in a minute), barely broke to ride, untrained and unconditioned-but they thought he had enormous potential as an endurance horse. The moment I rode him, I agreed. I felt lots of suspension and great strength in his stride. "Ooooh, boy. This is an incredible horse," I thought. "If I can get him conditioned properly, he'll be hard to touch."

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How it All Began - The Legacy of Wendell Robie

Wendell Towle Robie (1895-1984)
By Gordy Ainsleigh © 2008

Wendell Robie spent his entire 89 ½ year of life in Auburn, California, a gold rush and railroad town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains about an hour‘s drives east-northeast of Sacramento on the road to Reno. Yet his involvement and innovations in finance, politics, lumbering, and endurance events for horse riders and runners-walkers have had, and continue to have, a dramatic impact on great many live in diverse parts of the world.
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In the early 1950s, a horseman from Montana wrote a letter published in Western Horseman in which he announced that his own worthy steed was the greatest and fastest cross-country endurance animal in all of equinedom, and challenged any and all those who doubted this to race them over any trail at any distance. Wendell responded with his own letter, accepting the challenge and specifying that the test course would be from Lake Tahoe to Auburn, in California.

Wendell started preparing for the match, training his good horse Bandos, then an early teenager, and mapping out a course. The distance from the shores of Lake Tahoe to the fairgrounds in Auburn is about 55 miles by air, so the course Wendell had in mind was probably about 80 miles. However, the confident horseman from Montana never answered Wendell‘s challenge, and no one knows what happened to him. He or his horse may have experienced an incapacitating misfortune.

Wendell was still stewing over this at the last campout in 1954 of the Sacramento Horsemen‘s Association. It was at Robinson Flat, a beautiful cupped between ridges, 6,900 feet up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains about 30 miles west by trail from the shores of Lake Tahoe.

Sitting around the campfire for one last time before the snows of autumn closed in on the high mountains, one of the horsemen reproved Wendell for bragging up his horse, Bandos, so much, and began rhapsodizing about the great horses of yesteryear, the like of which were gone from the earth in this soft modern age of the mid-1950s. Wendell took offense to those remarks, and pressed the man to be specific about what those great horses of yesteryear could do that made them so great. His fellow horseman answered that, for instance, there had been horses in the last century (the 1800s) that could cover 100 miles across mountains and deserts in one day. Wendell‘s response was that he thought his good horse Smoke (Bandos‘ nickname, since he had turned from a bay colt to a gray mature horse) was up to that task. The disbelief with which Wendell‘s comment was received spurred Wendell on to what was probably his greatest achievement in his lifetime: the founding of the Western States 100 Mile Ride and the sport of equine endurance riding.

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Heather Reynolds and French Open - Tevis Cup Winners 2014

Hadeia (registered name, French Open) is a 14 yr old, 14.3 gelding. He was gelded as a late 8 yr old. He ran on the flat track before his endurance career, running an amazing 89 times. His legs are very clean and tight, he's a beast.

After everything was done we went and vetted in. Trotting Hadeia out was like flying a kite. Then we went for a little pre ride. Hadeia got a little squirrelly, he was in a great mood!

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