I work for event rider Yoshi Oiwa, who is based with Dirk Schrade. My main role is to look after Yoshi’s horses, but Yoshi (who led the dressage phase at the London Olympics) and Dirk help each other and Dirk has tons of young horses in work, so I, together with Dirk’s workers work together as a team and I also get to ride some of Dirk’s horses which is a fantastic opportunity.
It’s a very international stable here with Germans, Italians, Swedish, French, a Thai girl is on her way to join us over this winter and, of course, Japanese. As an international mob we all speak poor German and pretty good English, so the language spoken at the stable is always English. It doesn’t help my German to improve, but I’m getting old and my head just doesn’t take any more new things, so I’m pretty happy to turn my back on my German … though I have learnt one sentence:
“Ein bier bitte’’ which is “One beer please’’ … I can live with that!
This is the beautiful indoor arena at Dirk Schrade’s yard
We start at 6:30am and do usual stable jobs such as feeding, mucking out, sweeping etc. Dirk sometimes rocks up at 6:30am and starts riding until the end of the day without a stop, but this didn’t surprise me too much as I’ve seen Heath (Ryan) doing the same … workaholics!
Then we have a quick breakfast together and onto working horses until we all finish riding.
The facilities here are amazing. There is a very nice indoor arena, an indoor lunging yard and a big outdoor jumping arena. We also have a natural uphill gallop area, and some lovely hacking through the forest. It’s certainly all set up for eventing horses.
Hacking and galloping area
It seems to be that all the top eventers from all over the world visit this stable. I got seriously excited when I met Mark Todd, the legend, and he was a very nice man to talk to. Also some Aussies have been here. Burto (Chris) was here early in this year and he’s still a true Australian, happy and relaxed!
Our stable has had a few successes in the last a couple of months. Dirk won the Team Gold at the European Eventing Championship and one of the young horses went through to the final at the Bundeschampionat in the 6 Year Old Eventing class. The Bundeschampionat is like the Dressage & Jumping with the Stars in Australia, but they also have classes for eventing.
There are plenty of horses and dogs in our stable
When this Bundeschampionat was on, our team got split into the two. One went to the competition with Dirk and the other one stayed home and painted the stable! And as I’m the only the boy worker here, I got chosen to stay home with the quickest discussion! Though I must say the girls who stayed home with me did much better painting job than me and the stable looks like a brand new one now.
That’s all for now
Daiki
