LaGoy-Weltz and Rassing’s Lonoir Dominate Day Two of the 2021 Adequan® Global Dressage Festival

By Andrew Wiggins

In their first international competition since February 2020, LaGoy-Weltz and the 17-year-old Danish Warmblood gelding (by De Noir 3) owned by LaGoy-Weltz and Mary Anne McPhail came out on top, earning a score of 73.978%. Second place in the class went to Great Britain’s Susan Pape on Harmony's Don Noblesse, Harmony Sporthorses’ 14-year-old Hanoverian stallion by Dancier, who ended with a 73.022%. Third place was awarded to Yvonne Losos De Muniz (DOM) on Aquamarijn, her own 16-year-old KWPN mare by United, earning a 71.717%.

“I’m really happy with how this has started off,” began LaGoy-Weltz. “We went out and rode in a national competition last week, and it was harmonious, but plain. It served its purpose to go out and ‘shake out the bats,’ and that’s part of the strategy. We’ve been trying to push it to the next level with Lonoir. I’ve kept him quiet for so many years, but there is a lot of horse in there. The goal was to push that more today; we did, [but] we had a few costly bobbles in the zigzag and in the pirouette. We can fix that next time. I know that [coaches] Debbie [McDonald], Ali [Brock], and Charlotte [Bredahl] say that he has never looked better. That’s a good place to start, so we want to keep going from there.”

LaGoy-Weltz and the gelding enjoyed some downtime this summer when major shows were put on hold, hacking and waiting for competition to resume. “After everything came to a screeching halt last year,” she explained, “we finished in such a good place and were like, ‘Now what?’ With a 16, coming 17-year-old horse, we didn’t want to keep him in that spot all summer long, so we did a lot of working on things but also a lot of hacking and hills, with a goal to ramp back up slowly down here. So far it seems to be going okay!”