Kicking Off The Season With A Bang As We Welcome Our New Ambassador

2018 is all set to be an exciting year for us here at Apt Cavalier so we are kicking the season off with a bang by adding another member to our team!

We are delighted to announce established young event rider Pumbaa Eventing will be joining us as an ambassador and blogger, and you guys are going to love following her progress this year!

I first noticed Pumbaa at Blair Castle International in 2016 because Sooty is one of those once seen, never forgotten horses - he flies cross country and Pumbaa always has a smile from ear to ear. I've followed her progress on the circuit and on social media and her love for the sport is evident- plus her blogs are hilarious and insightful and I cannot get enough of watching Soots jump!! So, I am absolutely delighted to have her on board and am so excited to support her this year.

Read on for Pumbaa's first blog for Apt Cavalier:

Introductions have always been my living worst nightmare, after 20 years of ‘sorry whats?’ and blank expressions I now have the name game down to a tea, so I can predict the line of questioning without so much as a blink. My name is Pumbaa Goess-Saurau – a mouthful I know. No, Pumbaa isn’t my real name (that would be Franziska – yes, equally complicated – I have an Austrian father, you can blame him). Oh, you recognize the name? Well it does happen to come from one of the world’s most popular Disney films – yes, it is the warthog from Lion King. How did that happen? Well my mother and her rather ‘advanced’ sense of humor meant my first teeth were dubbed ‘tusks’…and somehow it stuck. So, voilà. 100 words later and my name is explained – a miracle.

With that out of the way I’ll try and get to the more interesting stuff. I am a young event rider, based near Marlborough in Wiltshire and I have been riding ever since forever. Just like my name, my passion for all things equine originated from my mother who used to train Point-to-pointers. With regards to eventing, things really got going for me in 2010 when I started doing Pony Trials, and later made on to the European Team in 2011 and 2013.

Fast-forward 5 years and my main steed stands at 17.2hh…oh how times have changed. Sooty, who was likely a super hero in a former of life, is my one in a million. I’ve dubbed him my Bucket List Horse, because he keeps helping me cross things off it – last year we completed our first CIC*** at Blair Castle, as well as finishing in the top 10 in CCI**u25 at Tattersalls. I’d be lying if I said he wasn’t a little/completely mad, but I’ve since decided that sanity is both highly over-rated and equally dull so I suppose it’s for the best. 

My other ride is the gorgeous, somewhat regal (well, she likes to think so anyway) Ellie. She is our first homebred event horse as we’d previously only ever bred racehorses – the sixth and final foal out of Mum’s favourite national hunt mare, Two For Joy, we called her Six For Gold…so the pressure’s on! Last year she completed her first International, also at Blair, which was an extremely special moment for all of the team. I’ve never been particularly maternal (babies scare the living daylights out of me), but I felt like a proud, slightly teary, mum…she’s very special!

This year, I hope, will be a very exciting one for my team and I. My aim is for Ellie to step up to Intermediate, where I am sure more tears will be involved, and Sooty will hopefully go to Bramham for the CCI***u25 Championships…where I should think much hand holding and Rescue Remedy will be involved. Not for me, but for my parents. It’s true that I get nervous, but there are levels. I tend to sit and be quiet – for those that don’t know me, that’s a very rare occurrence – my mother, however, is an entirely different ball game. Every surface in the lorry is wiped, every useful piece of equipment ‘tidied away’ (never to be seen again) and the lorry park is nervously circled until I come back from jumping.

I am absolutely thrilled to be the newest member of Team Apt Cavalier, and I’m really looking forward to working with them over the course of the season. All fingers, toes and various other limbs crossed that it will a good year. Horses and predictability are like oil and water, but hopefully all will go to plan and it’ll be a cracker! That said we’ll be needing the weather to cooperate first, so hopefully the sun will grace us with it’s presence for more than a grand total of 2 hours over the next few weeks and we can get going!

Until next time,

Pumbaa x

Photos by the fantastic Dave Cameron Photography of course