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COUNCIL BLUFFS IOWA NONPAREIL—OCTOBER 31, 1954Danish Housewife To ShowHorsemanship To YanksBy ed McCarthy'?}*•»'Inline X4 wCDPEHAGEN - men the 66th annual National Horse Show clip* clops into Madison Square Garden in New York next Tuesday for its. customary eight-day stay, the spectators will see -champion hoi se$ and riders culled by elimination this past year from some 1,5*)0 regional shows throughout the country.r't\ey will see als.) five*'international riding teams, representingSpain, West Germany, Canada. Mexico and the United Stales. But in the feature spot, filled in previous years by equestrian troops from the Spanish Riding School of Vienna (eight members) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (32 members), will be a lone woman and her horse. This is Us Hart eh a 33-year-old housewifefrom Denmark, and her 12-year-♦old mare, Jubilee.'As the show reaches Mrs. Har-tel's spot on the program, the band will strike up, and out into the arena she will ride, dressed in black boots, white breeches, black frock coat and silk hat. Up and down the length of the Garden she and her horse will go, maneuvering rhythmically 1o the music m sharp turns and quick changes of gait.Applause wil1 build up as the horse goes through its paces — walk, trot, canter, slow gallop. To a circut-goer Jubilee might appear to ba’’ just another dancing horse and Mrs Hartel, considerably less spectacular than a circus rider because she doesn't get results by cracking a whip. That, however, is the whole point.Mrs, Hartel‘s specialty is dressage, a riding event that is a test of the rapport between horse and rider. The more it appears that the rider is giving commands' by mental telepathy to a mind-readmg horse, the higher they score with the judges.At the Garden, Mrs. Hartel will be performing not for judges but for the audience, She has already been judged* Two years ago in the Olympics at Helsinki, Finland, she placed second in a field of four women and 24 men. And this summer at Aachen, Germany, she swept a field of three women and 20 men to becogw world's champion, This makes Mrs. Hartel tohorsemanship what Willie Mays is to baseball.Anyone who has sat on a horseisn’t as easy as it looks, iitfany s.pectator horsemen prefer theknows that w s.ubtleties ofhat Mrs, Hartel does dressage'to the spectacle of juiriping. They knqw, of course, that it takes five to seven.years to tra lee, to build nary horsen a horse like Jubl-up muscles the ordi-loesn’t have for the |XKver and , control and form (Iressage requires.1 Warm Up Period They know, too, that Mrs. Har-l el must spn*nd an hour of hard riding beforj; each performance la warm theborse up, so that Ju-i bilee responds to a light rein, im-; jjerceptible pressures of the rid-jer's legs, and7 slight shifting of I 'weight in the saddle. But the tra* I y amazing thing about Mrs, Hartel is that 10 years ago, while Denmark1 was occupied by, toe Germans, she was stricken with polio and told by doctors that she would never be able to ride again. She still has to be lifted into and out of ihe saddle by agroom.You would not realize this, were you to meet *as Hartel as I did not long ago, at her home in Hellerup, a northern suburb of Copenhagen. Lis, wearing a sweater-and-skirt combination on the gray-brownish side, walked into the living room — five foot seven or eight, 12s pounds, brownhaired, and smiling,She headed for the back of a sofa and held on to it as she swung around in front and sat
Newspaper Details
Council Bluffs Nonpareil
Council Bluffs, Iowa, US
Sun, Oct 31, 1954
Page 5
Full Page
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Anonymous
USA 17 Jul 2019
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