07/12/2024
Such different times … never to be repeated I’m sure! What a pony.. what a partnership.
How times change.
Today it's all about the breeding of Horses & Ponies. Back then many were unknown breeding, infact no such thing as Passports, so many stars were without pedigree.
Stroller the Olympic Wonder Pony
Stroller could jump as high as the world’s finest despite being much smaller…in many cases eight inches shorter than his closest rivals.
In the 60’s and 70’s, if you were a show jumping enthusiast in either England or North America, there was one equine name that got everybody’s attention. In the days before major league sports took over the cable stations and hockey, baseball, and hockey were shown 24 hours a day, the sport of show jumping, especially, in Great Britain had a following that was second to none. These were the decades when top show jumpers wrote books and “annuals” to the delight of their adoring public, company sponsored show jumpers had their company names as prefixes to horse names, and fans wrote for hairs from horse stars’ tails and manes.
However, out of this stadium full of the tall, long legged equine show jumpers, there emerged an oddball, albeit, an incredibly talented oddball. A pony named Stroller who was 14.1 h.h.; a Connemara / Thoroughbred mix that had been blessed by the gods of genetics and the wizards of wonder with confidence and scope. He could jump as high as the world’s finest despite being much smaller…in many cases eight inches shorter than his closest rivals.
Stroller was born in 1950 and was initially bought in a job lot from Ireland by a dealer and sold to a Ted Cripps for his daughter until he realized that he might just have a gem on his hands. He sold the pony to Ralph Coakes, a farmer near New Milton, who knew a thing or two about horses and the sport of show jumping. In buying the small pony, Ralph Coakes had just hitched his wagon and his daughter Marion’s even bigger wagon to a star that would explode into a supernova for the next 15 years.
Marion had two brothers, John and Douglas, who were members of the British Show Jumping Team but it was she who had the natural riding talent and ability to bring out the best in her pony. Eventually it seemed that graduating to a horse would be the natural thing to do but Marion knew that Stroller had more to give. They challenged the big horses and the big courses and won over and over again. There was nothing that this pair couldn’t tackle and jump whether it was a parallel, a spread, water, a bank or a ditch!
In 1964, this dynamic duo won the Hickstead Derby Trial, a grueling course founded in 1960 by show jumping great Douglas Bunn that tests the best of the best over a course of natural obstacles, a totally different event from the usual colourful stadium jumps. Stroller and Coakes placing second to Seamus Hayes and Goodbye on Derby Day in the actual event. A year later at the age of just 18, Coakes and Stroller won the Ladies World Championship at Hickstead. That same year they won the Queen Elizabeth Cup at the Royal International and won it again six years later.
Three years later Stroller was to show what he was really made of when he fought back from a stumble down the big Hickstead bank and achieved the only clear round out of 44 horse and rider teams. Stroller placed second in the Derby in 1968 and third in 1970.
In the 1970 Hamburg, Germany Derby, Coakes recalls: “When we sailed over the last fence, having completed the only clear round of the day, the crowd of 25,000 went crazy. It was one of the most exciting moments of my life. We had completed the 50th clear round ever achieved on the course — and it was the first by a woman rider.” Amazingly, Stroller was 20 years old at the time!
Stroller also helped Great Britain win three Nations’ Cups, the World team Championships and the President’s Cup.
