THREE-time dressage Olympian Heike Holstein didn’t “breed to be a breeder” when she put her Limmerick-sired mare Astoria in-foal in 2008, but she was thankful for making the decision when a foal named Sambuca was born in 2009.

A look back at Holstein’s FEI record shows a wealth of experience. She represented Ireland at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta on Devereaux, the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney with Ballaseyr Royal and the 2004 Athens Olympic Games aboard Welt Adel.

In between she competed at the European Championships in 1997, 1999, 2003 and 2005, as well as the 1998 World Equestrian Games in Rome.

After that European Championships in Hagan in 2005, Holstein’s international career was paused for 13 years, until July 2018 when she made her international comeback in Hickstead. During that time, she had her two children, Archie and Jake, and continued to produce her young horses on a national level, becoming national champion seven times during that period.

Her 2019 FEI European Championship mount Sambuca was one of those youngsters at home in Carbury, Co Kildare.

“I bought Astoria as a three- or four-year-old in a field in the north from her breeder, John Reid. I competed her in dressage, she did the National Championships in Necarne in 2007, the Preliminary and Novice.

Heike Holstein and Astoria, the dam of her European Championship mount Sambuca, at the National Championshios in Necarne

“Then I decided to breed one and see what happened… and Sambuca came out,” Holstein said, explaining her path to breeding a future Olympic horse.

It was her mum, international dressage judge Gisela Holstein, who spotted her sire, Samarant. “We were deliberating over a stallion, I didn’t really know. Mum had seen Samarant in Germany, she must have been judging at one of the international shows, and she thought he was lovely.

“Astoria had a really good bank end but she looked a bit like a gelding, with big front on her. Mum said this horse [Samarant] was really free in front so we went with him.”

Grand Prix horse

Sambuca was the first of three dressage horses Holstein and her husband William Bell bred by the now 18-year-old Astoria. Did she also know Sambuca would turn out to be a star? “As a foal she was cute, like all foals. But as a two- and three-year-old, right up until she was seven or eight, she was a real ugly duckling,” she said with a laugh.

“When I started riding her, she always felt like a Grand Prix horse. She was very powerful but she didn’t look the prettiest. Mum used to say ‘what are you doing with that horse!’ And I would say ‘no, she feels like a Grand Prix horse’. Luckily she was!”

Astoria had two more foals for Holstein, in 2012 and 2013, by the Oldenburg stallion Fürstenball. Lucy Miller is competing the 2012 gelding Furstendorf at Elementary level, while Nessa Toher Shannon is also at the same level with the 2013 Irish Sport Horse-registered Furst Fendi.

Furst Fendi won the Preliminary category two final at the 2018 Dressage Ireland National Championships, and Holstein became National Champion aboard Sambuca, making it two home-bred wins on the same day.

Holstein would have liked to keep Sambuca’s siblings. “I sold the younger ones to buy a lorry for Sambuca. She got a fright in the trailer one day. A lorry went right up behind her and blew the horn. She got a huge fright.

“She then got worse and worse in the trailer, got more and more frightened and it was dangerous so I had to buy a lorry. I got a nice five-horse lorry, she feels safe in that, she has three partitions to herself.

“She’s no good to me if I can’t bring her anywhere. So I had to sell the other two to buy that, even though I didn’t want to sell them.”

Astoria, who has two more foals registered on the IHR database for Donegal breeder Anthony McFarland, a good friend of Holstein’s, is out of the Wendepunkt mare Weishe, who bred multiple good performers.

Among them is Yvette Truesdale’s 1998 and 2002 World Equestrian Games mount Accolade.

Asked why she decided to sell the mare, Holstein said: “I didn’t breed to be a breeder, it was kind of a fun thing. I was away a lot and was thinking where am I going to put them and I will be older when they are old enough to be ridden, so the McFarlands are good friends of mine and they have bred a few from her now.”

Future in breeding

Sambuca has well and truly reignited Holstein’s career at the very top level of dressage. Before being part of the Irish team who secured Olympic qualification at last year’s Europeans, Sambuca was national champion at every level in Ireland and Holstein won a record-breaking 13th national champion title after winning the Grand Prix in 2019.

While all Holstein’s focus remains on getting to her fourth Olympic Games in Tokyo, now taking place one year later than planned in 2021, she has thought about breeding Sambuca in the future.

“I have made a few enquiries about it, but haven’t done anything properly yet. Someone said don’t do it in the middle of the season; so I said I would get Tokyo out of the way and now Tokyo is another year away.

“All my focus was just on Tokyo,” she said, adding that postponement was expected in the current circumstances. “It is disappointing because everything was planned for this year, but it will work to my advantage I think. She is only 11 and she hasn’t hit her peak yet; there are still a few mistakes happening in tests. There is a lot more in her and I am trying to tap into so we can only get better.

“It’s good for Irish dressage to have a horse that is bred in Ireland. It’s a long road, it seems a long way away when they are one and two and three, but it shows how talented she is.”

That is for sure. Irish dressage is on the rise.