THE retirement of Judy Reynolds’ Irish record-holding dressage horse Vancouver K yielded thousands of messages from dressage fans around the world on Wednesday.

Reynolds made the decision to retire the Jazz gelding, fondly known as JP, at the age of 19, just short of a potential shot at a second Olympic Games. “It has been very humbling to read the messages, people think an awful lot of us, maybe giving us more credit more than deserve. It has been lovely,” Reynolds told The Irish Field on Thursday evening.

The combination hold all three Irish records in the Grand Prix, Grand Prix Special and Freestyle to Music, and have reignited the sport of dressage nationally.

They were the first Irish combination to ever qualify for an Olympic final at Rio in 2016, represented Ireland at the 2014 and 2018 World Equestrian Games and qualified for three World Cup finals, finishing fourth in Omaha in 2017.

Perhaps their best moment came in 2019 at the FEI European Championships when they secured team qualification for the Tokyo Olympic Games, for the first time in Irish history, before going on to smash two further records and finish fifth individually.

Vancouver K also scored international wins at Achleiten and Fritzens-Schindlhof in Austria, Dortmund in Germany, and at Pennsylvania and New York in the USA.

Retirement

Explaining the decision to retire JP, Judy said: “It was really hard because he desperately still wants to work. You pick up the reins, or you ask him canter and he is squealing and bucking because he really still enjoys it.

“But it is no secret he was injured in the past, and we deliberately took last year off and made it very easy for him with the hope of still picking it up this year for the Olympic Games. When we did that, there was a couple of niggles; the brain wanted to do it but time has caught up on the body. So it was just the fairest thing to do, he gives so much, and I don’t want to show him in any less light than deserves.”

It was a tough decision for Judy and her husband, Patrick Heavey, to make. “It was a very difficult decision to make and there was a lot of emotions. But once we made the decision, I was okay with it, and we knew it is the right thing to do. We felt happy about it then, once we had told the people that needed to know,” Judy added.

Asked to pick her proudest moment of their long career together, she said: “It has to be Rotterdam [the 2019 FEI European Championships]. That whole week was amazing.”

It is well documented that JP was a handful in his younger days and had many doubters, but the pair proved that with “perseverance and hard work, it just shows that you can do”.

Tokyo

Judy has other talents in her German stable, most notably the gelding Leroy Naeldeborg, but Tokyo comes too soon for the combination.

“Leeroy is a good horse, he is a talented horse, but the break (due to Covid-19) wasn’t to our advantage last year. He doesn’t have a lot of experience and trying to fit that experience into a short space of time won’t work. We are not going to push him to do it when he is just not quite ready but I am working on Paris already!”

Judy thanked her parents, and JP’s owners, Kathleen and Joe Reynolds, as well as JP’s long-time groom Elizabeth Dudman, trainer Johann Hinnemann and all those who helped the pair scale the heights of international dressage.