Lucy Davis at WEF

By Paula Parisi March 8, 2012

Lucy Davis is ready to jump into the big leagues. After spending the summer competing in Europe, with coaches Markus and Meredith Michaels-Beerbaum, the 19-year-old from Los Angeles is currently competing at the Winter Equestrian Festival in Wellington, FL, where she plans to participate in the 2012 Summer Olympic Games show jumping selection trials on Nemo 119.

The duo were the top-placed California pair in WEF’s $80,000 Adequan CSI 2* Grand Prix on Feb. 4, coming in 12th in a field of 81 (which had to have been some kind of record for grand prix starts). She bested more experienced West Coast compatriots―including Ashlee Bond, Kirsten Coe and Chris Pratt― and outperformed some of the top international riders in the world,  placing only two slots behind her coach, Michaels-Beerbaum (herself a 2008 Olympic contender, riding for Germany).

The course designer, Bob Ellis, will also be setting the jumps at the 2012 Olympics. “It was a tough course,” Davis says. “The general consensus was he did a good job. It was big, but not scary, and challenging in that it was very technical. He did a good job of weeding out who should be clearing and who shouldn’t.”

Davis wound up the fastest four-faulter, with an unlucky rail down in the middle of a triple. “Considering how rusty I was, I was very, very happy that it wasn’t a disaster. Having been at school, I hadn’t shown since November. I did a grand prix on Thursday, my first day at WEF, and it was shocking for me to see how out of practice I was. But Nemo was so focused, so we thought we’d give it a try in the big class on Saturday night, and he was great.”

It’s Davis’ first time competing at the WEF circuit, and she received a warm welcome, honored on Jan. 27 with the United States Equestrian Team Foundation’s 2012 Lionel Guerrand-Hermes Trophy, presented each year to an outstanding young rider who exemplifies sportsmanship and horsemanship in an Olympic discipline.

Prior to the current season, her only WEF drop-in had been to try Nemo two years ago, when she purchased the Holsteiner gelding from Britain’s Nick Skelton, who happened to be the winner of the $80,000 Adequan Grand Prix.
Since then, Davis and Nemo, now 13, have built a solid partnership (his occasional bouts of bucking on entering the arena notwithstanding). The 2011’s HITS season in Thermal, CA, was a star turn for Davis, who won four consecutive grand prix, including the $200,000 Grand Prix of the Desert on Nemo.

Still, she is sanguine about their chance of making the U.S. Olympic team. “I want to get more experience,” Davis says of the trials and WEF, which offers more than $6 million in prize money over 12 weeks of competition through April 1. “Last year, HITS was about as great as I could want it to be, so changing venues and competing against new riders was very appealing.”

As a freshman at Stanford University, it’s a challenge to juggle her academic workload with her high performance sports ambitions. The trials fall the week of winter finals. “I’m getting all my papers and stuff done before hand,” she notes. Though Davis has yet to declare a major, she’s considering international relations, “but that’s still up in the air.” Soaring on the wings of Nemo 119, so is she!

For complete results for the $81,000 Adequan Grand Prix CSI-2*, click here.

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