From The Aiken Horse
December-January 2021-2022
By Pam Gleason
When the Thoroughbred mare Hocus Pocus trotted down the centerline of the dressage arena at the Thoroughbred Incentive Program Championship Show at Stable View this October, she had the look of a winner. Her black coat gleamed in the sunshine and she carried herself calmly with flowing gaits and a confident manner. Competing at First Level, she seemed so professional that you would never have known that this was just her second show. She won her class and her division, coming home with the T.I.P. First Level championship.
“When they added up the points and I saw that we had won the championship, I cried,” said Merideth Leonard, her owner and rider. “It was just so amazing to me that Hocus had come so far.”
The Jockey Club’s Thoroughbred Incentive Program was created to encourage the repurposing of retired racehorses. Any registered Thoroughbred is eligible to earn points in different disciplines for year end awards. The championship show, which came to Aiken this year, is open to any horse that has gone to a T.I.P. sanctioned show during the season.
While many horses overcame obstacles to get to the championships, Hocus Pocus had an especially arduous journey. She had been a racehorse, and then a polo pony. And then she was in a terrible trailer accident that killed her owner and three of her stablemates, leaving her with broken bones, damaged eyes and an unsteady gait.
“She should have died,” said Merideth. “She should never have been able to be a performance horse again. Not only that, she should have never wanted to get on a trailer ever again. But she has so much heart, she just puts it all out of her mind.”
Hocus Pocus, registered name Home on Heels, was foaled in Louisiana in February, 2007. She is a granddaughter of Gone West who was an influential sire known for his dark coat and excellent conformation. On her dam’s side, she is descended from Southern Halo, who spent most of his stud career in Argentina where he was a top sire of racehorses, and, not coincidentally, of polo ponies as well.
If her racing owners had high hopes for her, they were disappointed. Hocus raced four times in 2009 between May and September and never got closer than sixth, never earning even a dollar. She soon ended up at an auction where she was purchased by the polo pony trainers Joe and Kelly Neave. They started her for polo and when she was playing as a green horse, they offered her for sale. That was when Merideth first met her.
Merideth grew up in the Chicago area where she was originally a dressage rider, but had transitioned to working in polo. In 2011, she was working as a polo groom for the Aiken player Barb Uskup, when Barb took the beautiful black mare on trial for a week at her Meadow Hill Farm.
“I remember that I rode her out with the sets,” Merideth said. “When I asked her to canter, I just started giggling. She felt so much like a dressage horse.”
Barb decided not to buy Hocus, and so she went back to the Neaves and was later purchased by the up-and-coming young professional Will Tankard, who was based in Aiken.
“She had only played low goal polo when we got her, so she was transitioned slowly into Will’s string,” said Samira Waernlund, who was Will’s partner. In a few years, she was playing 16 goal polo in Florida and Kentucky. “She was very fast and she could run. She wasn’t Will’s best horse, but she was steady and solid and you could always rely on her to get a play done.”
Merideth, who was good friends with Will and Samira, often helped them out, sometimes rode Hocusm and always commented on how she would make a good dressage horse. Samira agreed. “She played polo because that is what she was trained to do, but I always thought she was meant for something a little bit more artistic.”
In the summer of 2015, Will was playing in Kentucky. He had been hired to play at the Darlington Polo Club in Pennsylvania, and from there was scheduled to travel to Massachusetts. Will was driving his truck and trailer through Ohio while Samira followed along in her car when Will suffered a devastating and fatal crash. There were ten horses in the trailer. Three of them died, while the remaining seven were severely injured, Hocus Pocus among them.
In the aftermath of the accident, the surviving horses were cared for in Ohio until they were well enough to be transported back to Aiken. Then they went to live at Meadow Hill Farm where Cissie Snow, Will’s mother, was the manager. Samira and Cissie devoted themselves to caring for and rehabilitating the injured horses.
“Hocus wasn’t the worst off, but she was bad,” said Samira. She needed to have surgery at the University of Georgia to repair a broken splint bone. (They performed the operation for free.) She also had a cracked sacrum and injuries to her hips and head, as well as damage to her eyes that affected her sight. With these kinds of injuries, it seemed unlikely that she would ever play polo again.
Merideth had been helping to care for Will’s horses, and Samira and Cissie knew that she had a connection to the mare. It seemed as though the two belonged together.
“How could we not give her the horse?” asked Cissie. Merideth took her, knowing that her injuries might mean that she could never be ridden again. But she wanted to try to rehabilitate her.
Free in the paddock, Hocus didn’t look exactly lame, but she was not right and she did not seem rideable. Merideth enlisted the help of the veterinarian Keelin Redmond who came out for regular chiropractic adjustments. Then Merideth started ponying her and riding her at a walk. It took months to do more than that. “When I first started trotting her, she felt like drunken sailor, like a 2-year-old that has never been ridden. She couldn’t hold a lead at the canter,” she said.
Progress was slow, and often followed by regression. Merideth sometimes wondered if she was doing the right thing. “When I first started trying to rehab her, I was doing it for the grieving memory of my friend,” she said. “But I sometimes wondered if it was fair to her. She couldn’t talk to me; she couldn’t tell me. I got dejected thinking about it. It weighed on me.”
But then, about 15 months after the accident, Hocus seemed to turn a corner. She started to feel stronger and a spring returned to her step. Merideth began to school her more seriously in dressage. Eventually, she took her to a few clinics, and then enlisted the help of her friend, the local professional Pippa Moon, who helped smooth out some training issues. When the New Vocations All Thoroughbred Show came to Highfields in September, 2021 Merideth entered on a whim. It was Hocus Pocus’s first time in front of a judge and the first time Merideth had shown in over a decade. But they scored well, won their class, and ended up the dressage champion.
“Someone told me that we were qualified to go in the T.I.P. Championships the next month, so I decided to do that, too,” said Merideth. She explained that she had never shown Hocus before that mostly for logistical reasons. “But I’m also a perfectionist,” she said. “And for a long time, I think I was just really protective of her.”
“I love her,” she continued. “She’s just a joy to ride, and she loves what she’s doing. She’s so light and sensitive and smart. You teach her something and she just does it; she doesn’t forget. There are two things that stand out to me when I think about her. One is how versatile Thoroughbreds can be. The other is how much heart she has. If she didn’t have the huge heart that she has, she would never have done any of this for me. It makes me cry all the time when I think of it.”
Samira and Cissie are thrilled to see Hocus succeed in a new career.
“If you had seen her after the accident, you would never have thought she could have done anything again,” said Cissie. “It’s amazing. To me, she has come full circle. My memories of her are of Will playing her. She was always the most gorgeous mare on the field, and she’s back to that. To have her come from where she was to the way she is today is a miracle
Photo credit:
Elizabeth Hedley
Christine Quinn Photography
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