Kate Withers
Grace Perkins is working day and night with the ponies on her family’s Rosedale property in readiness to take her craft to a much bigger arena.
A relative newbie to mounted games, the 15-year-old has enjoyed a rapid rise to the top-level of her sport since taking it up three years ago and is off to compete at the Prince Philip Games in England.
“It’s a lot of dedication to get to the highest level but I really didn’t think I’d get to compete for Australia,” Grace said.
“I mostly got into it for fun because it’s a bit different, but then I started winning competition and thought ‘maybe I’m actually good at this’.”
After less than a year in the sport, Grace was selected on the Victorian junior team for nationals and developed a taste for competition.
Her selection on the Australian team for this year’s Prince Philip Games is the result of an arduous, self-imposed schedule that would make many teenagers quiver.
“I’ve put more time into it over the years,” she said.
“To be selected for the squad I was getting up four o’clock every morning, riding in the dark with a head torch on doing flat work, coming home after school and doing games and jumping at night.”
Grace said a common misconception about equestrian sports was that they were genteel or less physically demanding than other sports.
“People have that perception that horse riding isn’t a sport, but really it’s harder than the majority of other sports,” she said.
“There’s lots of hand-eye coordination, you’ve got to be quite fast, you jump on and off the horses, remount, moving objects from drum to drum or flag to flag.
“It’s quite physically demanding. I’m always at the physio … I’ve had lots of injuries, especially in mounted games because the jumping on an off you’re straining your knees and ankles.”
Grace also trains her own ponies – Graham and Watt – but competes on borrowed ponies for some events and will do so again at the Prince Philip Games.
She also has a show jumping horse named Billy and said working with animals, especially ones that aren’t her own, was another facet of the sport that made it challenging.
“You don’t know what kind of horse you’re going to get,” she said.
“You have to work with a horse, with an animal that has a mind of its own. If it decides it’s going one direction, it’s 10 times stronger than you are.
“If it decides it’s going one direction then you’re going that way. Or it could decide it doesn’t want you on its back anymore and just dump you.”
Despite the unknown of riding on a borrowed pony, Grace has form working with less-than-perfect animals and relishes the challenge they present.
“I got my first horse from the breakers, so he had only just been broken in and I’ve trained him to jump, I’ve trained him to do games with help from my coaches and they’ve helped me build him up to the games pony he is,” she said.
“I got a new one last year and she was from the sales, so they don’t have to be these well-bred horses, they can be from the sales or they can be freebies.”
“The horses are trained five days a week and I normally compete both days on the weekend, so it’s pretty much seven days a week but I’ll give anything a crack.”
