Totilas | Totilas

چهار نعل: Totilas | Totilas

Among the dressage horses of history, none has turned the arena into a dream like Totilas; a black, gleaming KWPN stallion who, with every dance-like step,…

Totilas, whose registered name was “Moorlands Totilas” and whose pet name was “Toto,” was born on 23 May 2000 in the Netherlands; a black stallion sired by Gribaldi, the Trakehner stallion, and out of Lominka, a KWPN mare who was herself a daughter of Glendale, from the lineage of the famous show-jumping horse Nimmerdor. He was raised in the Visser family’s stable, by Kees and Tosca Visser at Moorland Stables, and from his earliest years attracted attention with a stature of about 175 centimeters and a dramatic presence.

From 2009, his partnership with Dutch rider Edward Gal repeatedly broke world dressage records one after another. At the European Championship in Windsor, the pair won team gold and individual freestyle gold. That same year, at Olympia in London, Totilas, at only nine years old, set the freestyle world record with a score of 92.30 percent; a figure that remained the benchmark of excellence in the discipline for years.

The year 2010 was a season of relentless ascent for Totilas and Gal. They repeatedly broke world records in the Grand Prix, Special and Freestyle, and American media referred to them as the “rock stars of the equestrian world.” The climax of this run came at the FEI World Equestrian Games in Lexington, Kentucky, where before the eyes of 25,000 spectators, ten-year-old Totilas and Gal took all three dressage gold medals—team, Grand Prix Special and Freestyle with a score of 91.80 percent—and became the first horse-and-rider pair in history to win all three dressage golds of a WEG in one go.

Only a few weeks after this victory, in October 2010, the Visser family sold Totilas to German entrepreneur and breeder Paul Schockemöhle. Rumors had pushed the sale price as high as 15 million euros, but court documents revealed years later during the legal dispute between Schockemöhle and Visser confirmed the actual figure at 9.5 million euros; still the highest amount ever paid for a dressage horse up to that time. The sale angered the Dutch equestrian community, as many saw it as the loss of a national treasure.

In the next stage of his career, Totilas competed under the German flag with a young rider named Matthias Alexander Rath. The pair won team silver at the European Championship in Rotterdam in 2011 and team bronze at the European Championship in Aachen in 2015, though they never returned to the legendary heights of the Gal era and were accompanied by a struggle with injuries and inconsistent form. In August 2015, Totilas retired from professional competition because of chronic osteitis in one of his hind legs.

Totilas’ retirement years were spent at Gestüt Schafhof in Kronberg, Germany, where he became one of the most in-demand dressage breeding stallions and left behind more than 400 registered foals, including approved and renowned stallions such as Glock's Toto Jr, Total US and Trafalgar, who themselves reached Grand Prix level. Totilas died on 14 December 2020, at the age of twenty, from complications of colic.

In the view of specialized dressage media and the International Federation for Equestrian Sports’s own reviews, Totilas is still considered the most influential and most-watched dressage horse of the twenty-first century; a horse that brought this sport to a general and international audience and forever engraved a dreamlike image of human-horse harmony in memory.

افتخارات

مشاهده در وب‌سایت اصلی