Raymi Rides Thoroughbreds with a Famous Jockey

On Tuesday June 22nd, I toured Halton Place stables and rode horses with retired jockey, Eurico Rosa da Silva. The property is very luxurious and there are young and old horses here and some are getting ready for competition while others are winding down and relaxing in comfort. It’s a pretty swank place and the horse stalls are extra roomy.

Eurico made everything fantastic for us. You can read about Eurico Rosa da Silva on Canadian Thoroughbred magazine which focuses on his horseracing career but he’s also frequently discussed in HorseSport magazine. where they detail the lives and health of the horses after they finish at the track and go on to have careers in dressage or as hunter jumpers. The man is a skilled equestrian who has won all the biggest horse races in Canada including the Queens Plate, a couple of times. He’s even met The Queen. Over the last seventeen years he worked his way up the rankings at Woodbine Racetrack, a career detailed in his autobiography, Riding for Freedom.

Now that he’s retired from horseracing at age 45, Eurico helps Canadians sharpen their brains. He calls his business Mind Coaching and he usually points to his own head when he says the name. He’s a life coach who focuses on the brain and on helping high-powered athletes and executives build mental acuity. As you can imagine, jockeys must depend on their dexterity and quick wits to stay alive. For many years, Eurico needed to stay sharp just to keep safe. He told us all about his accident in Macao, the worst of his career, when he was airlifted to a hospital in Hong Kong.

Eurico has led an active life and seen things, both good and bad, and he can share many of these experiences with his clients and friends. He doesn’t normally give riding lessons, but he’s kind and generous with his time. He told me so many things about himself and about how to read animals, and what a horse expects from someone in the saddle holding the reins.

Eurico Rosa Da Silva shares Life Lessons on Horseback

Eurico worked with me and the horses and so he was pretty busy, multitasking. Right from the beginning, he showed me how to balance, and how to coordinate myself and how to read Athena’s emotions. He taught me self-assurance and this combined with the experience of riding horses is very therapeutic muscle stimulation. Eurico installed a carefully planned lesson, he taught poise, posture, and strength and, most importantly, he instilled in me a desire to improve what he identified as my natural riding ability.

Halton Place is the home of Louise Masek and Look Ahead Sport Horses. We rode two of her best mounts and these sturdy steeds were named Raven and Athena. You can see Louise has her hand on Raven’s halter above. She’s in the early stages of pregnancy with a foal from Charlie who is Louise’s Hanoverian stallion, and her pride and joy. You can see Charlie in the featured image of this blog post. That’s his head poking through the window. Anyway I rode a horse named Athena and you can see me brushing her. She’s a five year old Dutch warmblood who’s very clever and willing.

Today was Eurico’s first time meeting Athena, but he already knew Raven as she was a racehorse at Woodbine during his time there, although he never said whether of not he’d ever ridden her in a race. Athena was clearly eager to follow Eurico, and she was very patient with us neophytes clambering all over her body and hugging her head for selfies.

Eurico showed me how to hold the reins and relax and breath. He showed me the signals needed to direct a horse’s movements. Both Athena and Raven were lively and curious and seemed happiest in the huge arena where there are bits of fence which are jumps. Overhead in the beams are hundreds of barn swallows which make incredible music that is most likely a chorus of complaints at our presence in their nesting grounds.

Horses show us how to communicate. They don’t speak English, but they can read our body language and they understand our tone of voice. When Athena’s ears are forward, she is listening and attentive. Her swishing tail tells us she’s happy. It feels good to positively affect and be affected by an animal that’s larger than me and possibly smarter.