I know almost nobody who will look back at ‘08 as a year as one which they will have fond memories for with the one exception of our new president being elected. Even that fantastic event was made a little bitter sweet by losses of gay rights in California and a defeat in my home state of Florida which would have furthered our cause.
Pretty much everything else has sucked- so many jobs lossed by friends, people losing their homes and becoming bankrupt, and loved ones falling ill and dying. I feel very lucky that my own family is healthy and thriving, and yes, I know that I should be grateful for all the wonderful miracles in my life. And truly I am, but somehow I still feel the need to vent a bit about how fucked up last year was in so many ways.
Probably the worst thing in my personal life was finding out that someone I regarded as family turned out to be a huge con-artist who took Robert and myself as well as many others for millions of dollars, and I am now embroiled in a law suit which, even though I am certain to win, may never benefit from since the asshole is probably not collectable.
My friend, Ron, who was also a friend of his and “investor”, is preparing to seek the only justice any of us might gain from all this by producing a documentary about the entire “soap opera”. I hope to have a starring role!
So with great hopes for a new year as brilliant as this last one was tarnished, I wish everyone great health , hapiness and prosperity in 2009.

I just read an article in the Chronicle which included a remark by British 3-day Olympian, Lucinda Green, regarding the cross-country jumping phase. She said, “The deep spot is from where those horrific rotational falls have taken so many people’s lives. I’m sure people are even more frightened of that deep spot than in my day. All these remarks go ’round which creates an atmosphere where you’re expected to see a spot. But why? That’s the horse’s job. It’s his legs.”
Sorry, Lucinda, but that’s CRAP!
First of all, if your horses were all so careful as to really be watching out for their legs, why do you lather them up with so much vaseline? I dare say that the majority of horses as careful as you say would never even consider jumping the first fence on cross-country with riders with no eye for a distance. They would be way to clever or simply afraid of being put in positions dangerous to themselves, no less their riders.
So here’s what I say. You want to risk your lives? That’s your choice. But you want to take a poor, dumb animal along for the ride? Then learn to see a distance or join me in the dressage arena where the worst we generally get is embarrassed!

As you all probably know, I had surgery on my back in the end of October, am really still convelessing and have only partial feeling in my right leg from the knee down. Nerves are very strange and complex things, I’ve come to learn. Anyway, I am much better now, but for the first three weeks after my operation I was on a lot of strong medications.

Which brings me to the day, a couple of weeks after surgery, when I was laying on my couch in a definite haze when the phone rang. In my limited state of consciousness I answered, “Hallo” and heard a faint voice say, “Hiah” to which I naturally replied with another, “Hiah” after which I heard, “No, Robert. It is Haya.”

Even in my stupor, I realised what I had just said to the Royal Princess of Jourdan who also happens to be married to the king of Dubai. So now I froze while trying to assess the damage at the same time as figuring out how to proceed with this conversation. Should it be, “Pardon me, Your Royal Highness” or “I am very sorry, Princess Haya?”

Luckily, she and I go way back to the mid-eighties when we were both competing on the European show circuit, she in jumpers and I in dressage. We would meet and joke around in the elevators on our way back from the shows and she was so amazingly down to earth that it was very easy to feel like she was just another cool “girl.” So after much deliberation, my final answer was, “How’s it goin?”

Princess Haya was just as down to earth as she had been 20 years earlier and we laughed and reminisced over old times and discussed the difficult things  going on in the dressage world, most recent of which was her asking the entire Dressage Committee to step down. And then came the big question- Would I consider sitting on a temporary Dressage Task Force to keep things moving forward in the sport until the next D.C. could be elected?

Now, I had gone off all committees a long time ago and  had just retired from my business as well on October 1st. I had also been extremely happy with my new found freedom and time to spend on non-horsey activities. And here I was again, high on painkillers and at the veritable precipice of saying “yes” to yet another stressful appointment, one I definitely never believed I would ever even need to consider. So I asked the Princess if I could think about it over night and, after our conversation lasted another 10 minutes, agreed to go on the Task Force. I still blame it all on Vicodin!

I did have the presence of mind to say that I would only consider such a job if I would be allowed to make it my mission to help create a new and totally democratic, transparent process by which the next Dressage Committee (and hopefully all F.E.I. committees) would be nominated and elected.

And Her Royal Highness agreed, so here I am, on my way to Frankfurt on January 10th for our first official meeting. The good news is that, unlike the last group, which consisted of 6 people who, though well respected and experienced, were all judges other than one active rider, this one is made up of one person from each major stakeholder- one judge, a rider, one trainer (me), a Chef d’Equip, one organiser and a major horse owner. This gives us the diversity of views necessary for the best interest of the sport.

And as soon as we have the selection process in order to correctly form the next Dressage Committee, it will be my greatest pleasure to fire myself!

I feel very lucky that my website, Doversworld.com, is being designed by one of the very best there is anywhere. Jory Stiefel (his last name means “Boot” in German. I love it!) has designed and developed some of the most successful wbsites in the world including Gawker.com, Defamer.com, Gizmodo.com, Jezebel.com, Wonkette.com and others. In other words, this young guy has been at the heart of creating many of the top sites out there today and now he’s doing mine.

And when I tell you that Dover’s World is going to be amazing, that’s an understatement! Jory is taking all my dreams for this site and using his magic to make them a reality. I told him I wanted it to not just have state of the art software to enable me to teach a lesson in real-time anywhere in the world as well as give video critiques to those wishing them, but also to deal with the other parts of my life — and by that I mean a no holes barred look at everything and everyone I am connected to or interested in, plus trips I am taking with Robert and my best friends which I plan to bring to you with video reports from everywhere in a spot I’ll call, “Out Around The World.”

I want to highlight people in the gay community who are my heroes in my, “Out For Good” and will also be linking my site to my favourite charities like the Equestrian Aid Foundation, Well Wish International, Tabasamu, and others.

So you can see that Jory has been given a very large undertaking when he agreed to take on my account but if anyone can deliver on all this, he can! To go to Jory’s website and learn more about him and his work, go to stiefeldigital.com.

My retirement has really gone well, for the most part.  Robert and I got a beautiful condo down in South Miami Beach, overlooking the ocean and we spend our weekends enjoying going to Lincoln Road with all its great shops and restaurants and everything else that is so fun down there. Great beaches, beautiful people (and by that I mean LOTS OF HOT GUYS!), and waking up to looking out at the gorgeous Atlantic.

I still have my 2 “hobby horses” which I haven’t been able to ride since my back surgery 2 months ago, so I started helping my ex-student, Suzanne Lapporte, with her 2 horses in return for having lessons with me on mine. Then Tuny, the owner of the stables, asked if I would just help her a bit with her Grand Prix horse, Wild One, and I said sure. I mean, I was there anyway, right? And while sitting there I was seeing another friend, Liz, having a lot of problems with her stallion, which just kept “getting to me” until I finally said, “Why don’t you try such and such”, and then I ended up helping Liz too.

So finally Robert said, “you know that when your ‘real students’ get down here and hear you are teaching and they are not welcome, they are going to be hurt.” Which brings me to “Clinic Wednesdays”. I decided to tell all my friends that I would do one day of teaching per week and they could text me on each Tuesday and let me know if they wanted a slot.

So yesterday I taught my friends from 9am to 3pm and was truly exhausted afterward. That was the first time I had taught like that since last spring, but I did love seeing my friends and their horses.

And so now I will do ONE DAY per week of lessons for my friends. ONLY ONE DAY! You hear me, Robert Dover? ONLY ONE DAY!!!!!

A little over 5 months ago Robert gave me my birthday present; one that I expressly told everyone I did not want- a puppy. I said it again and again- I was not ready! I had, in all honesty, spoken a few times and referred to the thought that I was beginning to consider the possibility of entertaining the notion of perhaps contemplating the idea of just maybe in the future but most definitely not now or anytime in the immediate space and time continuum- getting a dog.

So Robert said he had to run out at 9:30 pm to pick up my present which was ostensibly down the road at our friend’s place, ostensibly to keep it hidden from me and because ostensibly, it had been late arriving due to some manufacturing problem. Hmmm. Anyway, I waited and 10:00pm went by and so did 10:30pm and 11:00pm and by 11:30pm I’m wondering where the hell my boyfriend has gone for this “gift”.

And then it hit me, so I called him and when he picked up I said, ” You got me a dog, didn’t you?” and he said, ” I am driving in the garage right now so come and meet me”. And as I walked out to meet him I said ” I told you I wasn’t ready for a dog and I meant it ( Our last dog had died 5 years ago at the age of 18 and I still wasn’t over it) “. And he said, ” Just shut up and close your eyes and put out yur hands!” So I did while still complaining, saying, ” I can’t believe that you would do this when I expressly told you I was not, in any way shape and form–”  and then I opened my eyes and saw little Simon in my hands and said, ” OK!”

And that was that. Simon is a designer breed called a Schnoodle, which is half Schnauzer and half Poodle and is of the miniature variety. But he obviously got all the genes from the Schnauzer side because everyone think he is a pure bred, so I decided that instead of calling him a Schnoodle I would rename him a “Schnauzel”. Regardless he is adorable and now, at almost 8 months old, he has Robert and I almost perfectly trained.

I have loved and lived with Robert Ross for 20 years and in our 21 year, after all this time, I am truly hoping that we can get married! We’ve been talking about it for a long time and I actually proposed a couple of years ago on a cruise we took with our best friends. And I am sure we would have already tied the knot if a lot of unforeseen circumstances had not all occurred, seemingly simultaneously. You see, we had invested almost all our savings with our “best friend” and have been waiting for what we were promised was to be the “windfall of a lifetime” to manifest. The problem is that it was supposed to happen for the last 2 years and still hasn’t. As you can imagine, this has caused unbelievable stress to us, our relationship which thank God is even stronger than ever, and our friends and family who were caught up in our misfortune.

And so we have been waiting for our ship to finally come in so we could celebrate our love for each other and all our friends, including the one with all our money, with a great party. Well we are still waiting, but my parents are having very big health issues and we are running out of time, and at the same time the battle over our right to marry has now left California as not an option for the moment. We had hoped to have a small wedding in Palm Springs and have my brother, who is a retired Superior Court Judge, officiate. I hope we can do it still, next June, somewhere nice, because Robert and I are no longer going to wait for our money to come in order to celebrate our love for each other. If we have to, we will just make it a smaller celebration that we can afford and hope that someday, our old friend will live up to his promise and make it possible for us to through the biggest, grandest party we could imaging for all our wonderful friends and family.

I have recently been told that our show managers are feeling very stressed by what they feel are unfair rules being applied to them as well as all nations, regardless of the strength of the sport in their respective countries. The costs of putting on FEI recognised competitions, they feel, is extremely prohibitive. while I completely understand their feelings, I believe American show managers need to get together, form an organization which they can bring their collective experience, energy, and talents to, and figure out a way to create a model which raises the bar for all recognised shows.I know that I am going to take considerable heat for saying this but here are my reasons.

Our shows were actually more exciting and had greater prize money in the biggest classes back in the early 80’s. That is a very sad commentary on how the sport has evolved in the U.S.  The early 80’s saw the beginning of the Florida dressage circuit and show managers trying to entice northerners to make a major life change and head south for the winter. They did this by creating high-profile shows with lots of prize money and very fun parties full of pomp and circumstance. And not only did it work but then the show managers found themselves actually competing with each other to make a better show to lure the top riders to. We even had quite a few top Europeans spend full winter seasons, believing they could enjoy the great weather, ride in some very nice shows, and sell their mounts to Americans before returning home with lots of U.S. dollars in their pockets. Everyone had fun and Dressage bloomed until the mid- nineties when things began to change.

Sponsors were still giving money for dressage but show managers, I believe, had learned a formula of running our shows. They figured out that, especially in competitions that were qualifiers for teams, they would get large numbers of our best riders, regardless of whether or not they offered prize money at all. Slowly the bar began to drop and even our top U.S. shows have not increased their prize money; if anything, even they have reduced it. And since it did not require huge amounts of resources to put on shows, we began to see more of them, allowing riders to pick and choose between them and thereby lowering the number of top riders and horses one would see at any given competition. Now we have major CDI’s where there might be no more than 8 or 9 Grand Prix riders in a class, which is very sad for the shows, the sponsors, the vendors, and the spectators.

So I say we have to raise the bar! We need to look at the model already existing for the huntger-jumper industry in which all major competitions have prize money for all top classes. They need to or else the riders would just go elsewhere to find better shows with more money offered. I say that if a show wants to be recognised by the USEF, all FEI classes must have substantial prize money offered. And if they want to hold champioship classes or CDI’s, they will need to have a minimum in all GP classes of $10,000 for 1 star and go up to $25,000 for 3 stars and so on. We need to see more classes like the upcoming Masters Class which will offer $115,000 and we will see a new resuurgence of our sport.

Why you ask am I so sure of that? The top money classes will bring top riders from all around the world to our shows. When top riders come, so come the spectators to watch them, and where great numbers of spectators abound, so come the vendors to sell them their wares. Great numbers of vendors relate to greater sponsorships at shows and this brings more money back to he managers. Look at any great European show, but even better, look at Spruce Meadows. Who would have thought that a competition in Canada could rival even the grandest of European shows in every sense of the word. The key is in the prize money!

Our show managers need to get together and figure out an approach to pool their resources and find one or preferably several new major sponsors like Rolex has been for so long. It is not enough to wish one might come along while our shows remain dismal- we need to mandate that they do something about it if they want to remain sanctioned. I guarantee you that, just like many of the same managers find a way to sponsor their hunter-jumper classes, they will find a way to do the same for dressage.