‘It’s an addiction’
WHEN On Cue won the new US five-star in Maryland last October, the elation felt by rider Boyd Martin was matched by that coursing through a mother and daughter in a small Yorkshire village some 3,500 miles away.
The connection may not be obvious, but On Cue is British-bred, a third generation from the “On” breeding programme run by Alyse Clancey and her daughter Jolyse (now Bell-Syer).
As we munch a home-made chocolate cake in Alyse’s warm kitchen, our conversation flits across generations. The story starts in the 1980s, when Alyse bought a “hot” unbroken three-year-old mare called Augermist, by the Hanoverian Augermann out of the thoroughbred Gay Emma, by St Elmo.
“At one of her first dressage outings, she spent the whole time bucking and broncing and the judge wrote that she’d obviously been stung by a wasp. She also kicked someone’s car that day,” remembers Alyse. “She was bought to do dressage because her
