The Premier Magazine for Jumping, Dressage, Hunter, and Eventing Sires

Featured Foundation Sire:Caprimondby Christopher Hector

Warmblood Stallions of North America

—Warmblood Stallions of North America 2013,originally published in The Making of the Modern Warmblood

2 This article originally appeared in Warmblood Stallions of North America’s 2013 issue

So often a stallion makes a stud. In this case, it’s Klosterhof Medingen, and the stallion is Caprimond. Medingen is one of the cutting-edge breeding farms, but it is a business that has been built on the knowledge and energy of two men: Eugen Wahler and his son, Burkhard. But this stud is no plaything of the fabulously wealthy; it is the product of vision, hard work and an uncanny eye for a horse.

Getting Burkhard Wahler to stop the half-dozen things he is doing simultaneously, and sit down in front of a recording device, is a fairly major challenge, but I achieved it in February 2007. As you can see, once Mr Wahler starts, he is a born storyteller…

“My father started after the Second World War, in 1950, he started to breed Trakehner horses. After the War he had no money—nothing—but he rented a farm.

“He met Kurt Krebs, Schimmelhof, a very fa-mous private breeder from East Prussia. When he came to West Germany after the war, he had no place for his mares. My father had a stable but no mares. ‘We can make a partnership,’ they decided. My father was to take care of the mares, and then foal for foal one season after another, one year you, one year me.

“That’s how they started to breed and it was with two very famous lines. One was the line from Donau—it goes back to

Trakehnen—the other was the P-line1. My Prätorius who won the German three-day-event championship in 1986 was from this line. That goes back to Peraea, that’s also back to Trakehnen. They were both very famous bloodlines.

“So we started to breed with them. At the beginning of the sixties, Mr Krebs moved to his own place. My father had the offspring and developed his own breeding program. In 1960, we moved to this farm, Klosterhof, and in 1965 my father sold his knitting compa-ny, and he started to do what he’d always wanted to do: just breeding horses.

“In 1967 he started the stallion tests, at first just for Trakehner horses, then testing all different breeds. In 1972, we started to organize the Trakehner auc-tions. After we had run the auctions for two years, and everything was going well, you know how associations are, they said, ‘oh that’s super Mr Wahler, but you make money with it, so we make the auction for ourselves.’ They ran the auction for ten years, and in 1982, the year I took over the farm, they asked us whether we

wanted to run the auction again.

“We said, yes, but our risk, our money and nobody from the asso-ciation has any say. It took some years to build the auction up again

1 Editor’s note: this is one of the three great P-lines of Trakehnen. Pearea, her half sister Pelargonie and of course Polarfahrt founded great families, still around today.

Featured Foundation Sire

by Christopher HectorCaprimond

Caprimond at age 25.

Born: 1985 Height: 167 cm Breeder: Jürgen Hanke, HamelnLicensed for :Trakehner, Hanover, Oldenburg, Baden-Wüttemberg, Bavaria, Hesse, Saxony-Anhalt, Rhineland, Wesphalia, Sweden, France and Switzerland

This article is reprinted with kind permission of the author, Christopher Hector, from his 2010 book, The Making of the

Modern Warmblood, from Gotthard to Gribaldi.

3www.WarmbloodStallionsNA.com • Online Stallion, Breeder, and Trainer Listings

but we were very very successful. We had auctions very close to Frankfurt Airport [Kranichstein], which was very good for people flying in from America.

“Then the contract with the riding club where we held the auction finished, in 1989, and we decided to build our own auction hall. So from 1990, we held the Trakehner auctions here on our farm. In 1982 we had an average price of 15,000 German marks, now in eu-ros, 7,500. It grew every year and in 2001, we had our last auction, with an average price of over €50,000.”

Just as the horse selling business was growing big-ger every year, so too the private stallion business was about to explode:

“At first we mainly used the stallions here over our own mares, but then I decided we should have a real stud farm, and we put that idea into place with Caprimond.

“We bought Caprimond at Neumünster, at the Trakehner stallion approval. He was the reserve cham-pion stallion. Every special horse has his own story, and Caprimond has his.

“There was a picture in the catalogue, and the picture looked very nice, and the pedigree was very good for dressage; also the mother line was good. If you want a good stallion, it is important he comes from a good mother line, it makes his breeding much more safe, so that he is not making big ones and little ones so everything is mixed up. A really good sire has to have a very good mother line.

“With Caprimond, everything was perfect. When I went to bed every night, I took the catalogue, and I was looking again. Four or five days before Neumün-ster, I put a big circle around his number, and said, if this horse is like he is in the catalogue, then we will buy him—photos don’t always tell the truth. But when we went to Neumün-ster, he looked very nice. He was a fantastic type.

“He went reserve champion, then we bought him, then he won the stallion test at Adelheidsdorf. We paid about €40,000. For today that is nothing, but twenty years ago, it was a lot of money. Especially because he was very small; he was only 1.60,2 and that is small. But we were sure he was the right horse; we had that feeling. You can be wrong, but we got a good feeling so we bought him.

“Then he won the stallion test, and at the Bundeschampionate he was second. He got an 8.925, and the champion got an 8.93 or something! I rode him there.

“When he was seven he went Prix St Georges. When he was eight or nine, he went to his first Grand Prix. He was very successful.”

And how! Back in 1999, the Hanoverian Verband decided to publish its own Stallion Year Book, ranking stallions according to

2 15.3 hands, although he is listed elsewhere as 16.1 ½ hands.

dressage ability, jumping ability, and type—and on top of the list for type was Caprimond. Eleven years later, the 2010 Hanoverian Year Book once again lists the top stallions by type, and there still at the top of the rankings is Caprimond with a breeding value of 175—12 points clear of the horse in second place, Wolkentanz II!

And to underscore the point, his son Hohenstein is fourth on the same rankings. The tables are turned in the Hanoverian stallion dressage rankings, where Hohenstein ranks first, while his sire ranks fourth.

Caprimond’s sire, Karon, initially stood at the Hämelschenburg stud farm. He covered in Oldenburg in 1989 and 1990, spreading his influence before he ceased breeding following a fractured pelvis.

In The Trakehner, by Dr Eberhard von Velsen-Zerweck and Er-hard Schulte, the authors remark that out of the 300 stallions at stud at the time of writing (1981), “three sires in particular stand out as having had the greatest influence on the breed; they are Impuls, Pregel and Maharadscha, the last-named through his son Flaneur in particular.” Karon combined the influence of two of these stallions, Maharadscha and Impuls. continued

Caprimond in front of HIS statue

4 This article originally appeared in Warmblood Stallions of North America’s 2013 issue

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T

Caprimond

Karon (1981,

Trakehner)

Capri VI (1980,

Trakehner)

{

{Coeur-As

(1975, Trakehner)

Mackensen (1976,

Trakehner)

Karben (1974,

Trakehner)

Arogno (1976,

Trakehner){

{

{

{

Arcticonius xx (1968)

Flaneur I (1965, Trakehner)

Kaprice II (1965, Trakehner)

Ibikus (1967, Trakehner)

Maharani II (1969,

Trakehner)

Patron (1966, Trakehner)

Cora (1965, Trakehner)

Herzbube (1964, Trakehner)

{ Flocke IV (1959)

Maharadscha (1957)

{ Arctic Gail (1960)

Apollonius(1953)

{ Isolda (1959)

Hertilas (1963)

{Kassandra (1947)

Impuls (1953)

{ Palatka (1955)

Tranzyt (1959)

{ Marquise (1963)

Flaneur (1965)

{ Herbstgold (1957)

Gunnar (1960)

{Conny (1960)

Loretto (1957)

Arogno is by the Maharadscha stallion, Flaneur, foaled in 1965, and an important representative of the Arab stallion, Fetysz ox, one of three [notably influential] Arabians introduced to the breed in the early 1930s. Impuls, the sire of Karon’s grand-dam, Kaprice II, was foaled in 1953 and founded a flourishing sire line and produced over 100 registered broodmares and numerous successful competition

horses. Impuls represents the dominant line of East Prussian breed-ing, that of the English Thoroughbred Perfectionist xx.

Arogno also demonstrates the importance of the English Thor-oughbred in the Trakehner breed on his dam line. He is out of the Thoroughbred mare, Articonius by Apollonius. Articonius

Caprimond continued

5www.WarmbloodStallionsNA.com • Online Stallion, Breeder, and Trainer Listings

was one of the first full Thoroughbred mares to receive elite mare status from the Trakehner Verband.

On Caprimond’s dam side, his grand-dam, Coeur-As, was a full-sister to the approved stallion, Chantilly, and Uwe Sauer’s Grand Prix horse, Caro Bube. Again, Caprimond’s dam, Capri VI, shows the influence of Flaneur (sire of Maharani II), through her sire Mackensen, who was an elite sire of the Trakehner Association.

Caprimond has stood at Klosterhof Medingen since 1988. To date he

has produced thirteen approved sons, including the brothers Canaster I and II (private stallions in Oldenburg), Hohenstein I and II (the lat-ter in Hungary, and the former stands alongside his sire at Medingen). Another son, Caprigold, who was raised in Brandenburg, won his licensing in 1996, while the approved Hanoverian stallion Contucci won a number of riding horse classes before being sold to the United States. Caprimond was the sire of the best German three year old mare, Donaumärchen II, at the Federal [all breeds] Mare Show, where she was also a member of the Federal Champion family in 1994. In 1995, Caprimond was declared Elite Trakehner Stallion and in 1998 he was crowned Trakehner Stallion of the Year.

He has, as of 2010, produced 338 dressage competitors, thirty at S level or above, for winnings of €289,611. His FN dressage rat-ing is 131 as against a jumping index of 55.1

Even into his twenties, Caprimond was still looking great and introduced the young Theresa Wahler to Grand Prix dressage.2

The Making of the Modern Warmblood, by Christopher Hector, is available in the US exclusively from www.HorsesDaily.com.

1 Editor’s note: In the Trakehner breed, Caprimond has really turned out to be an outstanding brood mare sire. Among his grandsons of note are the im-portant dressage sire E.H. Cadeau, the Neumünster reserve champion Couracius, the international dressage stallion and reliable producer of riding horses, E.H. Latimer, the two approved FEI dressage stallions Sauvignon and Schönbrunn, and last but not least the young up and coming Grand Prix star and approved premium stallion Zauberfürst.2 Theresa Wahler was 14 when she won her first S level dressage test on Caprimond, who at the time was 17 years old.

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Father and son, father and daughter: Theresa Wahler and Caprimond, Burkhard Wahler and Hohenstein.

6 This article originally appeared in Warmblood Stallions of North America’s 2013 issue

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