ODEEO Historical Landmarks

The ODEEO Book of Groupwide Records

This "book" of groupwide records is a place to mark the outstanding achievements of the Old Dominion Equestrian Endurance Organization and its members! This list is a work in progress and will be updated over time, so feel free to occasionally check back!

As of 2024 - The Old Dominion celebrated its 50th anniversary!

2009-2023 - Lenora Keener started the Old Dominion Yard Sale. With only a couple of bags of used tack laid out on tarps at the Ft Valley ride, she raised $600 at that ride alone. Over the next 14 years: donations poured in, a storage trailer was purchased, and the OD Yard Sale took off. Lenora raised over $41,000 for the Old Dominion.

2023, June 10 - Nancy Sluys and Danny were the first ever rider/mule team to complete the Old Dominion 100-mile ride on the Orkney Springs course!

2023, June 9-10 - Our youngest ever to complete the Old Dominion 100-mile ride was 8 years old!

2021 & 2023 - Janice Heltibridle and Ellen Hart on Rush Creek Bobby completed the Old Dominion 100-mile Ride & Tie!

As of 2023 - Henry Muhlbauer has been "timing" for the Old Dominion for 47 years!

As of 2021 - Bob Walsh was inducted into AERC's Century Club Hall of Fame

(the Century Club is when a rider-equine team's age totals 100 or more years.)

As of 2012 - Bob Walsh is our oldest member ever to complete the Old Dominion 100-mile ride at 70 years old!

Much Loved Turtle Awards - Betty Demar Mueller (RIP February 5, 2025) painted softball-size rocks into turtles, for our much loved "turtle" awards (last horse/rider team to cross the finish line).

2006 - Within this same year, John Crandell Jr. on Heraldic win the 2006 Old Dominion 100-mile ride and Old Dominion Trophy, as well as the 2006 WSTR (Tevis Cup) 100-mile Endurance ride and Haggin Cup!

2000, April 9 - Our esteemed President, Bob Heltibridle, won 19th place during his first and only endurance ride (No Frills 30-mile LD) out of Fitches Field with wife, Janice, and sister-in-law Jean. Congrats Bob! ♡

Most Loved Articles - The Newsletters of the past, hosted the longest running and most loved stories of Leadfoot and Granny.

1998, June - The first year the Old Dominion hosted a 25-mile LD ride in June alongside its 50 and 100 distances! With 25 finishing riders, congrats to its winner: Jennifer Spalding on TF Northern Spy

1974 - Pete Fields created and wrote the criteria for the Cavalry Division for the OD 100. The division has been offered every year the OD 100 has been run.

ODEEO Historical Photo Hall

Monday, June 12, 1989

Long Day In the Saddle
100-Mile Race Tests Horse and Rider
By Alison Howard | Washington Post Staff Writer

‘ An hour after sundown Saturday night, 50-year-old Winkie Mackay-Smith cantered her horse down from Land’s Run Gap and across the floodlit finish line at the 4-H Center outside Front Royal. She had left this place 100 miles, 16 hours, 55 minutes, and 1 second ago in darkness just as black
On her right flank, Matthew Mackay-Smith, 57, reined in slightly to finish the annual Old Dominion 100-mile Endurance Ride exactly one second behind his wife. He was not just playing the gentleman.
“We elect to let the horse that has carried the load and set the pace go first,” Winkie Mackay-Smith said from the seat she took promptly in the muddy grass. “It works out pretty well.”
In the 15 years since they helped bring this western-born sport to Virginia, the Mackay-Smiths, of White Post in Clarke County, have often ridden to a you-first, no-you-first finish.
In this case, Winkie Mackay-Smith’s Arabian gelding, Doover—whose real name Atizer, became Hors d’Oeuvre and, finally, Horse Doover—had led the way through the steep terrain, which was unseeable after nightfall.
“Hey, not bad for a couple of fuddy-duddies!” she said, delighted to learn that they had finished eighth and ninth among 59 riders who began the race. They shared the course through the Massanutten mountain range with 82 ul-
See ENDURANCE, D5, Col. 1 ‘

‘Matthew Mackay-Smith rides across the Shenandoah River, followed by Winkie Mackay-Smith and Steve Rojek.

Picture by John Van Be- ‘

June 12, 1989 CONT'D

‘ -tramarathon runners, who also had 24 hours to cover the same 100 miles.
The last of the 42 riders who completed the race arrived just before 5 a.m. yesterday; 28 runners finished, led by Dennis Hurr of Harrisonburg, Va., in 18 hours and 57 minutes. The 29th arrived 1 minute and 4 seconds past the runners’ 4 a.m. deadline.
The Mackay-Smiths did not win the ride, but they “buckled”— earned the silver belt buckle that signifies a top-10 finish and makes them candidates for the U.S. teams in international competition.
The ride was won by Terri Cochran, 39, of Winchester, on a horse bred by Matthew Mackay-Smith’s mother. Cochran accomplished it cavalry style: no pit crew driving ahead to provide food, rest and first aid for her and the horse. She carried their sustenance in belt-and-saddle-pouches and got home before sundown. Minus the mandatory “holds” at seven checkpoints, her times set a course record of 12 hours, 15 minutes and 17 seconds.
According to Matthew Mackay-Smith, the only way to court victory in endurance riding is to ignore it.
“We just want to get around in good order,” he said between bites of banana at the first checkpoint, where he and his wife arrived before 8 a.m. in the middle of the pack. “If you set out to win, you lose every time. If you set out to get around, you get some wins. You see some countryside, you see some good horses—and you see some good horses overridden.”
On the other hand, he added, in a brief baring of the competitor’s soul, “there will be no bad horses ahead of us.”
Matthew Mackay-Smith, a veterinary surgeon and medical editor of Equus magazine, has now finished the Old Dominion seven times in the top 10, with two wins. His wife, a Clarke County planning commissioner, has 11 top-10 finishes and three wins. She got them both hooked after a friend gave her a hotheaded mare.
“I thought if I put a few miles on her, she’d calm down,” Winkie Mackay-Smith said. The first time her husband went along, to an Idaho race in the early 1960s, the mare scratched but he took second or third on a borrowed horse “without any visible effort on my part. It ruined my life for years because I kept trying to do that with other horses.”
Now, he said, “we have no expectations that don’t arise out of seeing how the day evolves. If we get to the last stop with plenty of horse and we see that there are seven horses ahead of us and they’re all dying, we’re going to kick ‘em in the belly.”
The Mackay-Smiths, who moved from 19th and 20th in late afternoon to 12th and 13th at dusk, are known for finishing with plenty of horse, and the reason is scrupulous attention to the horses’ condition during the race. Usually, according to Equus editor Bobbie Lieberman, “the horse runs out of rider before the rider runs out of horse.”
The object of endurance riding is to cover the distance as quickly as possible within 24 hours—with a healthy horse. Seven times during Saturday’s race, riders presented their mounts to a veterinarian who measured pulse and respiration, and checked for injuries or soreness.
If the horse’s heart and respiration rates did not return to normal—under 65 beats and breaths a minute—within a half-hour, it was scratched. Riders carried stethoscopes around their necks to make sure the pulse was dropping before they hollered “P and R!” to indicate that they were ready for the vet and the 30-minute clock.
At Jones Farm, about 65 miles into the race, Doover and Matthew Mackay-Smith’s matching gray Arabian, Rachmaninoff, emerged trot- ‘

‘ Matthew and Winkie Mackay-Smith relax as Juliet McCagg holds horse’s reins. ‘

June 12, 1989 CONT'D 2

Horses Carry The Day in Competition | The Washington Post
ENDURANCE, From D1

‘ -ting from the woods and sailed through the vetting. “I believe,” Mackay-Smith told the chief vet as his horse’s vital signs were being recorded on his entry card, “we’re getting close to a system that’s going to be the basis of a sport.”
While Mackay-Smith ate a sandwich under the trees and his wife went off to chat with a blacksmith, their pit crew—daughter Juliet and her husband, Winslow McCagg—fed the horses a stew of carrots and sweetfeed, removed their tack and sponged their backs.
The Mackay-Smiths logged out on Jones Farm at 4:17 p.m. with 18 horses ahead of them. Four hors and two checkpoints later, just as Cochran was crossing the finish line, they crossed the Shenandoah River at Bentonville Landing with 11 horses ahead and less than 10 miles to go.
The sun had tucked itself behind the mountains, suffusing the crests with pink light and the front-running riders in deep purple shadow as they headed up the rutted road for Land’s Run Gap.
“Be careful,” a National Park Service ranger had warned the riders at a briefing Friday night. “You’re going to come bouncing along that road in the dark when the locals come down there driving with one eye. That’s how they drive that road on Saturday night—with one eye, so there’s only one road they have to follow.”
“As the sixth and seventh riders neared the 4-H Center, people who were camped out on blankets at the finish line began to point—“Horses coming! There’s lights coming off the mountain!”—and stood up to track the approach of two flashlights whose rocking glow mimicked the canter of horses.
When the Mackay-Smiths arrived a short time later, with the 10th rider on their heels, there was no candlelight parade down the mountain—only the sudden emergence of three horses into the glare and Matthew Mackay-Smith’s cry: “We forgot the flashlights!”

‘Terri Cochran, winner in the Old Dominion 100-Mile Endurance Ride, check her b-‘

‘ DOWN TO EARTH — Denise Shepherd is reunited with Myntyfa after the stallion’s rescue by helicopter. Horse and rider were competing in a 50-mile leg of an endurance race when the horse slipped and careened down a Shenandoah County mountainside on Sunday. ‘

Staff photo by Jay Paul

No Pegasus, but he ‘flew’ riderless into the sunset
By Bill McKelway | Times-Dispatch staff writer
KINGS CROSSING — A chestnut stallion, trapped and bleeding after it tumbled hundreds of feet down a steep mountainside Sunday, was carried to safety yesterday in a dramatic helicopter rescue.
“As long as I live I’ll never see anything like it again,” an amazed Jim Hobson shouted to nearly a score of crying, whooping co-rescue workers as the 5-year-old horse rose in a sling from its rocky enclosure and was swept through the treetops to freedom.
Moments later and nearly two miles away, Virginia Army National Guard pilot David Crockett eased the stunned and wobbly legged horse, dangling below his UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter, to the ground.
“I tried not to watch until I knew he was standing on his own four legs,” said Denise Shepherd, the owner of horse, Myntyfa. “For what he’s been through, he looks fantastic.”
Rescue workers and Mrs. Shepherd had nearly lost hope that the animal would survive after it careened down the western slope of Kennedy Peak, a high point along an eastern prong of the Massanutten Mountains in Shenandoah County.
Mrs. Shepherd, 31, of Bucks County, Pa., had been –
Continued on page 6, col. 1 ‘

1990 –
John Crandel & Moyle Cider
John Alexander & Gage Kabet
Going Calvary

16 NATIONS REPRESENTED IN ENDURANCE RIDING
By Tina Skinner
The Washington Post

September 21, 1988
at 8:00 p.m. EDT

FRONT ROYAL, VA., SEPT. 21 -- Representatives from 16 countries will parade here Thursday at the Northern Virginia Regional 4-H Educational Center.

The opening ceremonies of the world championship endurance ride will act as an introduction to visiting equestrians. Later the riders will compete with one other, but their main opponent will be 100 miles of mountainous trail in and around the Shenandoah Valley.

At 6:30 a.m. Saturday, an estimated 60 horses will start out on what promises to be an ordeal. Last year the North American Championship Ride was held over the same trail and, of nearly 50 competitors who started, 27 finished.

Finishing isn't everything, however. An international team of veterinarians will closely monitor each horse's pulse and respiration at six checks along the course, and on the following day, the finishers will be closely examined for soundness.

The horses must be judged fit to continue the next day in order to be eligible for the gold, silver and bronze individual and team medals. The most coveted honor among endurance riders will go to the horse judged best conditioned by the veterinarians.

There to try for those honors will be the defending world champion -- a team from Britain. The British beat the United States to the gold two years ago in the first world championship in Rome.

The United States finished with the silver in that ride, France the bronze. Two U.S. team members, veterinarians Casandra Schuler and Jeannie Waldron, brought home gold and silver individual medals. Waldron helped to beat the British the next year by contributing to a team win in the European Championship Race in Germany.

The two international champions along with reigning national champion Mary Koefod, who finished the North American in just under 12 1/2 hours last year, head the list of U.S. riders slated to compete for the world title.

See Article Here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/sports/1988/09/22/16-nations-represented-in-endurance-riding/42de4ea8-0fb8-4441-a05e-1e6aab09894c/