Happy Life providing plenty of joy in retirement

By Andrew Smith

He was bought with the aim of pulling carriages for weddings but Happy Life is far from playing the role of bridesmaid in his new career.

The standardbred and his owner Debbie King took out the Driving Standardbred Award in the Queensland Off-The-Track (QOTT) Leaderboard at the 2024 Equestrian Queensland Annual Awards.

The seven-year-old, known around King’s Tamborine property as Polly, only ever trialled as a harness horse without ever competing in an official race.

But after landing with King in August 2023, Happy Life has taken to his new career without hesitation.

“I bought him specifically to do weddings with, because my wedding horse was retiring at 29 years old so I wanted a grey horse,” King said.

“I scoured the countryside for him, found this horse in Adelaide, bought him sight unseen and got him here.

“I started driving him and every time I would give him a challenge he would rise to it or exceed it.

“He was really anxious in the float, probably because he’d never been floated - he was always getting trucked but once we got to a competition he took it all in his stride and nothing worried him.”

It took eight months for King, who is a QOTT Approved Coach, to bring Happy Life up to speed.

While dressage is one discipline to master, King explained how attaching a coach to the horse can add a whole new level of difficulty during training.

“Coach riding is dressage with wheels and we’re looking for the same sort of shape and movement and obedience that you see in dressage horses,” she said.

“We started doing a bit of ridden dressage with him and we had a lot of problems because he had no idea how to go around a corner.

“We started driving him, and did a few lessons and things on the ground and he just showed that his temperament was such that he would just take it all in his stride.

“There’s a lot of challenges in there but every challenge we put up to him he sort of said ‘oh yeah we can do this.’

“He’s just got the most beautiful temperament, he wants to be with you, he’s not a standoffish horse - he wants to be in your pocket all the time.”

It was a meteoric rise to the top for Happy Life.

He took out the Standardbred Harness Turnout Class at the 2024 Ekka, while also being crowned Supreme Champion Harness Standardbred at Standardbred Association Queensland’s State Hacking and Harness Championships.

“We showed him under saddle and he won a few awards which was a big deal as well, because he’d only been under saddle for less than three months, so he’s done exceptionally well in his first season,” King said.

“For him to have done so well in the short time he was shown and competed at so many different things was just phenomenal.

“They say it takes a village to grow a child - let me tell you I had such an amazing support system, to get him to where he needed to be and to do what he did, it was spectacular.

“Amy Geldhart who has been riding him for me, and to Fiona, it’s just a whole lot of people who all love this horse…he is really good at bringing together lots of different people.

King has been a QOTT Approved Coach since the inception of the QOTT Subsidised Lessons Program in July 2021, and is keen to keep focused on people who have taken carriage horses into their homes.

“The Subsidised Lessons Program has been really good - it takes about 12 months to make a close relationship with any horse that you’re getting,” King said.

“Particularly the off-the-track horses who have to unlearn things they’ve learnt on the track, and learn all these new things when their new owners deal with them.”

True to his name, Happy Life will also be continuing to make the lives of others happier too.

“We took a couple of autistic kids out with him and they sat on his back and they had a whale of a time,” King said.

“So that’s another bow in his string that we will be exploring where he can be used for kids with sensory disabilities and those sorts of things.

“For them to be able to take him out on the carriage and go for a drive is just great.”

The QOTT Leaderboard with Equestrian Queensland was established to highlight ex-racehorses excelling in their new equestrian careers, with the awards presented to off-the-track horses that have accumulated the highest points in each discipline at the end of the competition season.

Click here to see the 2024 QOTT Leaderboard results.