"DADDY was driving out of the yard, because he was going to the races. He stopped and said, ‘Well, your wee chesnut seems to jump!’ - after Suma’s Zorro jumped a five-bar gate upon arriving in her new yard.

“She was like, ‘I’m here!’ She was always a character,” said Joanne Sloan Allen about the family’s newly-weaned foal purchase from the Suma Stud dispersal sale.

That was back in 2004. By the time Suma’s Zorro (Ard VDL Douglas - Vixens Frolic) officially retired at Balmoral Show 20 years later, she had earned over one million euros and was dubbed the ‘millionaire mare’.

2018 was undoubtedly the highlight year of her career, when she and Sycamore Stables’ stable jockey Sameh El Dahan won the €3 million CP Grand Prix at the Rolex Grand Slam’s Spruce Meadows round. Hers was not only a cross-border success story, but also created headlines and a fanbase in Sameh’s native Egypt. “People at home were really following her career and enjoying our wins as much as we were,” he said.

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Egypt's Sameh El Dahan on the Irish-bred Suma's Zorro, owned by himself and Joanne Sloan Allen, winning the Imperial Challenge Grand Prix at Spruce Meadows in June 2015 \ Spruce Meadows

It’s eight years since that dream result, but in the ecumenical setting of the Longines CHI Classics Basel restaurant facility, where grooms, Olympic riders, St Jakobshalle crew and officials all mix, Joanne’s recollections of Suma’s Zorro’s big payday are laser-sharp.

“It was so funny how it happened, because it was the year of WEG [World Equestrian Games] in Tryon. If horses went to Spruce Meadows, then they had to come back to Europe in the 10 days before they went to Tryon, because of the paperwork and quarantine.”

While Sameh wasn’t keen on combining both, Joanne woke up one morning with a road-plan. “I had this dream that she was going to win. I said ‘Sam, we have to go to Spruce Meadows. I will make this happen.’

“When we walked the course, I’m going, ‘He [course builder Leopoldo Palacios] has actually built this for Zorro!’ Sometimes they built the courses for those big, rangy horses, but this was for a clever horse.

“They were clear in the first, then the second round and the whole time I was convinced they would win. I just knew.

“It came down to him [Sam] and Verdi TN in the jump-off. I remember Maikel [van der Vleuten] came out of the ring and he said, ‘Joanne, I’ve left a bit, he can catch me’.

“It was the funniest thing, because I couldn’t see the clock - everybody was clapping and Sam was galloping around the ring, throwing his hat in the air. I’ll never forget going, ‘Did he actually win?’ And Kara Chad said, ‘Yes, he won!’ David and Goliath, because you had the big stallion Verdi and then the wee mare. It was complete opposites.”

A certain point

That was Suma’s Zorro’s peak year, but how did the whole story begin? “I was actually expecting Tabitha, my middle daughter and I said to Mum [Pat] and Dad [Joe], ‘We’ll go down to the sale for a day out.’”

The Suma sale took place after Marily Power and Susie Lanigan-O’Keeffe decided to downsize and relocate to Co Kilkenny. Susie owned the brilliant Royal Penny, one of the top show jumping ponies of her era. Her foals included Foxes Frolic, by Blue Cliff, competed at Rome by Susie and a horse that was often loaned to Ned Cash Jnr. for international duty.

Another relative was Vixens Frolic, by Horos out of the Pride of Shaunlara mare Presently.

“Her last foal Zorro has proved what is always possible for a small breeder, but very rarely happens,” remarked Marily. “We were also responsible for Ard VDL Douglas coming to Ireland to our great friends Richard and Heather Wright at Ardmulchan.”

As the Darco son Douglas was classified as S2 (now NA2) in the Irish Horse Register, Suma’s Zorro was registered with the Anglo European Studbook.

Back to Joanne’s first sighting of Zorro in a round pen set up for the sale. “The broodmares, with the foals following behind, were jumping in there. I never forget the mother jumping and there’s this little chesnut thing. They always say that, at a certain point in a foal’s life, that’s the jump that they’re going to have in the future. You could see she was really into her jumping and I thought, ‘I want that foal!’

“Richard Wright, who rode Douglas at the time, was bidding as well. We said to Mum, ‘You bid and Daddy and I will watch’. So she was raising her hand and, at one point, I think she was actually bidding against herself!”

Pat’s bid proved to be the lucky one and, once Zorro was weaned, Joanne returned to pick her up, armed “with a little Shetland pony one of the kids had to keep her company. We took her off the back ramp and, Zorro being Zorro, decided that she wanted to go somewhere else. She just turned around and jumped that five-bar gate.”

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Thanks For The Memories: Suma’s Zorro bows out at her retirement ceremony with Sameh El Dahan and Joanne Sloan Allen \ Susan Finnerty

Ask a mare

Horses of a lifetime are often made by a match with the right people and Suma’s Zorro is no exception. “Susie built that family. It is so important for all horses to get to the right person and Joanne Sloan Allen was definitely that,” said Marily.

Joanne typically sent her young horses to Liam McKee. “Liam is a good friend of mine and a very good horseman. He had a man from eastern Europe working for him at the time and he was brilliant at long reining.

“Zorro was really stubborn. All her life. I remember one day, he couldn’t get her to go left. She just didn’t want to go. And he was so patient, waited her out until she wanted to go left. I do think a lot of her talent could have gone either way, because her personality was such that Zorro was her own person. She had to think it was her idea. She had a lot of little quirks of her own, but she was always so kind.

“One time, Liam was lunging her over a pole, and she just decided she didn’t want to go near the filler. We must have been there for two hours. Basically, we took it all apart in the end and she went over, but it was on her terms.

“That mare never stopped at anything in her life. She always took it on and I do think it all goes back again to that there was never any kind of dispute. Zorro ended up where she should have been, because she was given time and she was given patience.

“If she had gone to the wrong place, they would have tried to break her spirit and we never did that. When you take a character away from a horse, what do you have? A robot.”

Another famous mare - Bertram Allen’s Molly Malone V (Kannan) - jumped in the same age classes on the UK circuit. “I actually wanted to buy Molly Malone, I really love that mare. Billy Twomey was riding her and said ‘She’s actually for Bertram, we’re just producing her’. They were both great mares.”

While Joanne was sidelined with a broken leg, Tracey Broome’s daughter Sophie, “a lovely rider, qualified Zorro for the Horse of the Year Show (HOYS). She was based at Ted and Maria Edgars’, a really good foundation. Then Zorro came back to me, as I was just back jumping on the Sunshine Tour.”

“That’s it”

That’s when Sameh joined the team in 2011. “We met at the Sunshine Tour and he jumped Zorro in the seven-year-old classes. And, as he says, at the time, it was probably only Zorro that kept him on because the rest of mine were as green as grass. I hadn’t been riding, so I had all these five-year-olds that were wild as crows, completely feral!

“By the end of the Sunshine Tour, she won the seven-year-old class at Vilamoura and she won Valkenswaard that year. I had her in Cannes [Global Champions League] as an eight-year-old and was the leading rider in the two-star classes. She was brilliant, but at that stage, she was kind of hidden as we had WKD Pepperpot (Heritage Fortunus). She kind of protected Zorro, because she was the one doing the heavy lifting.

“Zorro wasn’t like eight-year-olds today that were out running around. She did enough, but she was protected. And the magic didn’t actually happen until she was like 12, 13. That’s when she just bloomed.

“I used to train and work around old farmers, rode their ponies. Those guys actually had a lot of knowledge and the belief always was Irish horses were at their best at 12, 14, 15. I think we’ve forgotten that a lot in the sport, because you see eight, nine, 10-year-olds and they’re being pushed.

“John Ledingham said the same thing about Zorro. He trained Sam for quite a while and he said, ‘You’ll not know that mare till she’s nine, because she’ll strengthen up her back and over her back end’. With her breeding and her lineage, she was kind of a slow grower.”

Suma’s Zorro’s performance record is full of Global Champions Tour, Grand Prix and Nations Cup appearances before her final outing in 2022 at HOYS.

“So many good horses missed out on their last years because of Covid and Zorro was one of them. If those older horses don’t go to shows, it’s very hard to keep them at top level.

“I felt at home that she’d done enough. Sam took her to HOYS because he had to feel it himself, it’s a rider’s thing. He came out of the ring and said the same thing. We didn’t want to get to a point that she was going in the ring and it was a push to get her around. So we both said, ‘That’s it’.

“She retired at Balmoral, because she’d won the Grand Prix there before and it was handy to home. It was so emotional. As soon as Zorro got off the truck, came into the ring and saw the jumps, she was like, ’Let’s go!’ She knew. She enjoyed the occasion, but all good things come to an end.”

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“She knew”: Suma’s Zorro, Sameh and Joanne at the ‘millionaire mare’s’ retirement ceremony at Balmoral Show in 2024 \ Susan Finnerty

Food for thought

After Basel, where Spruce Meadows’ Linda Southern received the Award of Honour, it was on to Leipzig and this week, Hong Kong for the WKD team. It’s less than a decade since Zorro’s milestone years and Joanne, a mother of three daughters - Amber, Tabitha and Arielle - astutely summed up several warp speed changes since. Starting with social media’s omnipresence.

“Zorro was always everybody’s horse and I always tried to include everybody in her story. Social media was just starting to develop when she was competing. Now it’s everywhere.

“Horses, children… everybody has to make a mistake to learn because otherwise, how do you progress if you’re never allowed to make a mistake? You’re never going to get any better. We had to grow up, parties and stuff - can you imagine if we were being followed around and photographs taken?

“I think a lot of us are sleepwalking into the destruction of our sport. It’s like a hobby that people do and it is becoming what it was always accused of being: a sport for rich, privileged people. And it’s getting harder and harder for grassroots people to break through.

“I mean, I’m lucky. I don’t try and hide where I come from, but I was brought up a country girl with horses, working with farmers, that was the ethos that we lived under. You had to work for it. You had to go and develop horsemanship.

“Don’t get me wrong, it’s bringing money into the sport. But at what point do we sacrifice money for horsemanship?

“With horses, you’ve so many down days. People don’t celebrate things and I think every chance you get, you say ‘Yippee!’ We are never too good to not show that, because that’s what people want to see. You have to be grateful, because there are so many people who don’t get the opportunity.”

Celebration opportunities galore during the career of Suma’s Zorro, their horse of a lifetime.

By the numbers

1,414,470 - prize money won by Suma’s Zorro.

40 - year gap between Foxes Frolic and Suma’s Zorro, each winning the [Chester Nugent] Gold Cup at Balmoral.

Sixth - her place amongst show jumping horses in Hippomundo’s 2018 rankings.

Three - latest Suma’s Zorro’s embryos include two by Ermitage Kalone and a Tyson.

One-two - Suma’s Zorro and Molly Malone V’s Grand Prix places in the 2018 Global Champions Tour round in Paris.

Did you know?

  • The prefix for Suma Stud, founded in 1978 by Susie Lanigan-O’Keeffe and Marily Power, is an amalgamation of their first names.
  • The couple were presented with the Outstanding Contribution to Sport Horse Breeding award at the Horse Sport Ireland breeders’ awards in 2015.
  • Royal Penny, the Vixens Frolic line foundation mare, was an orphan foal. Susie’s uncle, George Malcomson, brought her home after spotting her beside her dead dam on his way home from The Curragh races. Royal Penny was said to be the result of an illicit liaison between a Baroda Stud yearling colt and a Connemara mare.
  • The Vixens Frolic line had fox-themed names. Zorro is Spanish for... fox. Zorro is also the last foal of Vixens Frolic, whose sire Horos won the Croker Cup in 1991.
  • Zorro’s Ermitage Kalone yearling filly is named Zusie. “I wanted to call her after Susie, who bred her [Zorro]. All our horses are named after the first letter of their mother.”
  • Joanne had a lightbulb moment about Zorro’s temporary loss of form. “She’d have silly rails down. She was sore, she was ache-y, but you just couldn’t put your finger on it. We never pushed her, that’s why she had a few quiet years. I remember waking up and saying, ‘I know what’s wrong’. Sugar, that’s her problem. She was always a good-doer and we really struggled to keep weight off her. We completely changed her diet, stripped it right back and just fed her 200 grammes of oats three times a day, sugarbeet, chaff, a really good balancer and linseed oil. To this day, that’s all our horses are on. Her body shape completely changed, she became an athlete and, if you look at her record, that’s when she really started to win. She won the A Coruña Grand Prix on the Saturday and was placed in the World Cup qualifier on Sunday. The next year - the Spruce Meadows year - she won Paris too. She lost all that puppy fat and was a lean machine.”
  • Social media can have its benefits, as Joanne discovered after Sameh’s check-in luggage, with his Spruce Meadows Masters medal, went missing from the return flight. “Conor Swail was on the plane too. I’ve known Conor forever, so Sam was sleeping, we had our celebration, having a few drinks and the craic. We landed in Dublin, the bags didn’t come and Sam went very quiet. I said, ‘Thank goodness the medal was in your hand luggage.’ And there was that silence... I put it on Facebook that the medal was lost and it went viral. Only for the power of Facebook, we would never have got the suitcase back, it was behind the check-in desk in Calgary!”
  • Zorro’s Spruce Meadows winnings were invested wisely. “She built the indoor arena. We’d all be riding in big coats right now otherwise and that was our investment.” Complete with an image of Suma’s Zorro on the arena wall.
  • Spruce Meadows is a favourite fixture for Team Zorro. “The Southern family - Ron, Marge, Nancy and Linda - have always been very good to us over the years. Last year, for the Masters 50th anniversary, there was even a private concert with Michael Bublé. He’s brilliant, a real entertainer and I got to shake hands with him.”
  • Joanne plans a book about Zorro’s story sometime. “I just have to get time to sit down and do it!”