EQUESTRIAN - Casey confident of Auckland success

NOT content with cleaning up at the Northland dressage championships, Casey Johnson is setting her sights on success at this weekend's Auckland championships
"I'm going to win, I'm entered in three classes and I'm going to win them all," the 22-year-old rider said confidently yesterday.
"It's a pretty big championship with lots of horses, as you'd expect in Auckland. There's good prizemoney too, except the boss gets that."
The boss also gets to shoulder costs, which makes Casey's role as rider less onerous.
Auckland will certainly be a bigger challenge than Barge Park at the end of October, when she took two first places in the elementary and medium classes, and a second in the advanced class. It was a fitting haul for the young rider, who earlier in the year was selected as the Dressage Northland Rider of the Year for her ring performances.
Johnson has been a full-time employee for the Matthews Hanoverian Stud at Awanui for five years, but before that worked there part-time as soon as owners Peter and Judith Matthews would let her. The stud breeds German Hanoverian horses with great success.
Casey's love of horses and her proximity to the stud helped get her started in dressage.
"I've always wanted to ride horses, ever since I was little, and I grew up across the road from the stud so it kind of just happened," she said.
Dressage is the least popular of the three Olympic equestrian disciplines and Casey said it's not hard to see why.
"It's not a spectator-friendly sport - even I get bored watching it," she laughed. "You do a five-minute performance ... and you are marked on a scale of 1-10, so you know how you're doing as you go," she said.
But competing is more exciting than watching - especially when you get it right.
"It's different when you are riding though, you enjoy it because you've got to get the horse doing what you want it to do, and I love it when you are training as well as you can and then go on to win a competition."
This weekend, Casey will ride Dreamworld in the medium class, her "baby horse" Divas Glory in the preliminary class , and also former Matthews Hanoverian Stud horse Dontello.
The age and experience of the horses decides which class she will ride in. She is itching to compete at the Grand Prix level, but will have to wait until the right horse comes her way.
Casey's ambition is to go to the top in NZ dressage and, with the horses she trains, that dream is not so far away.