The US Endurance World Championship Young Riders team is from left: Lisanne Dirian (Chef D’ Equipe), Alex Shampoe, Meghan Wert, Charly Dugan, Olivia Randolph (team vet) and Mustafa Tehrani (team farrier).
“It takes a village to raise a child.” The African proverb is quoted so often that it sometimes seems cliché. But the meaning behind the proverb is indisputable. It’s nearly impossible for any one child to thrive without guidance, support, affirmation and love. Maybe not a village-full of that support, but enough to inspire them. And children who grow up believing they can achieve their goals turn into remarkable young adults, courageous and determined.
Consider the United States Youth Endurance team of Alex Shampoe, Charly Dugan and Meghan Wert. In September they competed against teams from more than 20 countries in the Fédération Equestre Internationale (FEI) Endurance World Championship for Young Riders in the Netherlands, and they finished in fifth place in the 120 km competition.
According to the United States Equestrian Federation, “This was the first international championship for both Dugan and Wert and the second for Shampoe, with the team producing one of the top results within the program to date and marking an impressive accomplishment for all three athletes, who have worked to qualify for the championship since the 2018 competition season.”
Blazing Her Own Trail
Shampoe, the 19-year-old originally from Colorado Springs, CO, now lives and works in Virginia. She fell in love with horses as a toddler—too young to even know what horses and riding all were about. But she started taking lessons when she was six, and her parents purchased her first horse for her when she was nine. When she was 13, her parents bought her a new horse, an Arabian, and she competed in her first Endurance race two weeks later.
When she was 16, Shampoe received an exciting, intimidating, life-changing opportunity. “I was at a race in California in January 2018,” she says. “I was riding a two-day 100 for a lady from Wyoming.” The woman had three horses in the race, and one of the people crewing for the group knew a Sheika—a princess—from Dubai. She said she was going to see if the princess would like Shampoe to go to Dubai the following winter to work with her horses.
“My mom and I didn’t think much of it,” she says. “It seemed a little crazy. Then late October, the woman who helps coordinate things for the princess called my mom and asked when I could fly out.” Three weeks later, Shampoe was on her way to Dubai. “My parents didn’t know what to think at first,” she says. “They were a little worried about the city and it being a Middle Eastern country with different rules for women.” But, she says, they learned that it was one of the safest cities in the world and that it was mostly westernized, and they felt better. She was never left alone except on the stable property. “I was in online school, so my parents said as long as I got my work done, I could stay.” She stayed for three months, then went back the following year for five months. “It’s crazy how many horses they had, and how many were really talented,” she says.
In 2020 as the world confronted a pandemic, Shampoe’s odyssey in Dubai ended. “With COVID, I ended up coming home early from Dubai, and we were waiting to hear if there were going to be any races last year,” she says. “I worked for a few people in October and then I decided to stay in the US and work for Val.” Val is Valerie Kanavy, the 1994 and 1998 World Endurance gold medalist and 1996 silver medalist.
Kanavy’s Gold Medal Farms in Fort Valley, VA is at the intersection of the Venn Diagram where Shampoe, Dugan and Wert came together in the months leading up to the FEI competition in The Netherlands. Kanavy had been working with the three teammates, on trails, in the ring, in the mountains—getting them ready for The Netherlands.
The Team Comes Together
“Charly came here and brought her horse here for two or three months,” Shampoe says. “We stayed in the same house and rode together every single day and spent a lot of time getting to know each other.” Wert, the youngest of the trio, arrived later. “Meghan is only 14, so she couldn’t spend as much time as Charly,” Shampoe says. “But we spent a lot of long hours together.”
Endurance is in Dugan’s DNA. Her mother, Sally Jellison, has been competing in Endurance for years. Dugan started competing in Endurance about three years ago, and has ridden alongside her mother in numerous races, from 25-mile races in Florida, to the Big Horn 100 in the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming. Wert has been riding for six years and got hooked on Endurance after she entered a competitive trail ride sponsored by 4-H. “There is a competitive trail ride every year and I just had my horse for a couple of months,” Wert says, “and my instructor thought it would be good for us to try. I tried it. I loved it. My horse loved it.” And so it goes.
Surprises and Success in Ermelo
The young equestrians arrived in Ermelo in The Netherlands eager for the competition. It was a big stage, but they focused on their horses right from the start. “It was really exhilarating,” Dugan says. “I was really happy when we landed, and we went to the stables to see my horse.” Besides being a major change of scenery for the riders and their horses, the weather was a lot cooler, with temperatures in the low 60’s. “The horses were great,” Wert says. “They handled the trip well. It was fun riding them in a place so different from home.”
Wert says that they practiced a lot before the competition started. “Every day leading up to the competition we rode in the morning for one to two hours. We did a day where we cantered, and some days we would find a nice big open stretch and do lateral work.”
All the days of practice and nerves led up to the start of the race. “The mass start was claustrophobic,” Wert says. “There were a lot of people and a lot of horses. That many horses together can get pretty squished.”
“I was nervous at the start because it was a mass start with 75 plus horses,” Dugan says. “But the terrain was identical to what we have in Florida. That was a huge surprise to me.”
The terrain in Ermelo surprised Shampoe, too. “The terrain was supposed to be flat and fast and not a lot of sand. It turned out that most of the trails were good, but we had to go onto a military base,” she says. The trails at the military base were deep sand. “Almost every loop we had to go through there once or twice. It was not what we expected so we had to slow down and think about what we were doing.” She said that during their training in Virginia, the team worked mostly on good trails. “We got there 10 days early and rode the horses every day,” she says. “We took the horses to the venue a couple of days before the competition, and the training track was deep sand.”
On race day, she said the team all started out together. “We got to a pretty deep sand section and Meghan pulled off to slow down. It was hard to slow our horses down,” she says. But critical for their safety.
Dugan says that she knew she could have ridden faster, but it was a risk she wasn’t willing to take. “There’s nothing I could do differently, looking back,” she says. “But I did the best I could and rode my horse as well as I could.” She says it was his first championship, so “he doesn’t have as much of a base as the other horses out there.”
In the end, Shampoe finished 14th overall on Promissin Gold in 6:23:44. Dugan was 32nd on Southern Justice in 7:27:40, and Wert was 34th on Dude Free Gold in 8:01:50.
Reflecting on an Extraordinary Adventure
International competition on this scale can be a dazzling experience. Dugan says the opening ceremony was breathtaking. Her mother says that it was an amazing show. “They had a huge indoor ring,” she says, “and they had drivers with Friesian pairs pulling buggies. Everyone was wearing traditional Dutch clothing.” Each team’s Chef d’Equipe was brought into the ring on one of the buggies and dropped off in front of their cheering teams. “As the Chefs were brought in, the teams were presented,” she says. “Our team was one of the smallest there, so we decided we were going to be the loudest at cheering. We just exploded in cheers.”
Dugan says she met so many competitors from other countries, young riders just like her who are horse crazy. They exchanged hats and shirts and stories and vowed to get together again to ride and bridge the differences in cultures and languages.
She has been accepted to the National Honor Society, and in the months ahead she’s going to focus on school and her other activities, as well as achieving elite status. In her junior year in high school, Dugan is already thinking about college. “I’ve had a crazy Idea for the last several years, of going to a college in Scotland, Glasgow Caledonian University,” she says. “They do events and they also have a really nice field hockey club.”
Wert is in ninth grade and has lots of competition lined up in the near future. She says that most of her fellow students don’t understand her sport, “because it’s not a sport that’s well known,” she says. “I’m sure a lot of them don’t even know what it is. My close friends do take an interest in it, though.” As for the future, Wert has plans. “When I grow up,” she says, “I want to be an English professor, or something that involves English,” she says.
Shampoe says that she has a lot of races in her future, along with her work with Kanavy at Gold Medal Farms. She says she has been hiking a lot, getting in shape for some Ride and Tie competitions in Virginia. According to that sport’s governing body, “Ride and Tie is a fun and challenging sport combining running, riding, endurance and strategy. Teams consist of two runners and one horse who complete a 20-100 mile trail course by ‘leapfrogging’ one another. Partners do this for the entire distance and each team learns to maximize the different members’ strengths and weaknesses to their advantage.” The perfect way for endurance racers to relax.
These three young women, each following her own path to the future, exemplify how athletic competition amplifies the qualities the world values. These young women are taking different paths, with one thing in common: horses.