This is one of my favorite photos from the Olympics so far.
This was the final obstacle on the eventing cross-country course: the horse had to jump through an Olympic-sized horseshoe, with some brush across the base. Mark Todd's horse went through the brush--he was tired--and it slowed down the time.
The shoe is great except no one can explain the heel nails; a small detail, but perhaps studs in the heels would have been appropriate given the discipline.
The horseshoe was flanked on either side by bookend sculpthres of giant jumping horses made of shoes.
Presumably, the obstacle will enjoy a second life being recycled at another cross-country course somewhere in Britain. So maybe we'll see it again. Like so many of the cross country obstacles, it is unique!
Speaking of shoes, many were lost on the course that day, including by Great Britain's Zara Phillips, whose horse High Kingdom lost both front shoes somewhere along the way but still managed to get home.
We're still waiting for a comment from Zara's mother, Princess Anne, who is former master of the Worshipful Company of Farriers and a great friend to the farrier profession in Great Britain.
It was great to hear NBC Olympics commentator Melanie Smith Taylor in the USA give a shout-out to the important role that farriers play in the safety of horses and riders in the sport of eventing.
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Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any direct compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned, other than Hoofcare Publishing. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.
Now that's service. A street scene today in Melbourne, Australia showed a farrier performing a road repair for a carriage horse on Swanston Street in the city center.
Perhaps the carriage company has a fleet maintenance contract?
It looks like the farrier arrived on the motorcycle, which makes sense since Swanston Street is pretty much a pedestrian mall. Horse-drawn carriages, streetcars and bicycles are the vehicles of choice here.
The street is watched over by this wonderful metal sculpture of a horse, which swings in the wind.
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Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any direct compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned, other than Hoofcare Publishing. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.
A brief excerpt from a PBS documentary on the sculptor Saint-Gaudens, who created the Shaw Memorial on Boston Common. We take it for granted 364 days a year but Memorial Day seemed like a good time to stop and take a closer look. What memorials are in your town?
I don't know how many times I have walked by this statue--hundreds?--and never stopped to think much about it. It's part of the fabric of the city. We learned all about it in school. I saw the movie "Glory", which was Hollywood's version of who these people were. You probably saw it too.
I was intrigued by the horse's legs and hooves. Remember that this is a relief sculpture. It's not exactly 3-D. It's more like 2.5-D. And hard to do. This is the best my iPhone could record in the dark.
But the other night I stopped there at the top of Boston's Beacon Hill because I was taken with the horse and I wanted to see it close up.
It struck me that the foot soldiers are all leaning forward. But the rider and horse are not. In fact, they seem a bit hesitant. The horse's ears are back.
That's when I decided to start doing some more reading. And start forgetting Hollywood.
As soon as the Civil War began, African-American men in the North tried to enlist in the Union Army. They were turned away.
Colonel Shaw ended up in
an unmarked grave with his
fallen black soldiers.
Then it happened: it was two years into the bloody war, in 1863. Massachusetts, the hot bed home of the abolitionists, received permission from Washington to form a Black regiment.
They knew was they were up against. Confederacy policy was to enslave any captured Black soliders.
The governor of Massachusetts assured them that African American soldiers would be treated equally; they would receive the same pay and the same benefits as white recruits.
Only white men, however, could serve as officers. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the only son of one of Boston's leading abolitionist families, would lead the regiment. He was only 25 years old.
Hollywood made Americans much more aware of the 54th.
On May 28th, the regiment was ready to fight; they marched through the streets of Boston, to the cheers of thousands of well-wishers the same way we lined the streets when the Red Sox won the World Series. This is the moment memorialized in the sculpture. They marched right to the docks and boarded ships headed south.
One of their first engagements was on July 18th at Fort Wagner, in Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. Colonel Shaw led 600 men up the embankment. Almost half his men were killed, wounded, or captured.
Colonel Shaw was shot through the heart; the Confederates buried him in a common (unmarked) grave alongside 74 of his men.
Who were the black men who
modeled for the sculptor?
His parents said he would have wanted it that way.
The War Department, meanwhile, did not deliver on the governor's promise to the soldiers. The men of the 54th were paid only $10 per month--$3 less than the white soldiers.
So, they decided if they could not receive equal pay, they would accept no pay.
For 18 months, soldiers could send no money home. In turn, they received heartbreaking letters from their impoverished families back in Massachusetts.
Finally, in July 1864, Congress acted to give African-American soldiers the equal pay they had been promised, retroactive to the date of their enlistments.
In winter, the three-dimensional relief sculpture comes to life. They march on.
Memorial Day was declared a holiday in 1868, so that Americans would stop what they were doing and place flowers on the graves of fallen soldiers--a custom that began in Mississippi. It was called Decoration Day.
On May 31, 1897, 60 veterans of the 54th Regiment were among hundreds of people who gathered on the Common for the unveiling of the memorial. This bronze relief statue, which took the leading sculptor in the United States 14 years to create, is considered one of the greatest works of public art in the United States and was the first to portray black men in uniform.
Sculptor Saint-Gaudens' original plan was to craft a magnificent equestrian statue of Shaw--alone on his horse, on a pedestal. But Shaw's family wouldn't hear of it. Saint-Gaudens bought into their line of thinking and designed the first public sculpture to show an officer and enlisted soldiers together.
And, probably, blacks and whites together.
It was commissioned by the black citizens of Massachusetts, who raised funds to pay Saint-Gaudens. I'm just not sure why it is called the Robert Gould Shaw memorial. I hope someday I'll hear that its name will be changed to honor the whole regiment.
When it was unveiled back in 1897, people could read the names of the five white officers killed in battle; they were inscribed on the back of the monument.
It wouldn't be until 1981 that the names of the fallen black soldiers would be carved into that stone.
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Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any direct compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned, other than Hoofcare Publishing. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.
England's Uffington Horse is a 3000-year-old iconic carving into a chalky hillside. Was it designed by the ancient Celts as a sign to the gods, like some sort of equestrian crop circle? No one really knows. It's always been there, galloping freely across the vast clear hillsides.
Until this week, that is, when the local people woke up to find a jockey on the horse. and reins.
The amazing publicity stunt was pulled off by the Irish online gambling shop ("bookmaker") Paddy Power. We're in the final run-up to the Cheltenham Festival of National Hunt racing (steeplechasing, more or less, in US racing terms) and an annual prank was expected.
As you can see in the video, they didn't carve the soil, but rather used canvas to create the rider.
Paddy Power is known for its pranks and its controversial (and usually quite humorous) television commercials about gambling.
If you needed to end the week with a smile, this should do it.
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Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any direct compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned, other than Hoofcare Publishing. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.
Spring is in the air and a hoof blog editor's fancy turns to...kinetic sculpture.
But you'll soon understand why.
To anyone who says we can't improve on the way that horses are trimmed or shod, or the way that lame and sick horses' legs are treated or cared for, I'd have to say we're just not trying hard enough. And the answer is not likely to come from tinkering with the designs and devices we already have in our hands.
Kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen builds 'strandbeests' out of PVC pipe and turns them out on the wild ranges of the sand on Dutch beaches. The goal is for his perpetual motion creations to become permanent, independent citizens of the sands.
Jansen's kite-like sculptures will trot along the beach on PVC legs and coffin joints.
That's right. He wants to turn them loose. It sounds like he's been watching some fantasy beer commercial where the wild horses run free forever.
You can't help but notice that his sculptures' legs and feet mimic the design of horse' limbs, right down to the single digit and breakover action of forward motion via a rotating distal joint.
Maybe Jansen's been reading the Hoof Blog and saw this extreme rocker rehab on a foundered foot from Loic Entwistle's photo files in Germany. I'm sorry I don't have more information about this photo. I don't even know if this is Loic's work. But the image has always intrigued me. It's a thought-provoker.
Think backwards for a minute. What if you could be Jensen and design a new hoof for the horse, one that would be easier to work on, to keep sound, to serve the horse on multiple surfaces, in multiple environments, under a rider's weights, in different sports?
What would your design parameters be for the lower limb and hoof? Where would you start--at the bottom? in the middle? Would you specify a model with replaceable (transplantable or implantable) parts?
There's no doubt that Nature designed an amazing structure that functions organically with perfection when everything's right. Humans just seem to muck it up, in one way or another. Bioengineering is on its way to being able to identify weak tissue structures; perhaps digital cushion implants will be possible soon, or coronary band grafting will allow rehab to be completed in six weeks instead of six months.
I suspect most of us would be happy to tinker with the parts to improve them, but we like the design just the way nature has given it to the horse, and to us to work on, to ponder, to study, to capitalize upon, or to admire.
Maybe we should invite Theo Jansen to watch our horses run on the racetrack. What we'd end up with in return might be a little different than what you''d see him sketch on a drawing board. Imagine a silky, kite-like kinetic sculpture floating around the infield of a dark racetrack at night, under its own perptual power, making eerie music like a chorus of call-to-the-post buglers playing a duet with every foghorn on the coast of Maine.
People would pay to see (and hear) something like that. I think they'd pay to see lots of things he does. Keep an eye on him, and his beests. I think he's trying to tell us something
What a well-traveled group of readers checked the Hoof Blog today!
Our "Where in the world?" question asked for the location of the Three Smiths sculpture by Felix Nylund. I thought it would be a stumper, but a flurry of correct answers quickly came in from around the world!
The winner was farrier Jonathan Oehm of Queensland, Australia who, like so many Aussies, has been around the world and back again.
Close behind was farrier/doctor Mike Miller of Alabama and veterinarian Hank Greenwald of Washington. Then a three-way tie almost to the minute between "CJ" and Cynthia Dekker (locations unknown) and Sandy Johnson of Florida, who remembered the statue from her time in Helsinki shoeing at the FEI World Cup Finals in 1998.
The most recent winner is Frederick Marmander, a farrier from Sweden.
I had never seen the sculpture before and I was really excited to find these photos. Something unique about this statue is that it was damaged by bombing during World War II, and the anvil has a hole in it where shrapnel hit it.
As with so many artistic representations of smiths and farriers or anvils and hammers, the statue is said to be a celebration of the laborer, but the coordinated forging between the three men symbolizes the need to cooperate peacefully to get jobs done, according to the art museum in Helsinki.
Smiths are often depicted unclothed in classical art, but it seems a bit cruel of the artist for a city with the climate of Helsinki!
Thanks to everyone who answered or at least thought about where in the world this statue might be! What a worldly readership this blog has!
Now here's something I haven't seen before. This Shire is crafted from hundreds of horseshoes by retired Yorkshire, England businessman Donald Punton. Click here to learn more about him and the horses he builds. I think the blaze and feathers paint is really clever, although I am not sure if the body and legs are painted or just rusted!
I 
