‘A heart of gold, tough as nails’: farewell to tiny £500 thoroughbred who won Badminton – and at every level on the way up

A “tough and heroic” little thoroughbred who was bought for £500 but went on to win Badminton and represent his country has died aged 29 after a long and idyllic retirement.

Jenny and the late Claus Waaler’s Inonothing won at every national level from BE100 to advanced and completed eight five-star events, only once finishing outside the top 10, with Paul Tapner. They also represented Australia at the 2010 World Equestrian Games.

The Waalers bought “Mannie” as a weanling and he lived with them throughout his life until his age finally caught up with him.

“Mannie had a heart of gold, was as tough as nails and would try his utmost to do whatever I asked of him,” Paul said. “He was the ultimate event horse who I was honoured to be partnered with.”

Paul told H&H Inonothing was a full thoroughbred but “bred as a slight mistake”, not intended for the racetrack, hence his cheap price as a foal. The Waalers’ intention was for him to be “a lawn mower and potential hunt horse”. But although he may have excelled at the former, he “dramatically and quickly failed at the latter”, picking up his nickname “Spinhead”.

“He was a stereotypical thoroughbred, extremely highly strung and over-excitable, so he found the hunting mentally too much for him and was exceptionally excited by it all,” Paul said. “[Paul’s sister-in-law] Hannah took him for his first day’s hunting and he was so badly behaved, she was sent home.

“Then I went out on him, and I think everybody in the hunt was so entertained by the fact that I managed to stay on through his antics, and managed to not wipe any of them out, they decided to let me stay out. But needless to say, we pretty quickly realised that he was never going to be a hunt horse.

“My mother-in-law shared the Facebook post about him and Chris Kingston, who’s high up in the Old Berks hunt, said: ‘I remember very well a particular day out hunting when Paul was riding Mannie; no one else would have stayed on… I, along with many other experts, announced to the world that that horse will never be used for anything’. Certainly in the Old Berks hunt, there were an awful lot of people who said ‘What a maniac horse, he’s never going to be anything’, and expressed that to Jenny and Claus, but thankfully I was able to get in their ear as well. There were quite a few people in the Old Berks hunt who needed to, and were more than happy to, eat their hat, once he succeeded as an event horse having failed miserably as a hunt horse.”

Paul said on that day, he would probably have agreed with all those who thought Inonothing would not amount to much, but he thought the horse would be happier by himself.

“And Jenny and Claus loved him,” he said. “They’re animal lovers to the nth degree and would never give up on a horse, so they put their faith in me.”

Paul evented Mannie for a couple of seasons, without huge success, and Paul remembers a competition at a venue called Urchinwood Manor, one of the few events to which Jenny and Claus did not go.

“I just didn’t have a great event; I was thinking ‘This horse doesn’t inspire me any more, I don’t think I can ride him any more’” he said. “And I was prepping myself, ready to tell Jenny and Claus that I didn’t think they should persevere with him. But when I spoke to them on the phone something in me, and I don’t know what it was, wouldn’t let me say those words. Even though I’d practised them and was ready to say to Jenny ‘Let’s stop trying to make this horse an event horse’, for whatever reason, I couldn’t get those words out.

“So I kept eventing the horse, and then from then on – he must have known what I was thinking – he just turned a corner. He was amazing, and just started to win everything. You can put whatever slant on it but something on it wouldn’t let me do what I’d planned and hand in my notice on that horse, and from then on he was a very good event horse.”

Paul said Inonothing “epitomised the reason I wanted to be an event rider” rather than compete in other disciplines; he grew up riding former racehorses in Australia and “believed that eventing was a far truer test of horsemanship and the bond developed between horse and rider”.

“The maximum heights are the same, the maximum things we ask horses to do in eventing are the same, so a fairly average horse can still achieve, physically, the things you do in eventing,” he said. “But to excel and be competitive, you need a horse that’s trainable, and that’s where the horsemanship comes into it.

“Mannie learned how to trot for the dressage, and how to stay level-headed, or I learned how to keep him level-headed and not do his spinning. I had to teach him how to gallop; as a pure thoroughbred, you’d think he’d be quite fast, but he just wasn’t, he didn’t quite get the idea. Everybody used to say ‘Why do you always run this horse so fast?’ because I was always winning because we went so fast, and I said ‘I rode this horse slow once, and it terrified both of us’! He got his his braveness from from me and from the way I learned to ride him. He wasn’t naturally brave, he wasn’t naturally fast. He learned how to do those things, or I learned how to bring out the bravery in him.”

What dreams are made of

Once it clicked, Mannie and Paul were unstoppable. And although his Badminton win in 2010 was the ultimate, “the stuff dreams are made of”, the fact he won at every level on the way there was also very special.

“He felt invincible,” Paul said. “It took me days to be able to watch this video – and I still can’t watch it with the sound – and there’s a memorable moment from Badminton when we were racing alongside the camera on the quad bike.

“I knew that spot where the camera was, was where I was going to suddenly put my foot down. I’d learned the moment where I would just go. I cruised back up into the parkland after conserving energy, conserving energy, saw the quad bike, and had this almighty grin and said ‘Right now we can have some fun, come on, we’re going to overtake this quad bike’ – and we very nearly did. I still remember that moment, and that was like most of the cross-country rounds with him, we had an awful lot of fun, and we terrified the life out of the director, and the quad bike!”

Inonothing picked up a serious injury in 2010 and although he came back to the top, with a top-10 finish at Luhmühlen 2012, that was his last season eventing.

The best of care for Inonothing

“That was him all done,” Paul said. “I hadn’t necessarily thought he was going to be a happy horse in the field, but he was, and he had the best of care with the Waalers, from 2012 until just recently.

“It’s lovely that he never really left; not many horses, especially as good as he became, stay with that one venue?, or the one family, their whole life. He spent his retirement just being a horse, in their fields and at their house, getting lots of pets from them all the time, lots of apples and living as a very well kept horse.”

Inonothing enjoyed some more apples and attention on the day it was right for him to go.

Asked to sum him up, Paul said “tough, and heroic”.

“Thank you Mannie for everything,” he said. “Thank you to the Waaler family for allowing us to have Mannie as part of our team.”

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