How often have we all been told a horse has “a funny jump” or is, for all intents and purposes, relatively “nondescript” for the task at hand, let alone for the top levels?
And yet, how often are those who assign such labels wrong?
Those two terms used in the first sentence are the very descriptors used to describe a two-year-old La Biosthetique Sam, shortly before he was sold at auction for the bargain price of £6,000. Now, nearly 24 years later, that very horse — who had gone on to become one of the all-time greatest event horses — has been laid to rest at his home farm in Germany, where he had lived out his retirement with his rider, Michael Jung. The 2000 Baden-Württemberg gelding passed away on February 16, as announced by Michael on social media.
“This evening i lost my best friend, Sam 🖤💔,” the post read. “We reached every milestone side by side, and for years I found daily happiness in seeing you grazing in the field. Thank you for 20 years together. You will be deeply missed by all of us. Rest in Peace my friend 🌈”
The success of “Sam” can’t be understated. Silver at both the 6- and 7-year-old Young Horse World Championships to kick things off with a bang. A European Championships individual bronze two years later, and a World Championships title added on in 2010. Two consecutive Olympic gold medals. Eight CCI5* (then CCI4*) starts, all of them finished on the podium — three of those were wins. A World Cup title. Contribution a coveted and rare Rolex Grand Slam win. Sam was retired healthy in 2018, and lived primarily outdoors with fellow Jung superstars like fischerRocana FST until the very end.
Michael Jung and La Biosthetique Sam FBW. Photo by Jenni Autry.
A lot of accomplishment for a horse once called “nondescript”. But you can’t truly fault the originator of that label (who, likely, will never, understandably, raise their hand and say “heh, that was me,”). Most of you reading this can rattle off a handful of names that were likely labeled as such themselves. Because that, truthfully, is eventing at its core. Horses who aren’t “supposed” to compete at the sport’s highest levels still can, and do. The sub-$10,000 horse has just as much of a shot as the $500,000 horse, with the right partnership, ability, training, management and — key, non-negotiable — desire. And yes, it should be said here that Sam was well-bred for the job — he was 76% blood with both European and Irish Thoroughbred influence on both sides, and his predecessors had produced multiple Olympic champions.
And yet, Sam may not have turned heads the way a stunning mover like familiar U.S. stars Chin Tonic HS or Mai Baum would, but where he won was in the margins. The details. Fitting, consider his equally detail-obsessed rider. In Sam’s case, correctness mattered more than extravagance. And while yes, many horses are inherently blessed with the good moving genes, correctness is always the goal.
“The stand-out thing for me was the two of them together – they were an amazing partnership,” Andrew Nicholson told Horse & Hound for a wonderful feature on Sam published in 2021. “The horse looked quite small and plain outside the arena, but when told to perform, he danced.
Michael, for his part on picking up the horse at a young horse sale, noted that Sam’s trainability — his eagerness to be ridden and taught — was what stood out more than anything. “Sam was quite good as a young horse, but he wasn’t really a special horse from the beginning,” he told Tilly Berendt in a Chronicle of the Horse profile on the horse. “He was always just good enough. But then we started to train him, and he just kept going and going, and learning always, and then, after three or four years, he had grown up and kept getting stronger and better. He was always very trainable.”
That trainable, ridable skill that’s often difficult to find, paired with a rider that thrived on precision, proved to be near-unbeatable. Together, Michael and Sam hold a string of some 20 finishes on their dressage score throughout their career, and stepped up to the plate on more than one occasion to finish inside the time on cross country when most others couldn’t. Their consistent scores in the post-2018 era 20s weren’t a result of flash. It was the margins: the extra half-point nods earned for a crisp transition or flying change, the tenths of seconds shaved by the ability to ride tighter, smoother, the economical skill to jump clear on Sundays. That’s something we can all learn from, even if we’re not on the “best” horse in the barn. These margins equalize us, enable us to compete — even when the odds say we can’t.
And as we wrote recently, these great horses don’t come often. We’re lucky, in every generation, to have our share of greats. Future hall of famers are only thoughts in heads now. But even when we know we’ll always have greatness in some form, it’s fitting today to pay tribute to the greatness we won’t likely see repeated in many ways.
Much like our counterparts in other sports, it’s a fascinating thing to see people roll their eyes at repeated greatness. Give someone else a chance, they say. We’re tired of reading the same story. But the reality — the true appreciation — seems to be more accurate when seen through the lens of the extreme difficulty that comes with repeat success. It’s why it doesn’t happen often, and why it never stays around forever.
That’s what we’re left with now. The same story: Sam wins again, to be repeated when we’re asked who the greatest event horses of all time are. We were never sad to write the story over and over again. We see it through the lens of gratitude, of wishing we’d savored it just five minutes longer when it was happening instead of rushing off to write the story.
Thanks for the ride, Sam.
Enjoy some pieces of Sam’s story in the videos below:
