0
.
.
.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
goudenkpaa.jpg 37.14K
22 downloads In Memoriam
The Dutchman that stopped riding is finally re-united with his horses.
Now he might well wish to mount them again.
Cor has never forgotten the horses that once brought him fame. He had five big pictures
of them at the walls of his Chiang Rai home. None of these pictures showed a saddle and
on none of them you would see a rider. In his thoughts Cor wasn’t sitting on their backs
anymore; He walked next to them.
Cor’s relationship with horses was full of love and drama.
Being an excellent horseman he was invited to fulfill his conscription at the Royal Stables
in The Hague. The greatest height was the yearly ride on the third Tuesday of September :
Accompanying the Golden Carriage of Her Majesty the Queen of the Netherlands on its way
to parliament.
Its greatest low was the day that he had to ride to the slaughterhouse of The Haque and pick
up the tail of one of the horses under his care. It was traditional protocol that this should be
done on horseback. For him it was a ghost ride: A lonely rider crossing right through town with
a horse tail in his saddle bag and his eyes full of tears. He still considers it a miracle that he
managed to reach the stables without accident. “It was as if I was riding in a dream”, he told
me once, “I couldn’t see, my heart was broken”.
Later on Cor won almost every jumping competition in which he participated and for two years
he was Dutch Master. Soon he was invited to ride for the bigger European stables, mainly in
Germany and Italy. He entered a different world, a world in which love for horses seemed to
be a weakness. He was enabled to ride top-horses, but his love for them slowly but sure put
an end to his career.
The crown caps under the saddle might have hurt Cor more than the horses. The crying of the
horses during the beatings the nights before the tournaments finally tore his soul apart.
The day came that Cor put all the cups he had won in the back of his car and brought them to
the home for elderly horses in the dunes at Scheveningen.
He returned home, put all his medals in a bag, walked three blocks far away and dropped them
in a garbage can. After that day he never mounted a horse again.
My thoughts go to his father, now about 85 years old, who once survived the concentration
camp Auschwitz and now has to endure the sad fate of surviving his only son.
Cor was 58 years old when he passed away last week. May he rest in peace.
L.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Gouden_20Koets.jpg 1.37MB
37 downloads
