When it comes to her horse, Courtney Sendak knows the first question she’ll get before anyone asks it.
Sendak’s horse, Where's My Tail, a 2011 Thoroughbred mare (Double Honor x Crafty Prospector) owned by Krysta Paradis, known in the barn as "Detail," was born with a large portion of her coccygeal vertebrae missing, which gives her an unusually steep hind end and a missing tail.
"Everyone, everyone wonders about that," Sendak said with a laugh.
With everyone’s focus on Detail’s unusual appearance, most tend to overlook the fact that the mare has climbed the levels in the sport of eventing despite the missing vertebrae.
From the Picnic Table to the Barn
Sendak's path into eventing started on the sidelines. Her mom took weekly lessons and would park young Courtney at a picnic table with coloring books. It quickly became clear that horses were the main attraction. When it came to the riding part, her mom's instructor, Jill French, waited until she turned 6, so she was old enough to start to understand and execute what she was being asked to do.
However, the early lessons were not exactly smooth.
"I fell off like every time," Sendak recalled. She also disliked both cantering and jumping. Despite her family steering her toward other sports, the bug had bitten her. Softball mostly meant picking flowers in the outfield, and in basketball she was too short, so she mostly elbowed people. "Horses just made sense," she said.
Sendak grew up in the hunter/jumper world, showing on the B circuit. When Sendak was 13, her barn had a mass exodus, and with one instructor left, she was offered a deal: she would teach Sendak, but only if she did eventing.
"I was like, ‘How hard can this be?’" Sendak recalled.
The answer was a reality check. It was, in fact, harder than she imagined, but she quickly fell in love with it.
Balancing the Barn and the Classroom
After college, Sendak went all in as a professional athlete, with two upper-level horses in the barn. Then came a tendon injury to her Advanced pony Wil’Ya Love Me. He was a talented 1997 Connemara gelding (Grange Finn Sparrow x Finn) she had taken from Junior and Young Riders up through the levels. Following Wil’Ya Love Me’s injury and combined with a long list of young prospects who did not pass their vettings, she realized she wanted more stability. So, to help alleviate her worries about being able to pay a vet bill, she went back to school for her master's degree and teaching certificate and found she loved “teaching about dead people,” aka history.
Today she has two jobs at once. She teaches full-time at a middle school, then heads home to run her farm, Defying Gravity Eventing in Clarksville, Md., where she has her own horses and full-time training clients. She is also the mom of a 1-year-old, and admits that coffee and Celsius energy drinks are doing some heavy lifting while she changes all her hats throughout the day.
"[Having a baby] has rocked my world more than I ever thought imaginable," she says of juggling it all. Having a steady job, however, gives her something to fall back on, because, as she puts it, “horses break your heart all the time.”
The Mare Who Never Left
“Detail” had just come off the track at Penn National when her now owner, Krysta Paradis, found her in 2015. Detail finished her racing career with 23 starts, which included one win and seven other top-three finishes. She arrived at Sendak's farm soon after for what was supposed to be 60 days of rehab for an injury and restarting. The mare is, in Sendak's words, the “queen of freak injuries,” and when she is not in consistent work, she has some athletic moves, including “porpoise-like” leaps and a few spins. A friend of Paradis knew Sendak tends to attract quirky mares and thought they would mesh well.
"And then Detail never left."
When Detail attended a few events to get some show miles under her girth, the mare placed first and second consistently, so she moved from Novice to Training level, and then onwards to Preliminary. Detail competed in her first CCI2* when Sendak was five months pregnant, but when Detail began jumping up high enough to touch her belly, Sendak decided to pause.
When Sendak returned to riding after having her baby, Detail was the first horse she sat on, "because I knew she would take care of me."
The pair stepped up to Intermediate this spring and have now finished their first CCI3*. Detail is not the flashiest mover; she is short-strided and is built a little downhill. Over a small fence, she can look comical.
"She looks like a spider monkey," Sendak says.
But put a big fence in front of her, and she rises to the occasion.
"Her heart is just extraordinary,” Sendak added.
Managing a Mare With No Tail
The lack of a tail comes with some daily logistics. In the height of fly season, Detail is covered head to toe in fly protection, drenched in fly spray, fitted with fly boots which Sendak replaces twice a year, and lives in a stall that is equipped with two heavy-duty fans. She is always the first to come in and the last to go out. The one plus to not having a tail, Sendak has found is that because Detail must swing her whole neck around to reach every part of her body; she has become “the most supple horse” Sendak has ever worked with.
The biggest management challenge is her steep hind end, which makes the push over big fences harder.
"It really has been a delicate dance," Sendak said, “We make sure she feels well supported.”
Because Detail does not have a tail to help add lift through her back, the focus now is core and hind-end strength. After having a few hind-end rails in the CCI3*-S at Morven Park, Sendak is already planning to help Detail do the job she loves.
"We're going to have to definitely go to the drawing board this winter and come up with better exercises to get her stronger for next season," she said.
A Believer in the Thoroughbred
Sendak is a vocal fan of the off-the-track Thoroughbred, even though she notes the sport has been moving away from them at the upper levels.
“A good one,” she said, “is well worth the investment. There's no quit in Detail.”
On a day of competition when she kept hearing about refusal after refusal around the cross-country course, she knew that if she got the mare to the fence, Detail would try her heart out to jump it.
As big as Detail's heart and kindness show on the course, off the course, she’s the same. In the vet box at Morven Park, she lowered her head to nuzzle a local boy who had come with his mom to take pictures. It was a touching moment that reflected why the mare takes up a big place in Sendak and Paradis’ hearts.
Why Horses are Everything
Horses are everything to Sendak, and as part of that “everything,” her day starts at 5:30 in the morning, before school, when she arrives at the barn to feed.
"There's something so spiritual about that quiet time in the barn," she says. "It's just such a reflective time. Horses are always there when life implodes. They don't judge you, and they don't care if I look like a mess. It's just such a centering, fulfilling thing to take care of a horse."
Along with taking care of them, she loves teaching horses as much as she enjoys educating children. Finding a horse, building their skill set, and then either competing with them or sending them on to someone else to enjoy has brought her an immense amount of joy.
"I tell myself that I've now given this horse a job. It's very fulfilling,” she said.
For Sendak, it all comes down to the connection between people and animals, and to do her job alongside a tailless mare with a heart as big as any in the sport; that job is a good one.