A new concept for a new situation

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My team and I have built up our annual Sport Horse Sales into an event with a global profile. The format for our 16th International Sport Horse Sales on 21 November at our equestrian centre in Goch has been adapted by the organisation team in light of the current COVID-19 situation.

The global pandemic has changed our lives and forced us to come up with new ideas. We put a lot of thought into how we could organise the auction. Cancelling the event in November was never an option for us, especially since we’d had a lot of enquiries from potential buyers overseas. So we worked out a brand new concept for the 2020 auction that works despite all the pandemic-related restrictions.

This year the two indoor shows on the weekends of 13-15 and 20-22 November at our Equestrian Centre will form the basis of the auction. There will be a presentation of the horses in the auction collection at the first of the two shows on 14 November. On the following days potential buyers will have the opportunity to make appointments for try-outs. Then the auction takes place during the second show weekend on the evening of Saturday 21 November. As a result of the COVID-19 restrictions there will only be a small number of invited guests and bidders in attendance. The rest of the world can watch the auction on the tried-and-tested www.clipmyhorse.tv platform, which also has an easy-to-use online bidding function.

The collection includes around a dozen top show jumpers between the ages of five and nine with very interesting and in some cases international competition placings. We decided to look for a few slightly older auction candidates with excellent placings this year – horses that our customers can start competing on right away.

Ten year-old Beauville Z. by Bustique, one of the lots in the 2016 auction, is a shining example of the calibre of horses in the Hetzel collections. In early September he won the Grand Prix at the substitute event for the cancelled CHIO in Aachen with Dutch rider Maikel van der Vleuten. Last year the duo also won the five-star Global Champions Tour class in Monaco.