News

Motawaazy or ‘Wazzy’ as he is known at home, is Catterick's Equine Ambassador as part of the ROR Horses for Courses programme. Motawaazy ran 11 times at Catterick between June 2021 and May 2024, winning on 4 occasions. He has now retired from racing and has moved home with his owner Victoria Greetham and her daughter Zara. We will be checking in regularly with him to see how he is enjoying life after racing!

In this blog, we hear how Zara and Wazzy got on at their first ever Riding Club event! You can read the previous blogs here. 

Wazzy has spent most of the winter in the field relaxing, but now that the weather is better Zara has started riding him on some evenings after school.

He had a visit from our dentist Dan and he was very well behaved.

He is still barefoot and is coping really well now after 6 months without shoes. His feet really struggled at first and he was very footsore, but our farrier said that they were so bad, it would do him the world of good to have the shoes off for the winter. He’s always had bad feet. In the arena he is fine, but he wouldn’t cope hacking out so we are going to put shoes on soon so that Zara can do a bit more.
Zara is now 5, so was able to join a riding club. At Easter she attended her first ever event which was “Children’s Intro to Dressage” clinic. The night before she gave him a bath and was really excited.

When we arrived Wazzy got himself in a real tizz and started sweating up and jogging around whinnying. He was quite a handful, and I did a couple of Superman style moves on the end of the lead rope thanks to his unwanted enthusiasm. At this point with a 5-year-old child at a kids pony event with a big horse I did think maybe we should quit equestrianism and take up tiddlywinks instead, but luckily after 20 mins he settled down. I think he believed he was at the races, which is only natural after 38 runs. He’s so quiet at home so I hadn’t seen that side of him for a while!
After he settled down Zara hopped on and he did the 1-hour clinic and was absolutely perfect. He went back to his quiet lazy self and didn’t put a foot wrong. He really tried his best and was a Gentleman looking after Zara doing her “up downs”. The children learnt different circle sizes with coloured cones and poles to help them and it was a great lesson. At the end the children did a mini dressage competition riding “Intro A”.

This was both Zara and Wazzy’s first ever dressage test and they did really well! The instructor even taught the children how to salute at the end (see pic!) We are planning more similar events and hope that once Wazzy realises he is not at the races anymore he will settle much quicker.