Horses born and raced in the U.S., Canada, England, Ireland, Brazil, France and Germany will be running in Saturday’s Arlington Million.
But they share a common body language in which Monty Roberts is fluent.
Roberts is a 69-year-old Californian who is leasing the 6-year-old German import Sabiango from the chestnut’s owner-breeder, Stiftung Gestut Fahrhof. His study of the body language of horses of all breeds has been his lifelong labor of love.
The first of his four books, “The Man Who Listens to Horses,” was on the New York Times’ bestseller list for 58 weeks. He has demonstrated his techniques for Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle. He has been the subject of documentaries on NBC and the BBC.
“My real thing in life is training and dealing with the brains of professional athletes with four legs,” Roberts says. “My greatest accomplishment was learning to be gentle. Without that I would have accomplished nothing. For centuries humans have said to horses, `You do what I tell you or I’ll hurt you.’ I’m saying that no one has the right to say `you must’ to an animal or another human.”
By creating a bond of trust through a communication technique he refers to as “Join-Up,” in 30 minutes Roberts can persuade an untrained horse to be haltered, saddled and ridden, a procedure that takes three weeks under the traditional methods.
“There are a whole series of things I go around the world trying to teach, taking pressure and violence out of the routine and getting the horses to want to do it,” he says. “I deal with them where they want to be with me rather than be away from me.”
Roberts is colorblind. The rare condition of seeing only in black and white gives him extraordinary night vision and he discovered equine body-talk when he was a child observing herds of wild mustangs in the Nevada desert through binoculars by the light of the moon.
“It nibbled at my subconscious,” he recalls. “Then I went to domestic horses and I saw something happen that the mustangs had shown me. I suddenly realized that they had a communications system and there was a way for humans to communicate. I began to experiment with that language.
“It wasn’t until 1948 (at age 13) that I really understood what I was doing. I became street conversant with that language. I learned in the equine universe every degree of movement has a reason. The horse reads my body language and I read his.”
Throughout his life Roberts and horses have been inseparable. As an 8-year-old, he was a stunt double for Elizabeth Taylor in “National Velvet” and was riding quarter horses in sprint races. When he was in college at Cal Tech in San Luis Obispo he joined the school’s rodeo team and became a national champion after injuries forced him to turn down a football scholarship.
Although it was an arduous struggle by 1966, Roberts and his wife, Pat, were able to achieve the goal he had set when he was a teenager–he founded Flag Is Up Farms, an equestrian breeding, training and rehabilitation facility in Solvang, Calif.
In 1977 a yearling Roberts bought in Kentucky became a resident of Flag Is Up Farms. The yearling was well-bred but didn’t bring the $30,000 asking price in the sales ring.
Roberts didn’t have $30,000, but he made a deal with the sellers–he would put up $10,000 and then pay the remaining $20,000 after reselling the colt as a 2-year-old.
“He weighed 612 pounds and was in pathetic condition,” Roberts remembers. “Perhaps because he was so thin I could see that he had the best skeletal balance of any thoroughbred I have ever seen. I went to work on him through the winter and then took him to a 2-year-old in training sale.”
The colt was sold for $175,000, giving Roberts a $145,000 return on his piecemeal $30,000 investment. Little did he know that the colt named Alleged would go on to become a two-time winner of Europe’s most revered race, the Arc de Triomphe, and be syndicated by racing tycoon Robert Sangster and associates for $16 million.
In the mid-1980s Roberts began holding public lectures and demonstrating his unique technique of introducing untrained horses to the saddle. American racing trade publications picked up on the story and the articles caught the eye of Queen Elizabeth, a longtime horse owner and aficionado. After inviting him to Windsor Castle and watching him demonstrate his techniques, she insisted: “There has to be a book.”
Roberts thought: “Maybe we can talk her into a video,” but the queen persisted and he subsequently wrote the autobiography, “The Man Who Listens to Horses,” that brought him international acclaim.
This reputation prompted Walter Jacobs, the owner of Stiftung Gestut Fahrhof, and his trainer, Andreas Wohler, to summon Roberts to Germany to work with Lomitas. The colt was a national champion 2-year-old, but he had an intense aversion to both being loaded into a van and into a starting gate and, as a 3-year-old, he was banned from racing because of his vicious attack on the gate crew before a race in Cologne.
Thanks to Roberts’ technique, Lomitas overcame his feeling of claustrophobia. After he demonstrated exemplary deportment in tests for the stewards, the ban was lifted and he went on to become arguably the finest German racehorse of the 20th Century and then one of his homeland’s greatest sires.
In 2001 Lomitas’ son, Silvano, became the only German winner of the Arlington Million.
It was because of Robert’s ongoing relationship with the Jacobs family that he was able to lease Sabiango in January and bring the 6-year-old half-brother of Silvano to his 164-acre California farm. Like Silvano, Sabiango’s dam is Spirit of Eagles, “a cheap, California-bred mare” he bought for $30,000 because he liked “her way of moving.” He then sold her to Stiftung Gestut Fahrhof.
“Sabiango was a horse who could run (he won two Group I races in Germany), but he was headed downhill,” Roberts says. “He had terrible trouble with his feet and was having trouble with his circulation and a compromised immune system. They were at wits’ end, and I told them I thought I held the key. When he came to the farm we did a stem-to-stern examination of this horse and got huge amounts of data. We did a lot of things that are out of the box to get him right, and every single thing worked.”
Sabiango made his debut for Roberts on June 12 in Hollywood Park’s Grade I Charles Whittingham Memorial Handicap and led all the way in the 1 1/4-mile grass race to win by three-quarters of a length.
Saturday at Arlington Sabiango will run his second race for Roberts. The Man Who Listens to Horses thinks that Sabiango’s body talk is suggesting that he can do what his German half-brother, Silvano, did–win the Arlington Million.
