Who's Who!

"We had the race won," a leading trainer in England once complained to Aline Holmes, saying that his horse was several lengths in the lead of a prestigious race, "until the saddle slipped. Then the jockey just worried about staying on the horse instead of winning the race. Someone should come up with a saddle that doesn’t slip."

Until that moment, Aline had figured that there had always been saddle slip and that there always would be. But then she wondered, why can’t someone come up with a way to keep saddles from slipping? She decided to do just that, and for the next two years she endured trials and a lot of errors before she finally came up with the first anti-slip saddle pad. The pad’s revolutionary concept used the horse’s body heat to form a bond between the horse and the saddle, so that the horse, pad and saddle all become one.

Aline decided to take the pad’s name from the other love in her life, besides horses, sailing. "A limpet is a mollusk that clings to the hull of a boat," she says. "It seemed like an appropriate name for a pad that clings to the side of a horse." And the Limpet Saddle Pad was born.

"I wasn’t really a product developer," recalls Aline, "I breed horses." Aline’s yard in the horse country Devonshire in South Western England, has produced top-level showing stock for over twenty years. The first trials with the Limpet pad were at her own yard, where she found that within twenty minutes of riding a horse with the Limpet pad, both the horse and rider noticed the big difference. "Once the pad formed the bond, it not only eliminated slipping but also the heat friction caused by other pads, so the horse’s back softened, the shoulders opened and we got six more inches of stride."

The first horse to use the pad in competition was Aline’s own Anglo-Arabian show hack, Racing Colours, who had won the Horse of the Year show the previous year without the benefit of the pad. The Limpet pad only seemed to increase Racing Colours performance and the following year, she repeated as winner of the Horse of the Year show.

After her own successful trials, Aline decided to try the Limpet Pad out on other disciplines, like racing, where trainers told Aline that in a close race, the six extra inches per stride could mean the difference between winning and losing. Soon the Limpet Pad was being used by several of the United Kingdom’s leading trainers like Lester Piggott, the most successful jockey in the history of England, who is now a trainer and Sir Mark Prescott, this year’s leading trainer of English flat racing.

Nikki Barratt, one of England’s top dressage riders, also agreed to try out the Limpet Pad. Due to a past injury, Nikki suffered from severe back pain and said that she hadn’t been able to sit her Olympic horse, Cerrutti, a 16 HH Warm Blood, in a sitting trot before using the pad. The considerable concussion absorption had enabled her sit deep without being thrown out of the saddle. Since her first ride, Nikki Barratt has been using a Limpet Saddle Pad and is currently England’s National Dressage Champion.

In every discipline, whether it was racing, eventing, dressage, endurance, trail riding or others, the Limpet Pad’s extensive trials proved remarkably successful and Limpet’s popularity began to grow. While the Limpet Pad is also now being used by members of England’s dressage and eventing Olympic teams not all the Limpet success stories involved top-level competition. Aline remembers a trainer who complained of his well-bred pony spending much of his time trying to unseat his eight-year-old rider and the trainer decided to try the pony with a Limpet pad. A few days later, the pony’s ecstatic young rider ran up to Aline at a show exclaiming that, "Now, Charlie goes with his ears forward in an outline."

After Limpet’s considerable success in England, Aline has come to the United States to introduce her pad to American riders and was in Arizona for the Scottsdale Classic. "We don’t have too many Western riders in England," she explains, but one Western rider who does recommends the Limpet Saddle Pad is legend, John Lyons. "Members of the U.S. Olympic eventing team are also using Limpet pads," explains Aline.

Asked if she planned to do anything differently in marketing the Limpet Pad in the U.S. than she had in England, Aline thinks a moment and replies, "I don’t think I’ll call horses, gee gees anymore. In England, they would know exactly what you mean but here they sort of look at you with blank stares. But other than that, I think that horses are pretty much the same the world over, and Limpet pad can benefit them all."

Anyone interested in information on the Limpet saddle pad can go to the Limpet website at http://www.limpetsaddlepad.co.uk or call Limpet’s toll-free number
866-860-1818.

 -- Reprinted with permission from Bridle & Bit