Following Canada's Equestrian Team

Pia Fortmuller & Orion

For those of you who don’t know Pia Fortmuller, she hails from Alberta and rode to tremendous success in the Young Rider ranks earning gold medals.

Pia has been in Germany for the last couple of years training with Olympic German medalist Heiki Kemmer. One of her top horses is Orion (who some of you may remember as Leslie Reid’s mount for the 2008 Olympic Games), her declared mount for the 2012 Olympic Games.

If you’ve never met Pia, she is absolutely one of the nicest, most gracious and wonderful people you ever could meet. Not to mention a terrific rider!

Pia recently broke her wrist while riding a rambunctious youngster, but being ever the competitor, she didn’t let that slow her down and instead created an ingenious plan to keep her training on track. Read all about it here: piavirginia.blogspot.com

Pia also didn’t let the cast stop her from taking Orion into the CDI Bremen, where she earned some fantastic results! In Pia’s words:

“The summary of the show is as follows : Orion was a Star 🙂 On the saturday we scored a 65.66% in the Grand Prix which qualified us on to the Special on Sunday. In the Special Orion and I performed our best test yet and scored a 67.24%, placing us 11th in a field of tough competitors and giving us another qualifying score for London 2012!
So basically the moral of the story is: If life gives you lemons… make lemonade out of it!”

LOVE IT!

During the Olympic Excellence Series hosted by the Canadian Olympic Committee last fall, we were asked what 5 words best describe how we want the Canadian Olympic Team to be seen as we walk into the Opening Ceremonies in London, and into our sports venues.
The words chosen were: Proud ~ Unbreakable ~ World Class ~ Fierce ~ Relentless

Pia – you are definitely the epitome of being Fierce & Relentless!!

Best of success to you in your Olympic journey.

Check out the list of 38 horse/rider combinations declared for the 2012 Canadian Olympic team: http://bit.ly/x5JMpD

And keep track of who is on top of the leaderboard here: http://bit.ly/ApmdEX
(right now it’s Ashley Holzer with Pop Art)