Cudal is not normally considered one of the major equestrian centres of world competition, but young local Darcey Eyb Is changing all that.

 The bright 15-year-old James Sheahan student recently won her class for dressage and best rider overall in a major world competition — doing it all from the local Showground!

 But her win was no fluke, Darcey has literally been in the saddle since she can remember.

 “I’ve been riding my whole life, since I was a baby… I just love the challenge of it,” she said. “I just like to keep pushing myself up the levels.”

 Her enjoyment of working in tandem with a horse in competition is that each animal, like every person, has their own personality.

 “I think it’s partly that all of them are different, and you have to work with them in their own way,” she explained.

 Darcey estimates she puts in a fair chunk of each day on her current ride, “Sir Versace” (family pet name, “Ricky”), but it’s not all riding and practice.

 “I do about two hours per day, that includes training plus grooming, feeding, cleaning-out the stables… everything,” she explained.

 So, when the Australian Pony Club recently announced an international competition that would be held via online video, she jumped at the chance.

“I had to put in all my performances and scores in competition, I did Class Two and Class Five… we then had to submit a video online, we did it all at Cudal Showground,” she said.

 “It wasn’t the best I’ve ridden, but it was nice,” Darcey said of her performance.

 Mum Sarah, a local school-teacher, said that the requirement for full-audio on the tape — to ensure that no coaching instructions were used — led to some humorous results.

 “Cudal Showground is next to the greyhound training and their children also fired-up their two-stroke motorbikes, so there was a fair bit of noise,” she laughed.

    “We had old-car tyres around the ring as markers, you would not believe the indoor facilities for riders at some of the other countries… the Americans, Canadians, Hong Kong… the Germans and Dutch.”

 Sarah was grateful, though, for Darcey’s chance to compete in an event that, normally, her family would not get close to being able to afford. “I’m a school-teacher, my husband works out at the mine, we’re not a wealthy family at all,” she said.

 Darcey’s win though, has only fired-up her ambition for international riding competition. “I want to do it forever, and eventually, go to the Olympics,” she said.

 Known to her family and friends as “Dixie”, Darcey also has an eye on that most competitive of mixed sports, pentathlon — fencing,  swimming, show-jumping, and pistol shooting and cross country running (combined).  

 “I’m already doing tetrathlon (a modified, junior form of pentathlon), so that’s my my next aim,” Darcey said.

 Unlike many in horse-related competition, Darcey doesn’t come from a family with long historical links to the sport. “Not really, I’m the first person in my family who has had horses,” Sarah explained.

 But, she said, Darcey, if not born in the saddle, soon made her preferences known, even as a baby.

 “She was on a horse when I was riding, we used to put her on a little Shetland, ‘Fast Eddy’, it was the only way to keep her occupied,” Sarah laughed.