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38 SIDELINES FEBRUARY 2011 FOR HORSE PEOPLE • ABOUT HORSE PEOPLE

The Death of a Pioneer

Gene Mische Passes Away at 79

By Kenneth Kraus/PhelpsSports.com T

he horse world lost of one of its true pioneers of the sport recently when legendary horseman Eugene R. Mische, the founder of Stadium Jumping, Inc., passed away on Friday evening, December 3rd, 2010, following a long, hard fought battle with cancer.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on June 26, 1931, Mische, more than any horseman in history, changed the face of horse sports in the United States, and especially in the Village of Wellington, Florida. The area that is now the Village of Wellington was no more than a crossroads when Mische frst arrived in the area to expand what was then called the Sunshine Circuit, a series of horse shows with stops in Winterhaven, Ocala and other spots on Florida’s west coast. Mische felt that it was important to draw the equestrian competition to South Florida, and his crowning achievement, the Winter Equestrian Festival, is now the largest and longest consecutively running sporting event in the world, each season drawing thousands of competitors and their accompanying support teams to Wellington.

Since the inception of the Winter Equestrian Festival in the

late 80s, the competition has grown from three show rings and a couple of hundred horses, to a massive undertaking that begins in January and runs through April each year. It now encompasses nearly a dozen competition areas and is the winter home to over ten thousand of the world’s fnest horses and riders.

All of South Florida, and especially the Village of Wellington, benefts from that amazing Mische vision of nearly three decades ago.

Mische was the founding president of the Wellington Equestrian Alliance and was deeply involved in a host of equestrian related issues that ranged from the creation of the Wellington Equestrian Preserve Area in the Village’s Comprehensive Plan, to ensuring that the Village’s codes and regulations help protect and enhance the equestrian community.

“I don’t know if there’s any one thing that I’ll be remembered for, but I hope when they judge me, they look at the overall contributions I’ve made and Stadium Jumping has made to the sport and to the industry,” Mische said last fall. “We were the innovators of so many things the horse world takes for granted these days. We were the frst company to ever have multiple shows, for more than one week, on a single show grounds. Now look at what you see across the nation, huge circuits of four, fve, six, seven and twelve weeks, all in one place. I am so proud that