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10 SIDELINES JUNE 2011 FOR HORSE PEOPLE • ABOUT HORSE PEOPLE E V E N T I N G

Five Questions for Mick Costello

By Lauren R. Giannini

Mick Costello builds cross-country courses for eventing and marathons for combined driving. His credits include 2010 Alltech World Equestrian Games, Fair Hill International, Jackson Hole, Radnor Three-Day, Atlanta Olympics and Rolex. The US Eventing Association honored Mick with the Posthole Diggers Award for course builders last year at the USEA’s annual awards luncheon. His work is his play and he’s happiest with tools and earth-moving equipment: “I can drive anything. I’m not much on foot controls. My Caterpillar has joysticks; my backhoe has a stick shift. At the Horse Park my favorite is the Caterpillar 287, a multi-terrain loader with rubber track.”

Sidelines: How did you make the transition from rider to course builder?

MC: I started in Pebble Beach Pony Club (CA) when I was nine. There were a lot of leftover Olympic horses from when the team trained out there in the ‘60s for Rome and Tokyo. It was quite an education. But to pay for the riding I started to build courses. I helped my brother Pete who was fve years older. In 1969, right after I graduated from high school, I built what now would be called one-, two- and four-star championship courses for a big Labor Day event. One was the size of Rolex. I didn’t build the whole thing: We had a crew, but I was overseeing it and we worked all summer. Eventing moved east in the ‘70s and took off. In about ’89 I started building Fair Hill (MD) and in ’91 I started doing the Radnor (PA) cross-country and it went on from there.

Sidelines: How far did you go with Pony Club and eventing?

MC: I was a “C”: on the day I was to go for my “B” test I had to put on a horse trial. I enjoyed working more than riding, which wasn’t a passion for me. I always took an interest in building jumps. My brother was a designer and a technical delegate, and I helped Pete full-time from 1985 to the early ‘90s. I felt I should do something well, so I stuck to the building. I wasn’t very good at the designing anyway, not really. I know my limitations, and my strength has always been building.

Sidelines: Do you give input about safety issues?

MC: I’ve helped the University of Kentucky program where I can. They’re doing a lot of experimental stuff with safety. One of the grad students made a collapsible table and they made a gate for David O’Connor: It was for a ditch with a wall behind it, and the mechanism was developed at UK. We have some demos with the current safety equipment – reverse pinning, Mim-clip, pro logs, frangible pins. If they get in trouble, these things help to save them.

Sidelines: The WEG animals were really amazing: Who does the big loons, ducks, squirrels, etc?

MC: One of the guys who worked for us had a brother whose wife was doing a doctorate at UK. Isaac Bingham studied art in college. He had never worked with a chain saw or anything and he did all the animals for WEG. Isaac would do a little clay model in the morning and by

evening he’d have the fgure roughed out. I have some seriously big chainsaws. He’d be on top of a fve-foot log with this 50-inch chainsaw, slicing into it. He’s really fast, and he paints them, too.

Sidelines: What was it like working with Mike Etherington-Smith?

MC: Mike and I spoke the same language. When Rolex needed a course designer, Janie Atkinson went to Blenheim (1993) and met Mike who’d been designing that cross-country since 1980, I think, and hired him for Rolex. I’ve worked with him since ’95: He is by far the best ever. I’d get little cocktail napkin sketches to build the jumps, but we wouldn’t build them all the way. He’d come to walk the combination with the technical delegate and I’d have to move something a little or raise it or lower it or change it by a half-inch. We had birch rails going into Head of the Lake at WEG. I had to put dye in the water three times to make contrast behind those rails, something I wouldn’t have thought of. Everybody jumped it terrifcally. Mike does subtle terrain things to help the horses jump. I think he sees the way a horse does. No question that Mike is the best. [Mick stated that he’s enjoying working with Derek di Grazia, who stepped up to the design plate at Rolex when Mike E-S retired.]

Mick Costello builds cross-country courses all over the country, bringing the designer’s ideas to three-dimensional life. On cross-country day at Rolex, he’ll move from jump to jump, watching the action and ready to fx something knocked askew, replace a frangible log or re-set a fence whose safety mechanism deployed Photo by Michelle C. Dunn