Steele Family Warmbloods in Scots Bay, NS, has sold a Glamourdale x Totilas colt foal to an undisclosed new owner in Denmark who will have the youngster in training with Olympic dressage riders Cathrine Dufour and Nathalie Zu Sayn-Wittgenstein when it’s time for his early education. The fancy black 2023 colt will be housed at Blue Hors, one of the leading stallion stations, training and competition stables in Europe.
The colt’s dam is Ovada MTA, a four-year-old KWPN NA (Totilas x Negro x Westpoint) bred by Danielle Landreville of Mont Atoca Dressage in Ste Melani, Quebec. “After searching three years for a suitable Totilas daughter to add to our breeding program, with the help of Tanya and Evi Strasser we were able to obtain Ovada MTA,” said breeder Theresa Steele. “Tanya was instrumental in putting together the deal and making sure the sale went through smoothly. We purchased Ovada as a three-year-old in July and we made the decision to breed her right away to the best dressage stallion in the world – Glamourdale [via frozen semen].”
The foal, whose pending name is Total Glamour, will be staying on the farm until March 2024.
Steele Family Warmbloods is a small breeding farm on the coast of the Bay of Fundy run by the mother-daughter team of Theresa and her daughter Lindsay. These dedicated dressage horse enthusiasts have built a “small but mighty” breeding program over the past 25 years which currently includes seven mares and a stallion, Piccolo, by Peking, a registered Westphalian licensed by the Canadian Warmblood Horse Breeders Association. “We normally have between two and five foals per year and we have sold horses to most provinces in Canada, as well as Florida and New York,” said Steele proudly. “We are constantly upgrading our mares and gradually adding top-bred KWPN mares and importing semen for breeding AI.”
Theresa explains that how the sale happened is “a bit of a fairy tale. We posted a picture of him on a Facebook page in Europe at a day old; I didn’t even mentioned that he was for sale. Soon I started receiving messages from the buyer asking questions. When I found out the person making the inquiries was from Denmark I thought ‘oh darn, that’s never going to work, when they find out the colt is in Canada they will lose interest.’ Then I thought this must be one of those scams that horse owners have to beware of LOL! But after about six weeks of talking and figuring out the details, we finalized the deal.” She adds that there was also considerable interest in the handsome black colt on this side of the world.
“We are so incredibly excited that one of our foals will have the greatest opportunity to reach the stars with this wonderful and supportive new owner,” says Theresa. “Having the absolute best opportunity for him to be raised and ridden by the best in the world is just an amazing dream come true!”