Tiecheng Chen has two purposes at the 2023 National Reining Horse Association Futurity and Adequan® North American Affiliate Championships: One is to compete. The other is to gain knowledge to share with fellow reining enthusiasts back home in Beijing.
This year, Chen competed in Non Pro classes on his mare Mine Would B U in the Adequan® Arena. The 2018 mare was sired by Gunners Tinseltown and is out of ARC Shesa Walla.
“Today, he found out there are a lot of technical details that he should pay attention to every day,” Chen said through his interpreter and girlfriend, Oli Chen. “He paid much better attention to details today than yesterday. Some things he improved, but some he missed. But this is reining.”
This *is* reining – learning a little more every day. NRHA Professional Devon Warren is helping the Chens with their journey.
“This is also why we like reining,” Chen said. “This is how they attract us. You have to adjust every detail, every point of how you meld together with your horse. There’s always something else.”
When NRHA Professional and Hall of Famer Doug Milholland visited China, Chen learned about reining.
“He showed us how reining is, and it’s such an amazing game to do,” Chen said. “So we started to fall in love with reining and chased him all the way to here. So this is a totally new world. It opened the horizon for us.”
Chen has been competing at the Futurity and ancillary events since 2018. He competed at the NRHA Derby and the Colorado State Fair this year. The Chens have two horses in the United States and are gathering horses to ship back to China.
“We’ll continue learning reining here, and we continue to look for more good horses to help the horse business in China start,” Chen said. “We promote reining, so we share those experiences that happened here in China. So a lot of people already read the stories and watched his videos, so they got very interested in reining.
“We’ll need all the help from the community! We really welcome the great clinicians, trainers, and judges. Go to China to share the experience, the knowledge, and techniques. We also want to invite more Chinese people to come here to join this game.”
