$8 Million National Reining Horse Association (NRHA) Rider Andrea Fappani wasn’t exactly gunning for an open championship on Lectrifyn Metallic at the National Reined Cow Horse Association (NRCHA) Snaffle Bit Futurity. He was hoping he’d learned enough and trained his horses well enough to make the Limited or Intermediate Open Finals though.
Reining to Cow Horse
After becoming the all-time leading NRHA rider, Fappani wanted a new challenge. He didn’t want to stop reining, but he knew he needed to find more ways to continue developing his horsemanship.
When he began his cow horse experience nearly two years ago, Fappani went nearby to Corey Cushing’s facility every day to work on his cutting and fence work skills. Once Cushing moved to Texas though, Fappani began working cattle at his own place everyday.
“Randy Paul designed this place so it was already set up for cattle,” Fappani said of his facility.
He didn’t want his learning to slow any though. So he often went to other trainers or invited them to his place in order to develop the best skills possible.
Fappani has attended the NRCHA Western Derby in 2022 and ’23, but has been waiting to try his hand at the futurity.
The Right Horse
Timothy Anderson was willing to take the risk with Fappani and purchased Lectrifyn Metallic (Metallic Cat x Lectrifyn Royalty x One Time Royalty) from EquiStat Elite $8 Million Rider Adan Banuelos as a two-year-old.
“The reason why I wanted to start with one with good basics in the cutting is because I didn’t know much about it,” Fappani said. “So I bought him towards the end of his two-year-old year from Adan, and he was already pretty good in the cutting but he had no idea how to do the other two events. So, I concentrated on putting a little bit of reining on him and then, working down the fence. But he’s been a really fun horse.”
Although Fappani didn’t quite get him reining as nice as he might’ve liked, the pair marked a 218 in the rein work finals, and worked well together to mark a 219.5 in the herd work finals. Down the fence, the pair marked a 212.5 for a total of 650. Not only was that score enough to earn them the Limited Open Championship and $20,000, they finished eighth in the Intermediate Open for $5,500 and tied for 14 in the Open to earn another $12,333.33.
“He’s very natural, both in the cutting part of it and going down the fence, he taught me a lot. And that was the whole point was to find a horse that could teach me a lot as I was trying to train on him,” Fappani said. “So I feel that in the last 12 to 15 months my knowledge in the sport has really improved, and I think I’m ready now to get to the next step to where I started a couple of these here from the beginning. Hopefully we can get to show them again next year, it will be the first time that I’ve done it myself from the beginning to the end.”
