Por Jesika Millano
Para AL DIA TODAY
MIAMI – Antares de Valparaiso arrived at the 2019 Ponce International Paso Fino equine competition last year with his owner’s and his trainer’s expectations of winning another prize, and that is precisely what he did.
Since then, the 5-year-old Paso Fino horse is enjoying his status as the new star of the United States Paso Fino.
He was crowned ‘Champion Reserved’ in the category of foals at the international competition held in December on the mythical track of the Juan “Pachin” Vicens Coliseum in Ponce, Puerto Rico.
The horse traveled from the Valparaiso Farms hatchery in Miami to compete in the Paso Fino Horse World Championship. After an excellent presentation, he was not able to finish due to health problems.
He went straight back to training under the mount of Guillermo González.
The horse comes from a lineage of two generations of champions.
His father, Tormento de la Virginia, holds a record that has never been beaten and has won the world championship four times. Antares’ mother was ‘La Estrategia de Valparaiso’, who was the daughter of ‘Torbellino de la Sierra’, with grandmother ‘La Pistola de Valparaiso’, daughter of the great ‘Profeta de Besilu’.
This gives Antares the best pedigree of those who have been among the best in their time.
Nelson Primus is the proud breeder of the horses.
“Many years ago, when starting my odyssey of raising horses, I could only dream of athletes like Antares. I would never have imagined that it would take me 35 years to achieve that dream,” he says.
“It has been a long road, but I feel so fulfilled that it has finally become a reality. I am now starting to see the fruits of all of my labor,” he adds.
“I feel a tremendous sense of pride having raised, trained, and competed with horses who have won over and over again.”
The horse is fed six times a day with a diet as strict as that of a high-performance athlete, but hay and water are available all day in his barn.
He is trained for one hour each day and has a 24-hour veterinarian available. When he is not practicing Paso Fino or eating, Antares is loose in the pasture frolicking at free will.
He has participated in six championships with his first being when he was only three years old. Although he was young, he won first place. That competition was in August 2018 in Miami’s Tropical Park.
A month later, he was crowned champion in the Paso Fino foal category at another competition held in Perry, Georgia.
In April 2019, he won second place in the category of foals in the “Extravaganza” competition held in Ocala. Three months later, he won first place in the four-year-old colt class and was crowned as the great champion of the Miami Summer Festival at Tropical Park.
He then participated in the National Paso Fino Championship in Georgia, where he won fourth place. The Ponce International win soon followed.
Primus, his sole owner, ‘La Estrategia de Valparaiso’’ and gran‘La Pistola de Primus, its sole owner, is also the breeder of his mother ‘La Estrategia de Valparaiso’ and his grandmother ‘La Pistola de Valparaíso’.
“It has been such an honor to have achieved an entire generation of greatness, in addition to training the horses and having the pride of competing with them,” he said.