Many of the 17 grandchildren of the late Harry de Leyer, the Dutch-born horseman who, with a former plow horse, Snowman, scaled the heights of the show-jumping world, have ridden, but only one, Jason de Leyer, one of Andre and Christine de Leyer’s twin sons, is riding and showing at the moment.
The quiet-spoken 20-year-old has been riding for only a little more than a year. “Dirt bikes,” he said, when, at the indoor ring at his parents’ East End Stables in East Hampton Saturday morning, he was asked what his sporting interests had been as a youngster. “And in middle school I played baseball, pitcher, and first base.”
It was at a show last year in Saugerties upstate, a show that his parents and their clients always went to, that he first began to think he might ride. He told his parents he might give it a shot.
Andre de Leyer said he’d let him ride a couple of the stables’ horses to see if he liked it. His parents, Jason said, had never pushed him.
Jason and one of those horses, known familiarly as Velvet, a big 14-year-old Dutch Warmblood mare who competes as Ladys First Farm Velvet Royale, immediately clicked, and soon he was riding her from 6 to 8 p.m. three times a week after an 11-hour workday with Earthworks Services, evidence that the persistent spirit of Harry de Leyer, who in his later years was known on the show circuit as “the Galloping Grandfather,” lives on.
“I could tell right away that we had a connection,” Jason said. So much so that recently, at Saugerties, he and Velvet won the first class of the jumper division of the Marshall & Sterling Insurance League’s finals, a breakthrough win, over jumps of around three feet, that he very much wants to build upon.
He and Velvet had first shown last winter in Ocala, Fla., where his parents spend a month each year. “That was my first show ever — three days after we got down there. It was the first time I’d ever been in a grand prix ring. We were fourth out of 14 or so, going up against young riders from all over,” riders, he agreed, with grand prix ambitions.
“They were thrilled,” he said of his parents’ reaction. “Everybody was thrilled. I’d done better than expected.”
He and Velvet showed all summer, though not, Jason said, at the Hampton Classic. Knowing that they had already been among a handful of horse-and-rider combinations to qualify for the Marshall & Sterling finals, “I didn’t want to wear her out.”
While they had won the division’s first class at Saugerties, “I did poorly in the second class the next day. . . . I wasn’t finding the right distances — we either went into the fences too fast or we were too far away.” Which was too bad, he said, because the second day’s class offered some decent prize money.
Besides working long hours and riding, Jason keeps himself fit by working out five times a week at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, building strength, especially the core muscles, which he said were the most essential when it came to riding.
Velvet, he said, was off for three weeks now. “We’ll start practicing again in mid-October, and in February we’ll go down to Florida. . . . I want to get better and better and better.”
“Your grandfather would be proud.”
“Yeah, my parents are.”
Moments later, having been introduced to Velvet, who was in a stall nearby, this writer asked her, “You like jumping?”
“Oh yeah,” said Jason, who added that he rode her very fast.
Did he talk to her? “No, but we communicate when we ride. . . . If it weren’t for her I wouldn’t be where I am today.”