Local teen brings competitive horse riding to new heights

Park City teenager Ivy Melman cross-country jumping on ten year old Teddy. Photo: Mellisa Band

PARK CITY, Utah — 14-year-old Ivy Malman and her ten-year-old half Quarter Horse half Welsh Pony, Teddy, are jumping through hoops to ensure they continue to team up to compete in dressage, cross-country jump, and show jump. Combined, the sport is known as three-day-eventing.

The list of priorities this incoming freshman student has on her plate already is impressive and possibly daunting to any adult. Between school, holding a job, attending voluntary extracurricular studies, maintaining a social life with friends and family, training at Tally Ho Stables (a place she found on her own), exercising herself and her horse as an elite athlete, as well as feeding, grooming and the omnipresent cleaning up after said horse. One would think the day-to-day is keeping Malman from an impressive competition schedule, however, you would be mistaken.

Special snuggle sessions with Teddy can certainly make it all worthwhile, and Malman wouldn’t have it any other way.

“She’s been horse-crazy since she was old enough to talk,” said Melissa Band, Malman’s mom.

In Park City’s Montessori school, Another Way, horses were provided onsite for student riders. During the height of COVID, Malman’s grandma (in the running for the unofficial Best Grandma Award), who wanted to ride as a kid but was never given the opportunity, decided to pay it forward. She bought Teddy for her granddaughter to fulfill her own dreams of riding.

Seeing Malman in her happy place makes Band happy, too, despite the continuous upkeep of horse ownership which involves bills for hay, grain, vets, and trailers since these horses can’t simply travel to competitions in the back of the family car.

The inside joke toward parents of Park City skiers is a friendly reminder that, in their time of seemingly nonstop check writing, at least their equipment doesn’t have to eat twice a day.

Dream team Teddy and Malman got fifth overall in the adult division of a recent competition, and took second in the dressage discipline, making her dad, Brandon Malman, super proud. 

Equestrian is the only Olympic summer or winter sport in which men and women compete against each other, with the focus on the true athlete, the horse.