Leopoldo Palacios seemed a head taller than the others. Maybe it was the way his broad chest stuck out, or the way the other men circled around him.
Or maybe it was just his white cowboy hat.
At 70 years old, the Venezuelan equestrian course designer spends 11 months of the year traveling to arenas around the world, and on Monday his destination was Lake Charles. The original designer of The Stables at Le Bocage in south Lake Charles, Palacios returned for a few days to work on footing in the venue’s newest arena.
Palacios stood in the arena for a while Tuesday morning, hands behind his back, scanning the dirt floor. His eyes seemed to be measuring its breadth and depth, assessing its quality, making certain it was all packed down right so that each horse could trod on it comfortably during competition.
He said he does similar design work almost every day. He has worked in venue and course design since the 1980s, officiated competitions in over 35 countries and cofounded Aachen School of Course Design. He has also attended seven Olympic games, including Rio 2016, and was the official course designer for both the Beijing and Sydney Olympics.
Palacios comes in when the stadium seats are empty and the horses haven’t yet scattered the dirt with hoof prints. His job is to look at a space and envision its potential, to imagine how the horses will jump, how they will react to obstacles and what they will feel.
“They’re like people,” Palacios said. He removed his hat to run his hands through a full head of white hair, standing under the eaves of a stable during a short break from working on the arena footing. “You need to understand them a little bit.”
Palacios has made his life’s work the study of horses. After competing as a rider for about 20 years, earning himself the title of Venezuela’s “Rider of the Year” twice in the 1970s, he started designing courses. He said course design requires constant travel, meaning he’s only home for a few days at a time between jobs.
“It’s a way of living, living in hotels, one place to the other,” Palacios said. He said that although he reduced his work load from 40 shows a year to about 30, it’s still hard work.
“I have the fortune to work in my hobby ... but I’m getting old,” he said smiling.
Palacios said that no matter how many years he works, his job always challenges him. When designing a course, he must balance the horse’s need for comfort with its need to be challenged, he said, and there’s never a perfect solution. He said that even with simple work, such as preparing footing at Le Bocage, “there is no recipe.”
“The perfect footing doesn’t exist,” he said. There is only “good footing,” he added, and it can always be improved. Palacios said preparing good footing and course conditions is essential for a horse to both be happy and perform well.
The key to preparing good conditions is being realistic about what a horse can do, he said. He said the goal is finding the “challenge that they can do, not the challenge that I imagine they need to do.”
Palacios said this same philosophy bleeds into his personal life. People, like horses, have limits to their ability, and these limits differ with each person, he said.
“Every horse and every person has a limit — this is something that we need to understand,” he said, his light expression growing more solemn. He said this realization has helped him to accept people as they are, without always measuring them up against who he thinks they should be.
“It’s helping me to forgive a lot of people,” he said. “And teaching me to not be angry when people can’t do something.”
Seeing people through a realistic lens allows them to lead happier lives, he said, ones that are balanced between comfort and the challenge to always become better.
In this way, he finds horses are not so different from people, he said, and has dedicated his life to better understanding and relating to each.
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