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When Couronne pointed the tips of his nostrils at Sembrancher, the whole village came running, Jérôme Voutaz first. It was at the end of the 1980s, he was 13 years old and his farmer neighbor had just acquired his army mount, a valiant franches-montagnes that he could not bring himself to leave once his service was over. “I was lucky: after three weeks, the other children gave up and I was able to take care of them. A little boy’s dream,” remembers the friendly Valaisan. Quickly, the young teenager and Pierre Emonet, said neighbor, come up with a strange enterprise: stick a cart behind his rump. Then find three other equines to put together a four-horse team. They acquire foals, raise them. They teach them the fundamentals at the same time as they discover them.
Thus begins one of the most beautiful stories of French-speaking equestrian sports in recent decades. Today, the 46-year-old Valaisan is the Swiss reference in four-horse teams. He competes around the world, always with Franche-Montagnes, whom he trains and cares for on a daily basis, always with Pierre Emonet who hosts them on his farm in Les Moulins, always in Sembrancher. The atypical profile of the leader (a mechanic by training, he is director of a garage in Martigny) and his equine partners (he is the only one to lead franches-montagnes at such a level on the four-horse circuit) have made him one of the mascots of the Geneva International Horse Show where he will compete in World Cup events this weekend.
