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HOT CHILI: Pole bending, barrel racing horse named SDQHA AQHA Horse of the Year, ridden by a girl 

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Ruth Nicolaus

Arina and Chili at the 2024 SD High School Finals. The duo finished in fourth place in the pole bending. Photo by Chuck Miner.  
6 poles arina haugen

It was two old college friends touching base that introduced Arina Haugen to her horse Chili. 

And now Chili is the 2024 SDQHA AQHA Horse of the Year, ridden by a girl.  

The fourteen-year-old mare, whose registered name is VF A Famous Lady, was owned by Mike and Becky Grant and their daughter Rayne, of Wheatland, Wyoming. 

Rayne had ridden Chili in junior high and high school rodeo, winning the National High School pole bending, reserve barrel racing and all-around titles, and Chili winning National High School Rodeo AQHA Horse of the Year. 

But Rayne was off to college at Laramie County (Wyo.) Community College, and Chili was unemployed, sitting at home. 

The Haugens were in a bind in 2023. Older daughter Landry, a senior at the time, was to compete at the South Dakota High School Finals in Pierre, while middle daughter Arina was headed to the National Junior High School Finals in Perry, Georgia (youngest daughter, Blaisely, is ten years old.)   

Landry and Arina had shared pole bending horses during the regular season, but there was no way they could get the pole bending horse from Pierre to Georgia for Arina to ride.  

 “We had to put Arina on another horse, and we didn’t have anything else that was good enough,” mom Dee remembers. “Arina had qualified in four events, and I thought, maybe she doesn’t need to go in the poles.”  

But then Tyler, who college rodeoed with Mike Grant, remembered the Grant family and their horse, and wondered what Chili was doing. So Dee called Mike. 

“What are you doing with Chili?” she asked, and Mike replied, “call Rayne. I’ll bet she’d love it if Arina rode her.”   

So Rayne got the horse legged up, and a week before National Junior High Finals, the Haugens picked up the mare in Douglas. 

Arina got two rides on the mare before she competed in Georgia, “and everywhere she went, she was remarkable,” Dee said. Arina and Chili’s pole bending runs got faster as the rodeo went on: 20.1 seconds in the first round, 19.9 in the second, and then 19.6, and 19.3. “She was just phenomenal.”  

At National Junior High Finals that year, Arina won a round, placed fourth in a round, and came back to the short go second high call, but hit a pole.  

From Perry that year, she and her family went straight to Guthrie, Okla. for the Little Britches Rodeo Finals, where, on Chili, she won reserve in the barrels and third in the poles. 

And after Little Britches Finals, she competed at the WCRA Finals in the 15 and under youth division, where she was the pole bending champion for her division (and did well in the barrels, too).  

“It was just like this storybook tale,” Dee said.  

But they didn’t own the mare; the Grant family did. “We wanted her, but I knew I’d have to sell a kidney,” to own her, she said.  

So she called Rayne, and the two worked out a deal. Rayne “wanted some younger horses to step up her game and train more,” and she took some of Haugen’s horses as part of the trade for Chili.  

Dee said that if Arina ever questions if her daddy loves her, he proved it with the horse trade.  

Tyler had recently bought a three-year-old cow horse, and that was one of the horses Rayne picked. “We giggle,” Dee said, “that the next morning, Ty went out to feed and his mare is gone. Now you know what dads do (for their kids). If your kids ever wonder if you love them, there you go.”  

Chili, who is by Born To Be Famous with Frenchmans Guy in her pedigree, is not very good at the gate, Dee said.  
 

“We have to have a game plan at the gate,” she said. “She rears and wants to go in. She would scare a lot of young girls.” 

The Haugens have a strategy: they keep Chili and Arina away from the gate till the arena is ready. Either Dee or Tyler is there with them, and they have a buddy horse with her. Arina’s goat tying horse is Pepper, “so it’s usually the Chili-Pepper team,” Dee quipped.  

The horse is not only talented, but tough, Dee said. Chili, in a fifteen-day period last year with state high school rodeo, ran in both the barrels and the poles at four regional rodeos and three rounds at state, a total of fourteen runs in fifteen days. Arina won the state barrel racing title last year, against a tough group of horses, Dee said.  

Chili was a little reserved when they first got together, but she’s warmed up, Arina said.  

“When I first got her and went to pet on her, she wouldn’t let me love on her,” she said. “Now that we’ve gone together more, I can tell she likes me more than anybody else. She’ll walk right up to me and go to pushing on me. She knows that I’m hers and she’s mine.”  

Chili loves to rodeo. When it’s time to load up, “she’ll go ahead and jump on the trailer,” Arina said. “She’s so smart, I swear she knows she’s going to go and make her run.”  

The Haugens hope to pull embryos from Chili. “I definitely want some babies out of her,” Arina said. “I don’t want her bloodline to end, because she’s so cool.”  

The whole experience of getting Chili from Rayne Grant was inspirational to Dee.   

When Rayne let the family borrow the horse, she was very helpful to Arina in how to ride her.  

“Rayne said, ‘this is how I ride her, this is what I do, treat her like your own,'” Dee said. “Rayne was so good and kind about it, it still makes me teary. The opportunity she offered Arina is not something everyone would do. 

“There are times we all have that struggle, where life is tough and people are rotten.” But Rayne was the opposite. “I felt like my faith in humanity was restored.”  

Arina is also grateful to Rayne. “She’s told me to enjoy every ride, because she misses Chili.”  

 “What a blessing it has been for Arina and Chili,” Dee said. “They love each other.”  

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