Photo courtesy of Josh Szukala Tegenya Graziano, a 17-year-old from Fredonia and a member of Summerdale Sunset Riders 4-H horse club in Chautauqua County, is shown on her horse, An Impressive Icon.

Sometimes if you plan for success, you can achieve even more than you thought possible.

Tegenya Graziano, a 17-year-old from Fredonia, knows that quite well.

Graziano is a member of the Summerdale Sunset Riders 4-H horse club in Chautauqua County. Her love for horses and desire to learn more about them led her to compose a lecture on early horse domestication for her required 4-H presentation last winter.

Her goal was to be awarded top place at the county level. If she achieved that, she could look to the regional level, and then possibly be selected for state-level presentations at Cornell University last May.

But Graziano didn’t just meet all those goals, she surpassed them. Now, Graziano is headed to the 2022 Eastern National 4-H Horse Roundup in Louisville, Ky., from today through Sunday to give her presentation.

Graziano was chosen to present at Cornell University along with 4-H horse participants from many other counties in New York state, where she won the blue ribbon for illustrated presentation to earn her way to Louisville.

“I was really nervous, but I guess I don’t show it, other than being grumpy with my mom,” Graziano said of the day she presented at Cornell. “The judges were really nice and asked interesting questions.”

In Kentucky, 4-H presenters will be given a tour of the famous Churchill Downs race track and the Kentucky Horse Park before presentation day.

Her lecture — titled “The Botai and the Domestication of Horses — shares information on a Central Asian people from 6,000 years ago who were likely the earliest domesticators of the horse. Graziano thought the Botai horses were the ancestors of the horses she has worked with, but through her research she learned they were not. Rather than giving up, she continued to research and discovered that instead, they were the ancestors of a horse breed originally native to the steppes of Central Asia called Przewalski’s horse, commonly referred to as “the only wild horse breed.”

“Except they aren’t,” said Graziano. “They are actually the feral Botai horses, kind of like Mustangs are feral Spanish horses. So there are no truly wild horses after all.”

In next year’s 4-H presentation, Graziano will be answering the next question, “If our horses aren’t descended from Botai horses, where did they come from?”

Graziano also traveled to the New York State Fair in August with her western pleasure horse, An Impressive Icon, born at Double D.A.B. Riding Stables in Ripley. She came away with two blue ribbons and two red ribbons for the horse she trained herself. Her horse also placed first in trail, dressage and two western classes in October at the 4-H Intercounty team competition in Niagara County.

“He’s a really nice horse who was well brought up and just didn’t know anything about showing,” Graziano said. “… It was because of all the great people at Chautauqua County 4-H and Double D.A.B. Riding Stables who I learned from all these years that I was able to be his trainer myself.”

Graziano is continuing to ride with M&M Equestrians, a team coached by Shauna Brown in Union City, PA. Graziano was chosen for M&M’s national team this past June and traveled to Tennessee to compete.

Graziano hopes to take her horse with her wherever she goes to college next year.