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Fortune Magazine
My Idea of Fun: Show Jumping
September 22, 2003
 Doreen Toben
Executive Vice President and CFO, Verizon Communications
[According to Fortune, Toben is the 17th most powerful woman in business in the U.S.]
Horses are an incredible amount of work. I was raised on a horse farm in Harding Township, N.J. My father worked on Wall Street. There were always horses on the property, and we grew up with horses and fox hunting with the likes of Jackie Kennedy and stuff. When you got home from school, you would have to muck your own stall. You would brush your own horses. You would groom your own horses.
My daughter does show jumping, and we have six horses. If you think of the Olympics with maybe one rail lower, that's the kind of jumping I'm talking about. We do horse shows every single weekend. It's a real bond between the two of us, because we can talk about it. My husband talks to my son about basketball. It's also a very stay-out-of-trouble, all-encompassing, wear-blue-jeans-and-a-T-shirt-with-no-makeup-and-your-hair-pulled-back kind of lifestyle.
Our horses are warmbloods, which come from Europe. A thoroughbred, which you see on a racetrack, is considered a hotblood. The warmbloods are much more mellow, and they're also bigger. So we go over to Europe and buy them. Generally the ones that she has now cost someplace between $150,000 and $300,000. That's her cutoff. Some of these horses are half a million to a million. It really is a world unto itself. |
