If you want a horse that moves like poetry and a trainer who lives like a character in a gritty French film, you brace yourself and dial Jean-Luc Dubois.

The Colorstride team risked life and limb (and a perfectly good pair of designer breeches) to visit his facility—a perpetually muddy barn with a broken roof where the only thing consistently polished are the hooves of his champion horses.

Jean-Luc, a former French team rider, is the definition of the unpredictable genius. His methods are utterly chaotic, blending moments of pure brilliance with episodes of complete lunacy. He teaches using feeling and instinct, not diagrams or training scales, often shouting commands that defy translation: "Le Vitesse!" (The Speed!) or "Donnez-moi le feu!" (Give me the fire!). He is known to swing from hysterically funny to terrifyingly angry in the time it takes for a horse to chew the bit.

His students—a hardy, slightly shell-shocked lot—endure his rants because they know his results speak for themselves. The chaos breeds champions.

The Colorstride Insider Tip: Jean-Luc insists on using only ancient, patched saddles that he claims are "ridden in by the gods," and he only accepts payment in cash, or sometimes, bottles of exceptionally good red wine. The most verifiable rumor is that he talks to his horses in fluent, rapid-fire French, and, disturbingly, they seem to understand every word. He once traded a high-potential youngster for a motorcycle and a particularly aromatic wheel of Roquefort cheese—a move he defended as "a matter of balance." For Jean-Luc, the horse is an artist, and he is merely the volatile, chain-smoking curator.