Breezy and sunny at Hartpury today with a busy schedule for the team with 7 horses running various phases in their respective classes. So nice to have the horses in the permanent stables and they are tucked away in a quiet dead end row which is just perfect for them and their PA’s Jess, Lou and Beth cater for their every need just metres from the truck.
Global Quest (George) was first up for Tim this morning with the 4*Short showjumping. George made light work of the track with a lovely clear and was allot more focused and on the job than he was at Aston le Walls for sure!
Next up was the British Open Championship jumping and Tim’s first ride was Happy Boy. Happy is such an enigma of a horse, he would have made a brilliant French resistance fighter in WW2 as he is completely unreadable and totally unpredictable. He had plenty of time in the arena to acclimatise as the ground crew checked some rails, cantered off looking sublime and then two strides out from fence 1 gawped at the bottom white guard rail and made Tim flap his elbows to ensure he made the distance. He was spooky as hell over the first 5 and then settled to jump a beautiful round. It’s like Trigger Happy TV revisited.
Vitali was next up for Tim and that is always a pressure but today was yet another cool, calm and classy clear as Vitali jumped another really solid round and retained his 6 point lead in the class. That is quite some feat as the class may be small but it is full of 5 star horses.
Jonelle jumped Grappa Nera first and Grape is not easy to jump as her preferred mode of speed in the jumping is more breakneck than jump off. Jonelle gave a masterclass in not interfering but keeping a rhythm and Grape left the arena on a really cool score of zero and the aura that she has of taking all of the credit. That’s what super models do.
Chilli’s Midnight Star (Ollie) has no such starry illusions, he does not think he is Brad Pitt, he is just a really genuine working class boy who would like to break through the glass ceiling. He put in a really impressive cool, calm and collected clear and Jonelle was delighted with him and he strolled back to the stables with the swagger he deserved.
George stormed around the 4*Short cross country adding just 9.2 time over Hartpury’s undulating terrain for a great return to international competition. He was superb everywhere and relished the amazing effort that Jump1 have put into the going with the course a green ribbon in a sea of brown grass that winds up and down the hills. They finished in 15th in a huge section of class horses and set the scene for their Autumn campaign.
Last rides of the day were in the 3*Long for Gloire de Marchenval (Louis) and Faerie Good Golly. Again the ground was much lauded and both Tim and Jonelle had great spins. Louis picked up 1.2 time to sit in 3rd overnight with a super clear and Golly zipped around for 1.6 time to climb up into 9th spot and both look on form to tick the pesky 3Long box. Just a jog and a showjumping to go for those two!
Team NZ had a basic tent on site for owners and riders and as always Ginny Loisel did a fantastic job of running a lunchtime slot with picnic boxes in a very limited space! It was, as always, well attended and much appreciated and fun to be a part of.
Tim headed out to the cross country on the monkey bike with Otis and Abel in front of him close to the end of the day to watch Jonelle go cross country on Golly. It’s a proper hike at Hartpury out to the cross from the truck park, a good 10-12 minute walk but the road route is on private college ground and very safe. As he passed me with the kids and a baseball cap on I reckoned he had about 3 minutes before college Health and Safety kicked in and sure enough, I was stopped by a steward some 2 minutes later and questioned about the Kiwi flouting their rules with such abandon! Tim was hunted down, told to wear a helmet and, as the steward said to me, ” he has a small child in front of him!”. I could only reply that actually he had two small children and all was good.
Tim was told he could ‘push’ the monkey bike on the uphill route back to the truck to swap it for the E bike. As Tim said, the E bike goes as fast as the Monkey bike but probably isn’t that stable. And he had to abandon the kids on the side of a hill in a public domain which apparently was perfectly acceptable to H and S! Luckily there were plenty of friends there to watch the kids, Tim swapped for the E bike and I will leave it to you to decide whether he rode the bike back or pushed it round the corner and jumped on board or walked it all the way home.
The British Open is live on https://horseandcountry.tv/liveevents tomorrow (Sunday)
Live scoring on https://www.eventingscores.co.uk/events/event.php?eventid=2622