The first international of the year for Tim and with four rides Oudkarspel was always going to be busy. Louella and Ruby are the pit crew and with 4 advanced tests to fit into just the one day of dressage they had their work cut out but every horse went into the arena looking immaculate.
Sunny but with a cold wind was the order of go and not allot of atmosphere for the dressage as they run multiple classes at the same time which is nice and relaxing for the horses at this early part of the season. Brookfield Future News (Matthew) probably got marked a little hard as second into the arena, he didn’t do anything really badly and but he also didn’t do anything spectacularly well either! He certainly failed to impress the judges for a 38.5.
Next up, Gloire de Marchenval (Louis) put his serious face on and, as always, tried his heart out. He’s still green at this level but held it together until the second change which he executed more like Bambi than Valegro and the last halt where he simply went sideways. A 32.8 was very credible.
Garcon (Tibo) has the slightly unfortunate thing of being in the same year as Louis, kind of being like the twin brother of the school prefect when you are the poster bad boy for the class. He was a brat on the ground last year but seems to have come through the winter with a slightly different game plan and he tried very hard to do the right thing as well. A couple of mistakes saw him sitting on 33 which is an improvement on both Blenheim and Boekelo 4 star tests.
Falco was the last horse of the day and it was nice for him to have the laid back atmosphere for a change after all his high profile international starts. He gave a beautifully relaxed display and quite rightly headed the field on 26.5.
Showjumping on Friday afternoon which looked fairly chaotic! The main ring is pretty tight and the warm up was a sort of every man for himself type of affair with not much room at all. It’s all a bit agricultural rather than slick but the OC is trying so hard to accommodate everyone the atmosphere is great. Like allot of shows in Europe they are cramming every level possible into 4 days so that always gets a bit frantic. The track itself was fairly plain, think West Wilts Equestrian as opposed to Aachen and the sparse fence decorations were some small shrubby trees in wheel barrows! Utterly practical I guess but not entirely sure that it really worked from a designer ethos. The backdrop was the podium which was constructed out of big straw bales with some sponsors canvasses tied onto it. Hung in portrait but printed in landscape so quite tricky to read. But they had put the blocks for 1, 2 and 3 on some red carpet at the base which was a nice touch!
Matthew was quite feisty and keen and just rolled the front rail of the oxer out of the double for 4 faults, Louis managed to get a rub at fence 2 in front and behind and still left the poles in their cups which is the sort of thing that just happens to Louis, who then jumped beautifully. Tibo was fairly argumentative in the first part of the track and had the same fence out of the double as Matthew and then got more rideable and just didn’t jump high enough at fence 10 which actually belies the fact he jumped some good fences.
By dint of being last to go Falco had much the quietest warm up of Tim’s horses and as expected he jumped the most beautiful round to retain his lead in the class by some 4 points which is impressive at 4*S level but not really surprising. Cross country is scheduled to start tomorrow at 1.44 CET and is live on https://www.clipmyhorse.tv/en_GB, all scoring is on https://online.equipe.com/shows/78334
Photo credits Rachel Good.
