As Tim was finishing his second cross country at around 8am UK time Jonelle was en route to Tweseldown in her car with her 5 horses in the Didi and the Mini ( the 4 horse and the 2 horse) due to meet her there. No ‘living’ in either of these trucks so Jonelle had gone back to pony club and had dressed in her breeches, walked the track in said breeches and just changed tops throughout the course of the day for the phases via cover of the car door! Meanwhile, swanning around in the pop out living in Holland was TP who was all done for the day by 9am Dutch time!
Full Monty de Lacense (FM) ploughed through the tacky ground in his arena for a 33 which would have been a bit better had Jonelle not practised flying changes yesterday! She told his owners that she had considered it, then decided that she should just crack on and then FM put in a beautiful but not required flying change in his test so he definitely wants to move up to advanced! He then really quite struggled in the showjumping warm up to get his feet out of the ground. Tweseldown had stepped in at 5 days notice to replace the waterlogged Cirencester Park and they had moved the SJ to a new area from 2 weeks ago but since the day was a mixture of sunshine and huge downpours the ground cut up fairly quickly. It was impressive then that FM went into the arena and jumped a great clear round as he certainly wasn’t loving it outside.
Chilli’s Midnight Star ( Ollie) is just a pro these days and a 29.3 test was followed up by an unfortunate pole down three from home when he had jumped a great round up to that point.
Fernhill Kankan is a wiły black mare and she had conned Jonelle into riding her in a snaffle on the flat at Lincoln last week instead of the double. Today she was back in the double and a good mark of 29.8 was the result. Kankan was one of the early ones to showjump but she didn’t mind the tacky ground at all and jumped a super round and looked very happy with herself.
Senor Crocodillo (Diego) is another to tick the pro box and with a 29.6 under his belt he too jumped a super clear even though he was probably the one that had the trickiest warm up as by that point, in search of good ground, some bright spark had placed both the oxers in the warm up side by side on a slope so with grooms trying to put the fences up and down with riders aiming for the fences it was a tad dangerous until Jonelle started yelling “Yellow” or “Blue” on the approach which definitely cleared things up a bit! He jumped a copybook clear in the arena and exited looking very happy with himself.
L E B Lias Jewel had the first fence down behind and then the out of the treble in front before finding her mud feet and finishing well. It was a far more accommodating team at the showjumping gate than a couple of weeks ago and we got Jonelle’s 5 through in around an hour which was pretty good but days when it is nearly all multiple riders are always the smoothest.
All 5 horses ran cross country clear with the Tweseldown crew having worked their socks off to run a different track to the one two weeks ago. The low sunshine was exceptionally bright into the water and by the time Jonelle ran her last horse 9 AB had been taken out as there had been a couple of incidents but she was happy to be driving out with some 30 combinations yet to go! Jonelle clocked up between 7.6 and 12.8 time on all five and ticked all the boxes for a weekend that was originally meant to be in Kronenberg, then re routed to Cirencester and eventually wound up at Tweseldown!
A huge thank you to Rachel and her team and Jump1 for putting on the show at such short notice. Much appreciated!