Lucinda Fredericks looks pleased with her test
Hurray! It's the first week of the UK Eventing season in London Olympic year! Like every other season, that means Tweseldown hosts one of the first Open Intermediate classes giving the Badminton bound horses their first breeze up. Hosted along side a point-to-point course on sandy soil, Tweseldown gives an almost guaranteed run whatever the weather, and with a little sunshine providing a warm welcome, the southern UK based antipodeans were out in force.
In the UK we tend to think of the Aussies & Kiwis as similar, but watching both ride around Tweseldown there was a clear difference between their strategies for their horses' seasonal openers. From the outside it looked as though the Aussies were taking a more relaxed and steady approach, whilst the New Zealanders were really out to put their horses to the test.
Lucinda "Inflated"
Lucinda Fredericks was perhaps a bit of an exception to this rule, flying around the cross country on every mount I saw her on, and on Acheron, finished the last half of the course with her "life jacket" inflated. I'm not entirely sure what led to this, but I did hear she fell off or dismounted (dismounted I assume!). I did managed to watch her dressage test on Mr. Miller, the lovely expressive grey, on which she secured a well deserved win, and she is clearly in form having run a close second to Zara Phillips in another OI section on Flying Finish.
Paul Tapner and Kilronan
None of this overshadowed fellow Aussie team hopefuls looking for a slightly lower key start to the season, including Paul Tapner who ran Inonothing round quite happily to pick up a few time faults in his first event since the 2010 WEG, and also ran Kilronan, his CIC2* winner round in a similar fashion. Chris Burton brought four horses along for the OI class including the elegant Holstein Park Leilani, on whom he lead both the dressage and cross country phase at Pau CCI4* last autumn. Andrew Hoy an Sam Griffiths were also in attendance at Tweseldown for the Intermediate classes for a full list of results see: http://www.bdwp.co.uk/tw1
Chris Burton and Holstein Park Leilani
Many of the Badminton & Olympic bound horses will now move onto Lincolnshire Horse Trials in the Midlands & Aldon Horse Trials in the South West next weekend.
The Green & Gold Olympic Challenge continues........
Monty
Thanks to Monty White for our UK update. You can read more from him at http://blog.talkinghorse.net or follow him on Twitter @Monty_White
