Prue Barrett, Australian National Performance Director, Eventing
With the trial of the FEI Nations Cup™ Eventing 2012 ready to kick off at Fontainebleau (France) in March we caught up with our National Director for Eventing, Prue Barrett, to get her thoughts on this new initiative. “The first thing we have to remember is that is a trial year to see how the Nations Cup goes and not something set in stone. From an Australian point of view we usually have riders going to certainly four of the six venues for these Nations Cup™ events so it’s very likely we will have teams at those events. It will be a riders decision as to whether they want to run at these events and this year, as we are all in full Olympic mode, we will not be actively sending riders specifically to these events. Several of our London bound horses were planning on going to Fontainebleau as part of their Olympic campaign anyway so we had already organised for an Australian team vet to be there. Now with Fontainebleau being named as the first leg of the Nations Cup I can confidently say we will have an Australian team taking part because they were going to be there anyway. Boekelo have run a team event for a long time (and actually called it a Nations Cup). Australia won it last year so if would be nice if we could repeat that performance this year. Again we always have several riders at Boekelo, so putting a team together should be fine. If we do have more than four or five riders going to an event that is part of the Nations Cup the selectors will decide who will be on the team, which is just what we have done in the past at ‘team’ events. Riders who are on our Elite list get support from the High Performance Program for CIC3* and CCI34* events so there will be support for those riders who want to include the Nations Cup events as part of their program.”
