Being a great cross-country rider requires the skill, strength and experience to help your horse when things don’t go according to plan, as well as setting them up in the best possible way to successfully jump the fences they are facing. But even the most talented and skillful riders will have occasions when things don’t go smoothly – sometimes they will stage an impressive recovery and other times they won’t.
Here we celebrate some of the greatest cross-country saves we’ve seen over the years from top riders including William Fox-Pitt, Andrew Nicholson and Sir Mark Todd.
Great cross-country saves
William Fox-Pitt was competing with Cool Mountain at the HSBC European Eventing Championships 2011 in Luhmühlen, Germany when they survived an unfortunate stumble in the water, which could have easily resulted in a dunking for horse and rider. The pair also defied gravity at the Rolex turn towards the end of the course to completed without faults to help Britain to win silver and finish 7th individually.
William’s ability to retain a cool head – and his balance – under pressure is also shown in this archive clip from Badminton 2003, when his ride Highland Lad left a leg at the first element of the bounce of rails into The Lake. The horse’s athleticism combined with William’s excellent balance saved what could have been a very wet result for both horse and rider.
Andrew Nicholson is widely considered as one of the best cross-country riders of his generation, and this is in part owing to his ability to stay in the saddle during challenging situations, such as this famous moment riding Mr Smiffy at Burghley in 2000.
Andrew also demonstrated his incredible core strength when producing an impressive recovery during this uncomfortable moment jumping a rail-ditch-rail combination at Badminton 1995.
Badminton 1995 goes down in the history books for being the occasion when Sir Mark Todd rode much of the cross-country course on Bertie Blunt with just one stirrup.
“Our cross-country round was pleasantly incident free until, landing in the dewpond near the Luckington Lane, I felt my left leg slip down sharply. The stirrup leather had broken,” Mark wrote in his autobiography So Far, So Good. “Instantly I realised that I couldn’t give up and would have to keep going somehow, despite the fact I was only a third of the way round with some of the hardest fences to come.”
In an incredible display of grit and horsemanship, Mark completed the course by hitching his left leg right up to the pommel of the saddle for the galloping stretches so as not to be banging around of the horse’s back, and then dropping his leg back down for the fences. He said: “The jumping was almost the least of my worries; the galloping was excruciating.”
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