Blair Europeans’ countdown diary: 3 weeks to go

Over the past week, most of our time in the Blair European eventing Championship office has been spent co-ordinating deliveries to site, collating packs for our trade stands and sending our grandstand tickets out.

Sponsor’s boards and adverts are starting to arrive and we look forward to setting them up closer to the event.

The event programme is also coming together and this year we will be unveiling a new look and we can’t wait to see the final product.

I work closely with our event director, Alec Lochore who I have been playing time zone tennis with this week as he has been in Rio as part of his role as technical delegate for the 2016 Olympics while the test event was taking place.

The course building team are sanding and painting the wooden carvings to create course designer, Ian Stark’s cross-country fences. The course is going to look spectacular and we can’t wait for you all to see it. Now that the livestock are out of the fields, our fencer is taking out all of the field fences, so that we can mow the course from end to end.

My job as assistant event director has many parts. This week we spent a day helping with the annual ragwort pull. The horse trials take place on part of the organic farm at Blair Castle, therefore we cannot use herbicides to eradicate the ragwort. One day a year the horse trials, garden team and rural department work together to keep this toxic plant under control — a glamorous side of the job!

The British Eventing BE90 and BE100 Arena Eventing Championships, sponsored by Kent & Masters, and Open Intermediate Arena Eventing will take place on Wednesday 9 September at Blair Castle. Entries are still coming in and our onsite stabling is filling up fast, but please send your forms in quickly as we do have limited spaces left.

Do you fancy being part of the Blair 2015 team? We are searching for a couple of members to join our site team to help for a couple of weeks prior to the event. It will include mainly manual labour on site to help set up the stables area, horse walks and country fair arena. In return you will have tickets to the event and there will also be a monetary contribution. If you are interested and would like to find out more please contact info@blairhorsetrials.co.uk

There is excitement in the office this week because Joules has just launched their Official Joules collection for Blair 2015 (pictured). Take a look at the new collection here www.joules.com

I will catch up again soon,

Nicky

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