Winter Dressage Championships 2024, Parc Roscoe

Parc Roscoe and Laura Wells competing at theWinter Dressage Championships 2024 — (Image credit: Kevin Sparrow)

Last summer, Parc Roscoe’s life hung in the balance with a severe sinus infection. In the past few months, the spirited 13hh has not only qualified but gone on to finish third in the Prestige Novice Silver Winter Championship at the 2024 NAF Five Star Winter Dressage Championships.

“Last year, he had a really serious sinus problem and we thought even if he survived we’d never be able to ride him again,” she said. “His owner Jacqui Holford sent him to Liverpool to have pioneering surgery – and his vet believes he’s the only horse who has ever recovered from what he had. She had to open up an area in his sinuses so he could get air in, or he would have died. The pressure was distorting the bones in his face and could also have compromised his eye.”

“He’d had an episode in the school where he’d shot backwards, spun and thrown Laura up in the air; she went flying,” she said. “We thought, ‘there is something wrong, this isn’t normal’. Then when Laura was cantering in the field, he came back with a nosebleed. I didn’t think much of it, but it happened the next day, and the next and the next, so we got in touch with the vet and they quickly referred him.

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Martha is an experienced journalist who is mad-keen on horses and dogs. Her reporting CV includes the Paris Olympics, European championships, Aachen World Equestrian Festival and World Cup finals. After growing up with assorted liver and white springer spaniels, she enjoyed 14 years with two rescue dogs. Now, her constant companion is Fidget, an extremely energetic and habitually muddy black and white springer. Martha has written on topics as diverse as a top horse’s clone to the best GPS trackers for dogs, as well as equestrian and rural matters for Country Life, The Field, The Times, The Spectator and The Telegraph alongside Horse & Hound.

£50 pony survives near-fatal infection to scale podium at Winter Dressage Championships

From £50 foal purchase to the 2024 Winter Dressage Championships

Surviving serious illness is just another highlight in Roscoe’s incredible story against the odds. Bought for just £50 as a foal from the Builth Welsh Pony Sales, Roscoe was destined for a showing career. His switch to dressage is impressive, given he’s dwarfed by most of his warmblood rivals.

“He’s a Welsh section C but at 13hh he isn’t really big enough, although he’s done well,” said Jacqui of the nine-year-old. “So last March he started with British Dressage. He thinks he’s as big as all the other horses.”

They clocked a score of 69.51%, with their canter work a particular highlight, and the C judge Kim Warren put them in first on 70.37%.

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