‘I’m mystified as to why riders haven’t got behind the chance to win £45,000,’ says Andrew Nicholson
Andrew Nicholson shares his thoughts on the racehorse-to-eventer challenge at Cornbury, cross-country riding at Blenheim and a grassroots event that impressed
Cornbury House Horse Trials is a very popular event and the organisers do a great job, but I was disappointed that riders don’t really seem to have got behind the Arena Racing Company racehorse-to-eventer challenge class.
The winner gets £45,000; with the exception of Defender Burghley Horse Trials and Mars Badminton Horse Trials, no other prize in this country comes near it. It’s not expensive to pick up a horse out of racing and not much effort to ride one more horse a day when that’s your job.
Riders need to see the bigger picture. They can’t expect sponsors to pump in the money if they don’t support initiatives like this, and an event like Cornbury attracts the sort of people new to the sport who may well become owners.
Fair play to Bubby Upton, who won the class this year; she can see its importance, and I’m mystified as to why others can’t.
Cornbury will host the new FEI World Championships for under-25s next year, and European riders are excited about going there. The advanced track, designed by Andrew Heffernan, looked good, and I thought the new layout, with the start and finish in a different place, worked well.
The shape of the gallop
I didn’t watch much of Agria Blenheim Horse Trials, but looking at the results and speaking to riders afterwards, how can they expect distances to ride as the course-designer plans them to if they are going too slowly?
The time has always been hard to get at Blenheim because of the two long stretches of water crossings. Competitors have to be up on the clock before they get to the first one or they will inevitably collect lots of time-faults, but so many of them seem to come out of the start box at a collected canter. They did so at Burghley, too. Is it the riders, is it the type of horse, is it their training?
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Holly Richardson’s horse, Ballyneety Silver Service, was in another league to most of the rest at Burghley – the shape of its gallop was totally different. Katie Magee’s Treworra was quick and a good galloper, too – the fact that Katie was second at both Burghley and Blenheim shows she’s doing something, in fact a lot of things, right.
The horses that are well placed in Blenheim’s eight- and nine-year-old CCI4*-S usually go on to do well – of my own ones, Avebury and Quimbo did well there before winning five-stars.
A supporting class at British five-stars?
Continuing along the line of “age” classes, how about a CCI3*-L for eight-year-olds at Badminton and Burghley?
If numbers of CCI5* starters drop, it would add something exciting to cross-country day for the spectators, without affecting those numbers further in the way that a CCI4*-S might. You could take a limited number of horses – those with the most international points – and give them a real introduction to big crowds.
A class like that at Badminton would be a first CCI3*-L for some, with gentler terrain at the beginning of the season, and Burghley would give them a stronger test in September. It would be very interesting to see whether the Dubarry Burghley young event horse final winners came back to the CCI3*-L there, and on to the CCI5* in time.
I do wonder why many riders take so long to bring horses through the grades these days. I expected my seven-year-olds to do two CCI3*-Ls and then a CCI4*-L in the spring of their eight-year-old year. Nereo did the advanced at Chatsworth as a seven-year-old, and he had one of the longest top-level careers of any horse.
I think a high-profile long-format class for eight-year-olds would help their development, and also act as a great marketing tool for riders – the prices of good horses of that age are very high.
At the lower end of the eventing spectrum, I went to Offchurch Bury for the first time in 45 years the other day. I was pleasantly surprised – it was a very
nice event with good ground and educational courses. I thoroughly recommend it!
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New Zealand five-star event rider Andrew Nicholson has won Burghley five times and took top honours at Badminton in 2017. He has won two Olympic team bronze medals and a team silver and is currently cross-country coach to the Swiss eventing team.