Fouaad Mirza is the sole representative for India at this week’s eventing World Championships in Pratoni Del Vivaro, Italy, but he’s enjoyed a reasonably successful time with a solid completion.
But it wasn’t all plain sailing for Fouaad, as during his cross-country round with Seigneur Medicott, his number bib came loose and he ended up having to discard it halfway round the course as it was flapping around his body and face.
“I had a slight malfunction with my number bib and I felt it flapping behind my bottom and then I thought I better take it off before distracts me any more,” explains Fouaad. “Maybe I shouldn’t have done that, but I did it anyway.”
Thirty-year-old Fouaad Mirza rides Seigneur Medicott, a 16-year-old gelding at the top level of the sport, and completed the Tokyo Olympics last year. He trained with Bettina Hoy, and when she wanted to sell her top horse, the quadruple four-star winner Seigneur Medicott, the Embassy Group bought him for Fouaad, who then moved to be based with top German rider Sandra Auffarth at the start of 2019, whom he is still based with now.
“Seigneur Medicott is lovely. He has helped me a lot and up until today we had never incurred a cross-country jumping fault,” explains Fouaad. “He’s also not the bravest, boldest jumper though and I have to ride him a lot on his technique – he’s very nimble, hence he can get me out of some tricky situations. But he puts himself in them sometimes because he’s trying to get away from them too.”
Fouaad said he was quite nervous before he went cross-country at these championships.
“I had my doubts and quite nervous whether he would answer all the questions because they are quite difficult and they came up quite thick and fast,” explains Fouaad. “But the way he felt in the warm-up, I decided that OK, listen, I’m going to give it my best and if I make a mistake, I make a mistake, but at least I know I tried hard.”
Fouaad and Seigneur Medicott posted a dressage score of 30.1, but then had a run-out at fence 21d, coming out of the first water, plus 9.2 time-faults, in what was otherwise a super round. They completed their competition with five fences down in the showjumping.
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