South of England

I had an excellent day at South of England on Saturday.

Top Biats was having his first outing in the BE100, which he made a winning one.  He is a lovely young horse who has come from the same stud in France as Oslo.  He is very green and immature so has had a very quiet year to date at home but he certainly took it all in his stride, leading the dressage on a score of 21.5.  He did a lovely test and was very calm and obedient, particularly considering he had never been in an arena before.  He show jumped clear but it was a fairly exciting round with him being so green however, he touched nothing which is what counts!  He was then excellent across country finishing clear and surprisingly inside the time to win by seven marks.  I would always say it is never a good idea to win at the first event as there is only one way to go but it was very exciting for his breeder Philippe Brivois who had come from France to watch.  He will have three more runs this year to give him an idea of what life is about but what a great start. 

Henton For Fun had a run in the BE100 and also went very well to finish second.  He finished joint first on his dressage score of 28 but got piped into second as my time was two seconds further away from the optimum time on the cross country.  I was delighted with how he went and he will go back to Novice this weekend at Dauntsey.

I decided not to run the Intermediate horses on Sunday as the ground was just too firm on parts of the course so it was ironic the event was cancelled halfway through Sunday due to torrential rain and subsequent flooding.  It was very sad for the team at South of England and unbelievable to think that it was another casualty of the terrible weather this year.