Aston Le Walls

Sadly it was a slightly unproductive weekend at Aston for the team but it was nevertheless an outing worth having. 

Georgisaurous was again in Open Novice, the ground in the Dressage was concrete so I was delighted with his test of 19, after just a one minute warm up.  His show jumping was slightly exuberant and he rolled a couple of poles so we need to work at that, and I will just have to wait until we get some rain before I run him.  We have to remember we are in England and it will rain eventually!

I had Oratorio doing his first run since Barbury and Yes I Can having his first Advanced outing.  Both of them had a useful leg stretch but I decided not to run either of them cross country.

Oratorio did a very pleasing test overall but with a couple of glitches to score 28.   His show jumping wasn’t bad but he did roll 2 poles. 

Yes I Can really did his best in the dressage to score 35, not a good mark but his changes were quite radical, there are a few areas for us to work on.  He then jumped a very good clear show jumping, it wasn’t as neat as Barbury but he didn’t touch a pole.  As I always say the show jumping at Aston is quite big and influential.

I then had the two Intermediates – Ludo FH and Atlantic Vital Spark, and they were rather unremarkable.  Ludo did a fairly average dressage and was not his best in the show jumping rolling 3 poles, and Atlantic Vital Spark didn’t do a bad test to score 32, but had a couple of poles down being a little wayward in the show jumping.

Having run most of the horses at Barbury and having had no rain I really decided that cross country was not for me, but lots of people did have very happy runs.  Aston Le Walls had done an amazing job in getting everything as good as it could be.  They even watered parts of the Novice course.  But I still felt it was a bit firm underneath and predictably the going was inevitably quite inconsistent.  The only real downer for me was the Novice dressage which was very borderline.

Poor Ann Taylor had a broken ankle, and the Aston team had recently lost their main man, so I am sure the weekend was not an easy one, but they did a top job for us riders which we are incredibly grateful for.

It is a shame Team GB had such a terrible time in Aachen but hopefully the bad dress rehearsal there bodes well for a good performance in WEG.

The most exciting news over the weekend was the news that Jonty is regaining consciousness, and we are looking forward to more good news.