Bromont CCI*** 2010

Bromont CCI*** this year was a qualifier for the World Equestrian Games that will take place in Lexington, Kentucky this fall. The U.S. had several riders competing who were hoping to use this event to secure a spot on the WEG short list summer eventing squad that has two spots remaining. Mark Phillips, the U.S. Chef D'Equipe, as well as many of the U.S. selectors were wandering around all weekend watching us go. Some of the U.S. riders in contention for the two training spots were Will Coleman, Heidi White, Kim Severson, John Williams, and Buck Davidson. Other countries also had riders trying to qualify for the WEGs, including Ronald Zabala from Ecuador and Rebecca Howard and Jessica Phoenix from Canada. On the other end of the spectrum, this was Jet's first CCI***. Nevertheless, I know how consistent my boy is and my goal for Jet this weekend was to go out with a fire in my belly and have us placed in the ribbons on Sunday before show jumping. Show jumping has been an achilles heel this spring and I didn't want to promise myself anything in that phase.

Jet was the best I could have asked for right now in Friday's dressage test, scoring a 59.2 with our one lead change still not confirmed and the rest of the test steady and appropriate but not yet too flashy.

On cross country my thoughts were to give Jet a confidence building ride and to try to add nothing to our dressage score. On cross country day, Jet was the clever little spright that he is. This is his best phase. He was a little surprised by a few things, but he adjusted immediately. Corner jumps caused the most trouble on the course, including eliminating Heidi White and Buck Davidson. The first corner was jump 5B, which also was the jump that caused the most trouble all day. The combination was a big table (5A) with a four stride or five stride line to a decent sized corner (5B). What I thought made the combination difficult was that the straight route had us jumping directly at a big, bushy tree, and I wondered if that would back the horses off. What other riders worried about was the size of the table. I found that the line rode in a flowing four, but other riders who had trouble didn't get as deep to the corner and it opened the door for an early runout.

Over the whole course Jet felt well within himself and he was very proud of himself at the end. At halfway, I was down on the clock so I opened up a little more for the back half of the course. There had been storms at Bromont and the footing was heavy in places. Although I went as fast as I could, I didn't make my goal of making the time and we came in seven seconds slow on the clock. I was depressed about it until later that afternoon. When Jet was between icings I went over to look at the scores. To my amazement, out of the thirty horses in the CCI***, only one horse had made time and Jet had the second best xc round of the day! We had added only 2.8 faults to our dressage and were sitting in fifth place. We were seated in the ribbons going into show jumping on Sunday!

Perhaps, though, I should have also created a more concrete goal for Sunday. After passing the second vet inspection Sunday morning, we went on to have a very disappointing show jumping round. We took eight rails down. Although Jet felt very fit and happy in his energy level on stadium day, he had pulled a shoe somewhere on course on Saturday (I never felt him do it, so I don't know where it happened) and he was quite sore on that foot. None of the downed rails were bad mistakes, Jet just kept tipping them. We dropped to 14th.

Jet only moved up to advanced this spring and he is still gaining muscle at this level. We are going to go back to the drawing board this summer and do a huge amount of body building work, because the cardio is easy for him. I'm sure the foot was an issue on Sunday, but having a topline that can handle three hard days in a row is critical too, and he obviously doesn't have that yet. Our next CCI*** will be at Fair Hill International in Maryland in October, and for that event, after a summer of show jumping, my goal will be to finish the weekend in the top six.