Belton International

We had an excellent weekend at Belton with Vrolijk and Away Cruising, and were delighted with how they both went.  The team at Bede put on a great show and I have never seen more spectators there than poured into the beautiful park at Belton on Sunday.   As always, the dressage arenas for the International classes had a very buzzy atmosphere.  With nothing but a piece of rope between the horses and the children with ice creams, balloons, dogs, flags and so on very close around the arena, they are probably the atmospheric areans in eventing dressage - we were therefore delighted with how both horses handled it.  Vrolijk was early to go in the 2* and whilst we were happy with his test his mark of 50.0 was slightly disappointing, however all the scores were quite high on the first day of dressage and he finished the day lying in 5th place. He went on to jump another super double clear to finish the competition in 8th out of 85 starters.

Away Cruising came off the wait list to get into the 3* about 5 minutes before Harry was due to get on to do an Intermediate dressage test on him.  A quick change of outfit and some revision of the new 3* test and he headed to the Grantham Cup arena for the dressage.  We are all thrilled with his test, and with the exception of his final flying change, he really didn't put a foot wrong and scored a very respectable 49.3 to lie 25th out of top class field of 115.  His didn't jump his best show jumping round but having jumped a number of super clear rounds recently we weren't too worried about this, particularly as he flew round Mark Phillips's tough 3* track like an old pro.  Away Cruising is an eight year old who Harry has produced carefully since he arrived from Ireland as raw 4 year old - it is incredibly rewarding when horses you have produced from babies make the step up to Advanced and he feels like a proper horse - exciting for the future!  

  

Photographs thanks to Uptown Eveneting, E.S.Photography & Rosie Meade