Charm, an eventing horse, scored 74% in his first dressage test against pure dressage horses and won his first event at Pine Top Horse Trials in Georgia. The plan is to move him up to preliminary level with longer cross-country courses and more technical dressage.
This is a video for Katie and Alex guys. Charms been humming along very, very well this year. We got down to Aiken, South Carolina at the beginning of the year and in probably the second week in January and spent most of January working on Charms Fitness and we took him to a dressage show and took him to a show jumping show more just to try and get the nerves out of him before he went to his first eventing competition. And that first eventing competition was this weekend in Georgia in a very remote, remote town called Thompson, Georgia. And this event is called Pinetop. And it's not very glamorous except the cross country course is awesome. The dressage and the show jumping's a little bit rough and ready but I love to take my top horses here just because the cross country course is so good. And one of the most impressive things about Charm is how good he is at the dressage. It's quite remarkable that he is so talented and skilled at the dressage. We took him to an official dressage show, let's see, two weeks ago and I've got this young girl rider that's really, really good on the flat cord, Louisa Morgan. And she rode him in I think the first level test and anyway he won it, he got 74% and he was up against pure dressage horses. So he's quite remarkable. Anyway we've been spending a lot of the time just slowly but surely building, building his fitness up, proving him on the flat and obviously he is really good and nosy stuff in the show jumping. So he's a, he's an unusual horse for us just because you know he show jumper, show jumping sort of education is well in front of his cross country education and and his dressage is somewhere in the middle. So show jumping wise he could probably compete against the, the five star horses. We've only got to jump meter 30 meter 25 which he actually does quite well. So the show jumping is quite boring and easy on him. He's still a bit spooky at the Liverpool but all in all he's getting actually less spooky and wild and I think a lot of it's to do with the cross country training, you know like, you know, once every couple of weeks he's got to jump over ditches and through water and over hedge fences and all of a sudden his spookiness and his nerves in the show jumping less and less as you'll see on this video in a second. He still is a bit looky at the Liverpool but other than that he's calm right down. But depending where his career goes, I mean he can mix it with any horse in the dressage ring. This is a dressage test that was on Saturday morning and I think he was placed second after the dressage from memory. So this is the modified level. This is going to be, this is going to be his last modified level or that's the equivalent of the one star level. And in two weeks time we're going to move him up one more grade to the preliminary level or the two star level. So we got some footage of his cross country today. He was brilliant. He won, he won this competition, which wasn't our intention, but we'll take it anyway. He was in a. There must have been 20 horses in his class and he was second after the dressage, first after the show jumping and then after the cross country he was clear and I sort of went relatively fast and he, he won the class. So this, this is the show jumping and these jumps are really, really easy. Actually at the end of this video I've got Peter Wild was here coaching me on Monday and Tuesday and I jumped charm with, with Peter on Monday. So I've got a little bit of our jumping training to show you on Monday. So as I said, his next event is actually going to be about two or three holes higher, which will be fine by our charm. And I mean the, the dressage will start getting a little bit more complicated with counter canter and here's the old spooky Liverpool and then the cross country gets a little bit longer, a little bit bigger and a little bit more complicated. But he gave me such a good feel around the cross country today. I think he'll be fine to, to move up to the preliminary or to the two star level in the fei. So this dressage and show jumping was on Saturday and then the cross country was on Sunday and it poured with rain and poor old Sharm was racing around the competition in the mud. But he was legend. We were a couple seconds over the time which didn't really matter because we had a good lead after the dressage and obviously a clear show jumping. So he actually won the class by about five points. And again he's impressing me more and more. He's got himself, he's a good galloper and he's, he's actually. The spook in him is actually good at sort of, he almost sort of steadies up a little bit for the jump just because of his spookiness and he's obviously, you know, he's quite brave every now and then when there's straw or flowers around the cross country jump he'll, he'll never stop but he'll sort of do a bit of a spook and a snort and he still jumps it. And this is actually earlier in the week we did some show jumping like I said with Peter and he's jumping, jumping well. So I think the major goal this year would be to get him up to an FEI level 2 star long which is be about an 8 minute cross country course and he'll be starting to rub shoulders with some very very good horses in the country. But I'm very, very pleased with the way he's going. Seems to be very healthy, fit and strong. He's still full of fire but he's definitely loving his new job as an event horse. Hand in front, Excellent downshift. Come in very slow, land the right if you can. Good, nice, Excellent. That was great for him.
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