Barney Rubble competed at Fair Hill in May, a two-star three-day event where he went clear in show jumping and delivered one of his best dressage tests, though he picked up time penalties on cross-country due to hard ground. He's now prepping for Bromont in three weeks, his first intermediate and three-star competition, with training from Peter Wilde and Olympic rider Bettina Hoy.
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Hello everyone. This is a video for the Barney Rubble Syndicate. Well, guys, we took Barney out to the Fairhill Horse Trials. Again, this is a great event not far from where we live. It's about half an hour's drive from the farm at Windura. And Barney was in the open preling, which is starting to get, I'm glad to say it's starting to get nice and boring for us. He felt really, really good in all three phases this weekend. And this will. This. I wanted to do this event because my sort of main, sort of spring goal for Barney was to do the, the two star long three day event at Bromont, which is in three weeks time up in Montreal. And this will be Barney's final outing at the two star level. After Bromont. It's time to move him up to intermediate and three star and push on with his, his career at the upper levels. But going back to this weekend, Barney was great. He was the very first horse to do dressage in on Saturday morning. And the one thing I hate about prelim is with this big moving horse, you're in the smaller dressage ring, which is you always feel like you're stopping and starting and turning and whatnot. And Barney still produced, I think, one of his best ever tests. It was a few moments of spookiness from memory. I think he has a bit of a spook at the next corner saying that we got a good score. There we go, we got a good score. But obviously there was a couple little mistakes like that. The biggest reason for doing these events really is to school him around the cross country course. To be perfectly honest, the show jumping course at Fair Hill is terrible. It's in the grass on the side of a hill and it's hard to get the horses jumping well. But the cross country, which is the most important part for Barney at the moment, it's a really nice undulating long course with big jumps and forward distances. And it's perfect for Barney because for him to move up to the three star level, he's got to stop jumping so high and start jumping across his fences. And unfortunately we were pretty busy with a few horses competing at Fair Hill, so we didn't get any of the cross country footage. But he gave me a great round. The ground was, wasn't perfect. We haven't had rain for about 10 days, so. And Barney was a bit fired up at the beginning of the course. So I just sort of cruised around the first sort of third of the course. And once he sort of settled in, then I opened him up. But I incurred a lot of time penalties, half because I think it's good training for Barney not to go flat tanger and secondly the ground was rock hard and there's no trophies or prize money or blankets at the Fair Hill horse trials. So yeah, in three weeks time we're heading up to Bromont. This will be a very competitive event. I also think that Barney should win it. He will go close to winning it. There'll be a couple of good horses in there. But he's, he's been at this level now for the last, let's see, nine months and he's starting to get seasoned and mature at the level and so I think this will probably be his last finale at the prelim two star level. And then we'll crack on to intermediate and three star. He trotted up well this morning so he's good and healthy and sound after this competition and I think we're in really good shape to be very competitive at Bromont. Like I said, this is the show jumping ring. Now the frustrating thing with Fair Hill is not far from here those, those beautiful rings that they use for the three day event and for some reason we can't use them. We're racing around on this sort of small bit of grass course. But by saying that Barney jumped well, he show jumped clear. And because it was a smaller ring, we were sort of stopping and starting and turning left and right. Andy was a bit fired up because he could hear the, the loudspeaker for the cross country. But he's such a good jumper that we, we got it. We got a clear round, no problem. The think leading up to Bromont. I'm going to take him show jumping up at Sogarty's up in New York. Meet my jumping trainer Peter Wilde up there. And then I'll also got Bettina Hoy coming to the farm to coach the Bromont horses and the Le Moulin horses. So we've got a busy couple of weeks coming up with Bromont and Le Morl and Feistar very close to each other. It's an exciting time for us because we've got a lot of great horses at the moment. So I love these premier events. This is actually a video of Peter Wild helping me jump him a couple week or so ago. I never got around to sending you the video so I thought it'd be good to show you a little bit of Barney's training at home. And he's such a good show jumper. I mean the biggest thing is trying to get him settled and relaxed and as you can see there, he jumps the moon. And I have to say, overall, he is getting more and more rideable. If you remember sort of this time last year, he's trying to throw me off after the jumps and I mean, he's still a little bit frisky and wild and puts his head up. But it is getting better, I think, after Bromont, sort of being the middle of summer in July. So my guess is we should give Barney three weeks off while the gets really, really hot and brutal and rest him up and then sort of start making an attack on the intermediate three star level. Thanks for all your support, guys. And if anyone wants to come up to Bromont, it's a fantastic event.
