Bruno - Final Olympic Preparations - Syndicate Update - July ‘24

This is a video for the Annie Goodwin Syndicate. Well guys, we're nearly there. Bruno's been preparing really, really well for the Olympic Games in a couple of weeks. Training has been going really well. Last week we took him to Princeton, New Jersey to practice our show jumping. It was obviously an official USEF show, but I was sort of treating it as a schooling show. And I met my coach, Peter Wilde up there and we had a little bit of a warm up class. This is the meter 20 and this is easy peasy for Bruno. He jumped really, really well. It's an awesome venue at Princeton. Beautiful rings, nice jumps, great warm up. And it's perfectly halfway between where I live and Peter Wildlife. So it's, it's a great meeting point. We sort of jumped Bruno slightly differently to how he would at a proper show or one show that we really cared about. Probably rode him in a little bit more forward and got him in a little bit closer to the jumps, especially in the meter 20. You know, not, not trying to hit the jumps or anything but like letting the horse sort of roll into the fence and not protect him too much. And I'm terrified of a nearly perfect jumping record. And I sort of said to myself, alright Bruno, if you ever want to tap one in the ring here, this is the place to do it. Not, not at our next show. And Bruno said, no thank you sir, I'm gonna get my legs out of the way. About an hour and a half, we jumped a meter 35 class. This is what we're thinking will be about the height of the round at the show jumping at the Olympics. And Bruno was brilliant. He jumped really, really well. Peter's been working on my upper body coming to the fence, trying to stay a little bit taller just as the horse takes off. And my bad habit is I sort of lean forward as Bruno's taking off. And our goal is to sort of sit away from him as he's leaving the ground and really help his sort of shoulders come up in the air. I just feel like Bruno's, he's jumping in great form. I don't know if you like, remember last year he was really drifting hard right in the air over the fences. And we've done a lot of vet work to the horse and tried to make him more comfortable. Done a lot of physiotherapy work with his back and his neck and trying to make him just a little bit looser through his pelvis and his hips. And there's been not one thing that's amazing difference. But all in all, the horse feels great and super jumping. Great jumping, scopey jumping. Careful. A week later, Eric Devander and Bobby Costello met me at the farm early in the morning. We were very, very lucky. It rained about an hour before we. We decided to have a cross country school. And the ground's been quite hard here. So the field we're jumping on here got some of the farmers to dump about five truckloads of mushroom compost on the field. And then we got an aerator from another friend that runs the polo club up the road and we sliced the ground and for a 25 minute cross country school took about seven or eight hours to prepare for. Ideal footing for Bruno. So Bruno and Connor I've got. Connor obviously jumped at the same shows in the same day as well, but a bit like the show jumping. We ride him slightly different, ride him a little bit slower and a tiny bit more cautiously. I think one of Bruno's faults is, well, traps we fall into is he gets a little bit keen and aggressive, especially at the first five or six fences of the course. And our last run at Stableview was, you know, we intentionally tried to steady him a little bit early in the course, you know, because the worst thing he can do is if he gets too aggressive and we're trying to go fast, it makes it a bit messy. So we're obviously going around at a fast training speed. We also decided to make this a bit bigger and a bit harder of a cross country school than normal. Stable View is five weeks from the Olympic Games, which for me is a long, long way away to have your preparation event. And so I tried to make it quite technical and quite tough. I love to run the horses about three weeks before their competition, four weeks at the latest. And we're unfortunately Stable View is five weeks, but we've, we've got the travel as well, don't forget. So it is what it is. But this cross country school ended up being a little bit bigger and a little bit more challenging than our normal routine cross country school. We tried to emulate some of the questions that we think we might be getting faced with at Paris. A lot of turning questions, accuracy, jumps, skinnies, corners. And I gotta say, Bruno just felt fantastic. He jumped around the. Just jumped around it for fun. This feels in great form. A few of these lines here. I'm sort of steadying him up and slowing him down for the jumps and that the competition would go in one less stride. I find the three stride lines pretty hard in training. There's just not much time to Fix them up. So we actually redid that one a second time. The first time was a little bit messy and then this second time, a little kid could have counted through there. We've been galloping Bruno every. Bruno and Connor every four or five days. I feel like we've got him as fit as you could ever have a horse with the idea that we're going to back off and, and once we get to France, really let him freshen right up. I mean, that's a wicked tough line and Bruno does it for fun. The same day, young Leo was out for a cross country school with his mum, the dressage instructor, and came off, but he was unscathed. Just to let everyone know, the most hours spent have been the dressage. And I have to say we're very, very blessed to have a Grand Prix dressage rider schooling the horse and training me every single day. Of, for the last two months, I've not been allowed to ride Bruno or Connor unsupervised. And any day that I happen not to be there, Silver's the only one that sits on them and all of her hard work has paid off. And the dressage test that we're getting faced with is nearly a pre St. George dressage test. And I really feel like we're close to getting a really good job. We're schooling the movements over and over and over again. Every day we're videoing it and then in the evening sitting down and analyzing the video and going over it. And like in this change here, I've got to sit back and keep my right shoulder back and slip straight into half past. And on this change here, I've got to hold him right with my left leg. It's just a lot of tiny little details that we've been just going over and over and over and over again. And not just the tough, the technicality of the test, but we're really striving to get an uphill frame. Constantly sending the, the videos through to Bettina Hoy and, and also the one of the world championship judges, Peter Gray, for feedback. And it's pretty, pretty, pretty good. I mean, it's been a lot of work and like I said, we spend tens of thousands of dollars on physiotherapy and a lot of vet work to make sure that there's no stiffness or blockage in Bruno's body. He is a very, very well looked after animal at the moment. He's been treated like a rock star and so he should be. He feels really, really good. He's getting massaged every couple of days. And the biggest thing I've got to make myself and not do, I made this mistake in Tokyo is get to the Olympics and then drill him. And I think my plan is here. I'm putting in a lot of training, a lot of galloping, a lot of sort of tedious schooling and everything, with the idea that once we get to France next week, that we're going to really let Bruno freshen up and rejuvenate and get his energy level right up so that when we get to the venue in. In Paris, that he feels great. But at the moment, guys, everything looks good as gold.