Contessa - Stable View - April ‘23

This is a video for Club Contessa. Well, girls, we've just had our best event of the year so far. We took Contessa all the way back to Aiken to do the four star short this weekend, which is her final run before the Kentucky five star. And sadly they sort of changed the calendar, the eventing calendar around which sort of forced us to ship her all the way back south to, to compete at Stable View. We sort of. Ideally you'd love to run the horses either three or four weeks before their five stars. So our two options was Sarasota in Florida, which was last week at Terra Nova, or this week in, in South Carolina, Stableview. And it was a good track. Steph took her down there a day early and she arrived and had one rest day of just hacking with Steph and then I arrived on Thursday afternoon and did a dressage ride and she put in a great dressage test. She scored a 30 which was starting to get very, very competitive. Sadly, with all the shipping she's had to do the last month, she's had a quite a busy march. She's lost a little bit of weight, but we're doing everything you can imagine to keep as much feed into her as possible. She tends to go a little bit off her grain with the traveling and all the fitness work. And by saying that she gets about six more meals a day. But she seems in great health and like I said before, we had a great competition. Obviously this was the dressage. On Friday morning she scored a 30. Again, the, the flying changes are still a little bit dodgy, but by saying that we've been working very, very hard on the five star test at home and that where the, the flying changes are positioned for that dressage test, they're actually Contessa finds them a little bit easier. So that's one added bonus for heading to Kentucky. And then this weekend she, she show jumped. Typically, incredibly, she was one of the only clear rounds in the show jumping and, and put in a nice round. And the really, the highlight for me on the weekend was the cross country. It poured and poured and poured with rain all of Friday afternoon, evening and all of Saturday. But by saying that the ground was very good, that sort of sandy footing and I sort of galloped on just a little bit faster than the last two events and she, she just, she's just starting to click into gear gear. She really understood all the jumps and put in just a fantastic round of cross country. We had eight time penalties so I was going about five star speed. I mean this is a four star short. So the, the, the, the time on the course, I think was about six and a half minutes and we were, I don't know, 20 seconds over the time, which was, I think one or two horses by the time. But we weren't sort of dilly dallying around too much and she stayed in good control the whole way around. So I think the, the training we've been putting in and the bridle that we've got on is working out really, really well. I mean, have a look at this extended trot. She's flying across the ring and we finished fourth and we beat some very, very good horses. A lot of the horses that went to the WEG were there, a couple of the Olympic horses were there and really the best horses in the country were all sort of using Stable View as their preparation event. So the show jumping was on Friday afternoon and she was the first horse actually to get a clear round. The time was tight, so I probably rode her a bit too fast, to be honest. My coach, Peter Wild was there instructing me not to dilly dally around. And the great thing with Contessa, she's so careful and sharp and wants to jump clear that you can sort of go a little bit faster than some of the, the other horses that you have to set up a little bit more. So Contessa will, she's. Steph stayed there on Saturday night and she traveled home Sunday. We'll take her to the vets and get it to have a little look over on Monday. Maybe a bit of a tune up there and, and then we've got, let's see, two weeks before Kentucky five star. So we've got Eric Devander here training us this week. I'm flying up a dressage judge, Peter Gray next week to run through this five star test. And then Peter Wild will give us a jump school just before we leave for Kentucky. So. And I think I'll probably just gallop her twice. She's very, very fit and I think we've got her well prepared. So anyway, not long to go now, guys, and I'm quietly confident.