Luke 140 - Great Meadow - August ‘23

This is a video for the Luke 140 syndicate. Well guys, we took Luke out for his first big competition since Le Moulin. We took him down to the Great Meadow International where we, we contested the four star. This is the sort of first big run back since a big five star, five star run in Germany and Luke was good. This was the dressage. He was in the dressage on Friday afternoon. We've been working a fair bit with Bettina Hoy virtually and he did a pretty good test. It wasn't our best, best test but it wasn't far off. There was a lot to like about it with our training with Bettina we've been trying to get him to trot a little bit bigger just in his normal working trot which worked out well and we got some, we got some good marks. A lot of what you're seeing here was all sevens and eights which was quite nice. Unfortunately he got a little bit nervous which you'll see in the walk. They were dismantling the warm up arena as we were doing our walk and Luke's very noise sensitive and he got a little bit worried and unfortunately he got some, some tough scores for his walk which ultimately cost him a bit. Unfortunately Virginia hasn't seen much rain and I was heartbroken when I arrived at the show on Thursday morning and just to see brown, brown burnt grass and to be honest Luke didn't really need to run the cross country and I really thought long and hard about it and it made no sense in risking injury or anything like that on bad footing considering where sort of Luke is in his career. And I decided just to do the dressage and show jumping. I think the bulk of the elite horses decided to give the cross country a miss on Sunday. I think with Luke's main sort of focus coming into next year is keeping him healthy and sound is at the very, very top of our priority list. And racing him around on hard ground over big jumps didn't make any sense. So anyway we did the dressage on Friday. He had a great round of show jumping on Saturday night. Then we shipped him home and I actually galloped him on Sunday morning. This morning up the synthetic gallops up here in Pennsylvania on perfect footing. So Luke's next big competition is going to be the, the Plantation Horse Trials. He'll do the four star short there. That's going to be I believe around September 22, 23, 24 and that will be his sort of final big run before the Maryland five star. So it's about now Luke Started hearing all the noise and he got a little bit nervous and unfortunately that was supposed to be a walk canter, so we got a score of four for that, which he would have been in the 20s other than that movement, which was a shame. But in the scheme of things it didn't really matter too much. Now Peter Wilde was at our farm earlier in the week and Luke's jumping fantastic. You'll see his show jumping in a minute. He put in a great round. He feels very, very fresh and healthy. He was very, very wild and nervous and difficult when he came back into work after his vacation. He's starting to settle down now. We're starting to gallop him every sort of five or six days. It's a lovely counter work here. So I think we had a dressage score of 30, 30.6 and I think we were equal second after the dressage. The. The leader was on 30.1. But Luke's getting through this, these four star tests very easy and our main focus will obviously start being making sure that we can do a really good five star test come Maryland. And I feel like he's a bit more seasoned and experienced now at that five star test. So I'm expecting a phenomenal performance from Luke at Maryland. Five star. Everything's sort of guided towards that one big event and I think we're in with a real chance. The one good thing about Virginia being so hot is Luke wasn't quite as wild as he usually was and he actually jumped really well. It's a pretty big track and he only got a little bit wild and crazy on a few of the lines. But he, as you can see here, he just jumped, jumped beautifully. It's a bit of a rough couple days for me. I was sick as a dog for the first couple of days and luckily now I'm just about to jet off to England to do Burley on Thomas and Kew. And I've just started feeling a bit better now. But yeah, on Thursday and Friday I was, I was rough as guts, but I'm on the upward men now anyway. Obviously it would have been nice to do the cross country, but at the same time it's even nicer having a healthy horse. And like I said before, there was no real urgency to risk risk him doing the cross country. He's a great cross country horse. We'll keep the fitness, work up to him and then we'll aim him for a nice run at Plantation in a couple of weeks and then on to the big one at Maryland.