Sunday Showing

Is Spring finally here? I think the universal answer is still “no”, sadly as I sit listening to the rain tip tap on the windows!

As so many events have been cancelled over the winter we’d been keeping the horses ticking over so when there became an opportunity to do a bit of showing I was really excited at the chance to go out with Georgie and Frankie to compete. We went to a show at World Horse Welfare today and did quite well considering 90% of the people there were professionals or at least high competing amateurs. You see, we found out half way through that they’d combined the show to also include the BSPS area show that had been previously cancelled. This made the penny drop as to why only 3 children warmed up their ponies and the rest were lunged for about an hour beforehand or ridden to a sweat by adults. Some days I love or hate showing, yesterday was the latter.. I hate seeing adults on little kids ponies and my personal opinion is that if an adult needs to warm it up then it’s not a kids pony!  Call me sour but it puts my back up..

Anyway.. Frankie has got a new pony Ronnie, who she has had for a couple of weeks, so Georgie had entered her into a couple of the lead rein classes. It’s all a learning curve going from a little Shetland pony to a Welsh section A. The whole trot is different, she has a proper saddle now, he moves much quicker but is just as opinionated as Millie! Frankie did well, coming second and third. She had also been entered into a novice ridden class of just walk and trot for which she came sixth against eight riders and she did very well.

 Photo by Emily Harris Photography. Thank you so much for the lovely photo!

 Thank you to Amy Harris for this lovely photo of Ronnie checking himself out in the mirror! 

 We felt it a big learning experience and we need to adjust a few things to make Frankies life easier but those should be easy enough to fix. I babysat Beanie, who was a very good boy considering he was stuck waiting for 2 and a half hours but I did managed to rack up my step count in that time to walk 5 miles!!

Once Frankie had finished and the pony classes were over it was time for B to shine. He was a little annoyed to be separated from Ronnie, although Ronnie didn’t seem to mind being away from Beanie! Georgie warmed him up and got him focused and he was going lovely. After a good while of waiting we finally got into the ring for the ‘Purebreed’ class which was open to any purebred horse including Arabs, Thoroughbreds, Trakehners etc. B was quite ready to strut his stuff it would seem and we were pleased for Georgie to win the class. Immediately afterwards was a Championship, for which B took Reserve Champion.  Immediately after that was the ‘Riding Horse/Hack/Hunter’ class which was rather well presented but after being in the ring for about 30 minutes B was getting quite fed up and when a horse kicked the wall in a go round B spooked and lost focus. He did however put in a nice show and came away forth.

All in all not a bad day but a very long day!  It was a nice warm up for a larger show that we have in a couple of weeks which I look forward to.

Now, I must get on and pack my things for Cheltenham as I am at the festival this week. Look out for that write up, cause I am really quite excited!

Sophie x