Bath Riding Club Members Kim Walker and Georgina Bryce made the trip up to the British Riding Club National Championships on the weekend of 17th-19th September hoping to defend there title of current Dressage Pairs Champions and to also have some individual successes.
Kim and George qualified with their horses Max and Otto at the Area Festival held in the year at Taunton Racecourse, with them winning the Pairs dressage and Kim also having wins in the Novice with Points and the Elementary tests.
We started the long route to Lincoln on the Friday with Me (Kim) and my mum picking up George’s horse Otto to keep Max company whilst George and her groom Lucy carried on ahead in her car to start putting up her mansion tent! 5Hours later and we arrived there and quickly got our passports all checked and hats tagged. Lucy and I took the horses for a little hack whilst we left George and Mum still struggling with the tent! Once all sorted we drove into Lincoln centre and had a nice meal then returned to site and all ready for bed!
Saturday arrived and for the moment the weatherman was currently wrong and no rain was in sight. First up was Me and Max with our Elementary test at 9.30am, I was feeling all sorted and ready then time just disappears and I still ended up running around forgetting everything! Luckily I got him ready ten minutes early just as it started to chuck it down! Ten minute shower and off we went to warm up in the dry… perfect He warmed up lovely despite me stressing that he wasn’t going well enough and did a great test considering we are just moving up to Elementary level.
No time to waste chatting about it though as I had to warm him straight back up for his Novice with points test. He now had gone all tired on me and was abit tense but we went and did the test to a O.K level but was a little disappointed as I knew he could have gone better. I knew the results take ages there so we all went back to the stables to get Max and Otto all ready for their Pairs test.
Two hours later with results still unknown from earlier and NAF kindly giving out Energy shots to try, Hopefully to wake Max and Otto up abit, from their stand there we were nearly ready to go. We made sure we were truly matching with same jackets, hats, gloves, flowers, nummahs, blingy brow bands… you name it! Walking over to the warm up we knew we had to do this well after seeing two lovely greys warming up for their pairs test.
We did the test well we felt, apart from Otto breaking into canter in the medium trot but you never know and we were feeling the pressure after winning last year. Walking back to the stabling we saw that there were horses waiting to go into the presentation ring for prizes and after sending mum off quickly to look at results for my earlier classes I was thrilled to learn that Max had come 2nd in his arena in the novice with points with 67% and 5th in the Elementary with 66%. As top 3 have to do mounted presentations we went straight into the prize giving. Just at this point it chose to rain plus hail stones!! Lovely! But at least we had done all our tests in the dry. Another quick shower over and we wandered back to the stables complete with rosettes and vouchers. Clever boy!!
A 4 hour wait then began for our pair’s results!! We were all ready to start moaning then we noticed that they had quickly stuck the results up without us noticing! The pair’s results were surrounded by people but we could just see our names with a 1 by it! Yayyyy we had done it again!! and by a good margin of 7 marks to. As promised if we won I quickly brought Max some white bandages so we could look smart in the prize giving and then tacked up some unimpressed looking horses! At the prize giving they give you the NAF green rugs and sashes outside the arena and then you go in to collect the rosettes and do a lap of honour. We were so chuffed we had won again! Fingers crossed for three times next year!
7 o’clock was quickly here and we put the boys to bed and went out for a meal with the full intention of having a couple drinkys to celebrate but on return to the tent we were all shattered plus it was freezing so straight to bed!!
Sunday was a lovely day and the tent quickly dried and we headed home about 11. A great weekend was had again and Lincoln is always a fantastic place to ride at. Hopefully next year we can qualify a team or two and get a whole group of us together up there.
Next stop for the Pairs team…. Aintree, Liverpool for the Dressage to Music 8-9th October!
