Thanks for nothing (so far), wellies! Flip-flops would have taken up a lot less room in my travel bag. Photo by Leslie Wylie.
Badminton 2016 has been blessed with some astonishingly spectacular weather thus far. The skies are are a vivid cornflower blue, tie-dyed with a few cottony clouds, and the temperature at the moment is a balmy 71 degrees.
I was not expecting this.
Perhaps still traumatized by the sogginess of Rolex last week…
Photo submitted by Susannah Lewis.
…I stuffed my Badminton suitcase full of rain gear and sweaters, which have yet to see the (bright!) light of day.
Photo by Leslie Wylie.
Photo by Leslie Wylie.
Come Saturday, however, there’s a chance my wellies could be earning their keep. I hear the footing gets pretty torn up in front of the cross country beer vendors. What about the actual jumps?
It’s hard to say. With the sun smiling down on us for the past few days and the forecast for cross-country day looking fairly high and dry …
Screenshot for Badminton from weather.com.
… it’s easy to forget the long, wet spring that British eventers have endured — and it takes more than a few days of glorious, glorious sunshine to mop up that kind of damp.
While the surface layer has dried out nicely over the past couple days the ground beneath still feels a big “juicy” in places, as the announcer so viscerally put it at the jog on Wednesday, and the question of how it may or may not impact cross-country has been a hot topic of ever-changing discussion. Even if not wet-wet, soft ground could tire horses, especially if their riders underestimate it and come out guns blazing, or get chewed up as the day goes on.
Is this Badminton’s best footing ever or a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Ultimately, it’s a question without a black-and-white answer.
Some, like dressage leader Michael Jung, express confidence. “On the track the ground looks nearly perfect,” he said during Thursday’s press conference. “I think if we have a little more dry day we will have wonderful ground on Saturday.”
Boyd Martin described it as a refreshing change. “The footing is great,” he said. “In America every event we’ve done this year has had absolutely horrid footing, so it’s awesome to be walking around on footing that has a bit of spring to it.”
Buck Davidson is taking a pragmatic, respectful approach.
“My dad said when I first came here that you have to be careful — when it seems like it’s going to be fast going it’s always the hardest on the horses,” Buck said. “It’s always a bit easier in the rain. Hugh Thomas said same thing at the briefing.”
“It just depends on the horse,” he said. “Some horses will like this ground, some horses like it softer, some like it harder, and you can’t really worry about that. I just worry about what’s in front of me, what’s going on underneath me, and do the best I can.”
One truth we can all take comfort in: It could always be much, much worse!
Badminton has endured a long and complicated relationship with the weather — rain in particular. May is one of South Gloucestershire’s wettest months and excessive precipitation has wreaked havoc on the event on multiple occasions since its inception in 1949.
For the event’s first 10 years running dressage and show jumping were held on the old cricket grounds in front of Badminton House. In 1959, “after torrential rain turned the park into a sea of mud,” the arenas and trade stands were relocated to their present positions.
Badminton has historically rewarded riders with sticky britches and horses with an ability to shift into four-wheel drive when the going gets boggy. But on a handful of occasions, conditions were deemed too waterlogged for even the toughest mudders. Inclement weather has caused the cancellation of the event on four occasions: 1966, 1975, 1987 and, most recently, in 2012.
In 1963 Badminton was downgraded to a one-day event on account of “terrible weather” in the months leading up to the event. This film reel from moving picture archive collection British Pathé shows spectators’ cars being towed out by tractors and a cross country course that looks downright treacherous.
Of 13 starters that year only six horses finished and, in general, it wasn’t a pretty sight. Exhibit A: the horse/rider combination that fell into a muddy ditch on the backside of the jump, at which point the narrator triumphantly reports: “One fall doesn’t daunt a rider of the Colonel’s caliber, so he remounted!”
Oh dear.
One needn’t look too far back in the rear view to identify another Badminton that produced similar results. At the 2014 horse trials, wet and windy conditions contributed to a cross country day marked by thrills, spills … and more spills. Of 77 starters only 35 completed, with 24 going clear and nobody making the time.
Australian Sam Griffiths and Paulank Brockagh moved up from 25th place after dressage to win the event thanks to the scrappy mare’s heroic jumping efforts. The pair is back again this year and are sitting much higher up the leaderboard this go around: 11th at the moment, with just three horses still to go.
Here’s to a safe, dry and partly sunny Badminton 2016! Keep it locked on Eventing Nation for live reports from all the action.
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