Now that William has finished giving his young horse a nice schooling ride around what can only be described as a nice move-up 4*, the eventing world turns to the Badminton Horse Trials. And by ‘horse trials’ they mean a CCI4*–they just call it a ‘horse trials’ to be cool. Sadly, as usual, the USA will not be sending any horses over to attempt a revenge win from Rolex. Thank you Icelandic volcano gods. When was the last time the US won a 4* on foreign soil? With that depressing thought I present our Badminton preview:
Schedule – Due to a new TV contract with the BBC, the competition at Badminton will run from Friday to Monday, with dressage on Friday and Saturday, XC on Sunday, and show jumping on Monday. They scheduled the show jumping on Monday because May 3rd is a ‘bank’ holiday in the UK. Bank holidays are public holidays in England, so it’s like their President’s Day or Independence Day except…well, you get the idea.
The UK is currently running in GMT +1 time, which means they are EST +5 hours. Basically, the Badminton schedule is 5 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time in the US, so take any time on the badminton schedule and subtract 5 hours to get the EST time.
You don’t even want to think about the Badminton schedule in Pacific time. The good news is that none of your friends will be awake for most of Badminton so they don’t have to be disappointed when you tell them you’re too busy refreshing Eventing Nation to hang out with them. Actually, that’s a lie, there’s nothing good about this schedule.
Horses and Riders — As usual, the Badminton field is stacked. There were approximately 130 entries and 85 horses are set to start the event. Some names everyone should recognize include Alex Hua Tian, Mary King, Andrew Nicholson, William Fox-Pitt, Clayton Fredericks, Mark Todd, Zara Phillips, Lucy Wiegersma. We won’t preview everyone of course, but check out the entries list and you can click on the names of each rider for a biography and past performances.
The Course — It’s Badminton so it’s big and technical and will chew you up and spit you out if you’re not ready. The Badminton website has all the resources you need to get a feel for the course that doesn’t involve a long plane flight and a trip through customs. And yes, I know we already linked to these last week:
Video course walk: with Polly Stockton and course designer Hugh Thomas
EN’s Coverage — If you haven’t caught on to this already, to steal a line from Oliver, you’re a bit slow on the uptake. Check back to Eventing Nation throughout the weekend several times a day for the latest Badminton coverage and to chat with the Eventing Nation community about all things Badminton.
The vote for the placement of the scrolling Twitter news feed was close enough (56%-44%) that I decided to leave it at the top for now. Essentially, all the little stories that used to go into N&N are getting put into the news feed, which has the added advantage of being able to include feeds from other sites depending on what events are most important. Go eventing.
Note: Eventing Nation is a community built upon positive and fun discussion of the insanity that is our beloved sport of eventing. We always appreciate discussion, feedback, and criticism but comments must be constructive and appropriate. The easiest way to leave a comment is using the Twitter of Facebook login. If you submit a comment by typing in an anonymous username, it will be sent to the EN comment moderation Chinchillas for approval.
rl
Are you guys in the UK or just bringing us the networking "in"?
Anonymous
hi...your times are listed as "EST"...not sure if that will confuse people...should be EDT...? thank you for all that you do!!
John
I'm not in the UK, but two people who write regularly for the site - lec and Lindsay - are, and, as always, if we don't know the people then we know the people who know the people. That said, our coverage will be more about finding the very best Badminton articles and linking to them and discussing them on Eventing Nation than it will be about our eye witness coverage.
Thanks for the tip Anon, I got them totally mixed up, but it has since been amended. Also, thanks for the kind words.
