Classic Eventing Nation

Robin Godel and Grandeur de Lully CH secure their first four-star victory at Pratoni. Photo by Tilly Berendt.

Every part of this week’s World Championships test event at Pratoni del Vivaro has been a fact-finding mission, and today’s showjumping was certainly no different: this is an eventing course design debut for Uliano Vezziani, whose remit is ordinarily CSI5* showjumping, and who designs courses for the Global Champions league and World Cups among his accomplishments. He is, perhaps, perfectly suited for this role, though: he’s pushed for the re-introduction of grass arenas at major Italian showjumping venues, which allowed him to take a considered, clever approach to his job today, which he will reprise in September.

Of the 46 starters, just 16 produced clear rounds in the final phase, and 14 of those finished inside the 93 seconds allowed — a mere 30.4% of the entire field. This is actually a touch higher than Pratoni’s usual rate of attrition at this level, but certainly proved that the showjumping here can be plenty influential. This is in part because of the clever decision not to use one of the surfaced arenas for the final phase but rather, to make use of a spacious and gently undulating grass arena next to the dressage arena. Surrounded on two sides by grandstands and with plentiful viewing space on the hill on the arena’s far side, it made for an exciting spot for spectators — and also challenged riders to make savvy decisions with the plentiful space and fluctuations in their approaches.

Robin Godel proves his class once again with his biggest career win so far. Photo by Tilly Berendt.

Ultimately, it would be cross-country leaders Robin Godel and Grandeur de Lully CH who triumphed, delivering an impeccable clear just over half a second over the time allowed to secure the win — and to tip the balance in the team competition, too, which hung on a knife’s edge throughout the afternoon’s final rounds.

“It’s very wonderful for us — it’s a good beginning of the season, and it’s a place that’s been great for us as a team,” says Robin. “To have Andrew Nicholson has really helped us — we really see the difference with him. Today I didn’t feel a lot of pressure; of course, I was very focused, but not a lot of pressure. It was good pressure.”

Ingrid Klimke‘s Equistros Siena Just Do It had dropped out of the lead into overnight third yesterday, but a fault-free round today pushed them back up into second and showed a real progression for the ten-year-old Westfalian, whose talent had previously often been overshadowed by tempestuous exuberance. Her much-improved 22.7 on the flat, which beat out stablemate SAP Hale Bob OLD in the first phase, her 5.2 time penalties yesterday, and her faultless round today make her a very exciting prospect for Ingrid’s championship aims.

Tim Price and Falco take fourth place. Photo by Tilly Berendt.

France’s Nicolas Touzaint, who became the European Champion here in 2007, made the most of his knowledge and positive experience of the venue to finish third with Absolut Gold HDC, who climbed from first-phase twelfth place, adding just 0.8 time penalties to his dressage score of 28.6 and producing a foot-perfect round today. Last year’s Pau victors Tim Price and Falco took fourth after finishing less than half a second over the allowed time, while 22-year-old Swiss rider Nadja Minder continued to make an enormously positive impression, taking fifth on team horse Toblerone.

Mélody Johner and Toubleu du Rueire take a spot in the top ten with one of two faultless double-clears. Photo by Tilly Berendt.

Just two horse-and-rider pairs finished on their dressage scores: Switzerland’s Mélody Johner and Toubleu du Rueire took eighth place on 35.4, while Swedish pathfinders Malin Josefsson and Golden Midnight ended up twelfth on 37.9.

The individual top ten in Pratoni’s CCIO4*-S test event.

The Swiss team returns for a second victory in Pratoni. Photo by Tilly Berendt.

The team competition came down to the wire, largely because of the final phase’s order of go: individual representatives went first, followed by team riders in reverse order of merit. While France had led by just a tenth of a penalty after yesterday’s cross-country, second-placed Switzerland’s margin to catch them up widened after Beat Sax and Secret IV knocked three rails, putting them into the drop score spot. While that didn’t give France, who’d added four penalty’s in Christopher Six‘s round with Totem de Brecey, a rail in hand, Nadja Minder‘s knocked pole at fence eight with Toblerone gave them another 3.4 penalties to play with — and with just one French rider, and one Swiss rider, left to go, the tension in the stands was palpable.

But Maxime Livio‘s surprise two rails with his European Championships ride Api du Libaire put Switzerland into the top spot, and after Robin Godel pulled off the goods, they secured the team win — as well as the individual — by more than a rail over France. It’s an excellent start to the Nations Cup series for the Swiss, but more importantly, it’s an interesting exercise in comparison: Switzerland won the Nations Cup here in 2019, but did so in a much different style. There, they played it safe, delivering slow, steady rounds and allowing other teams to knock themselves out of contention on cross-country day with mistakes on course. This time, though, they were prepared to take calculated, educated risks and ride much more aggressively, which resulted in four out of four Swiss team riders, plus one individual, coming home clear inside the time over yesterday’s cross-country course.

This can be attributed in large part to the help of Andrew Nicholson, who began helping the Swiss team with their cross-country training and performances in the lead-up to the 2019 European Championships, but he’s quick — and rightly so — to point out that the riders have always had the ability.

“They’re nice people to work with, because they try very, very hard and they listen to everything you say — which makes it a little bit more pressure when you see them leave the startbox, because you know they’re going to ride the lines you’ve told them,” says Andrew with a laugh. “You have to really hope that that works, and trust that they’ll do it. I was very proud of them yesterday, and to see them in the jumping today, I think they’re unbelievable.”

No man is an island, not even Andrew Nicholson: his role in the Swiss camp is as part of a bigger machine that’s become more cohesive over the past couple of years, and he’s also encouraged his riders to work together and learn from each other’s successes and mistakes to fast-track their journey to serious competitive results.

“We’ve got a very good crew — the dressage coach and the jumping coaches. We don’t have a lot of people on the edges, but the ones we have are tops. When you can train them, and there’s groups of riders together, you can encourage them to watch each other and feed off each other. Then, when they get to the big competitions, like this team competition, they can remember what the other riders did wrong in training that could help them on the day — you can say one simple thing that they’ve been told in training, and it can really help. It’s that sort of team that you want to make a difference with, and at the end of the day, what makes a good team result is three good individual results.”

Aminda Ingulfson and Joystick are best of the Swedish team in eleventh. Photo by Tilly Berendt.

The French continue to look very strong ahead of September’s World Championships, while Sweden’s ongoing quest to build team mileage and move from consistent Nations Cup performers to world-stage contenders continues on apace: the three team riders whose scores were counted finished in eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth, with team debutant Aminda Ingulfson best of the bunch on Joystick. Swedish riders also delivered the two fastest clears of the day, with Malin Josefsson and Golden Midnight the fastest and Aminda and Joystick the second fastest — but their third place saw them slightly off the pace on the score board with a margin of 14.5 penalties between them and France.

“In the dressage we didn’t get the points that we wanted because we didn’t deserve more, basically, but I think that we made it happen,” says Swedish chef d’equipe Fred Bergendorff. “We started too far behind from the beginning, but even so, they’re working well. I’d like to get better than where we are at the moment; we’re too far behind, and when you have the very best horses in the world here in September, everything will be a little bit sharper and to climb like we did today might not happen in the same way. We have to start in a better point.”

Now that we find ourselves on the back end of the pandemic, though, and with travel restrictions lifted, Fred and his team — who are based across the UK, Sweden, and Germany, are finding it slightly easier to gain that sort of cohesion that’s been helping the Swiss so much. Their lack of proximity, though, remains one of their primary challenges to overcome en route to domination on the world stage, but Fred is optimistic: “We have a bit of a limited budget, so we can’t travel around [for training] that much with the riders, but as a coaching team we want to be better, and as riders they want to be better. Sometimes you have horses that are a bit more difficult in the dressage, and sometimes you have riders that find it a bit harder than the cross-country, and that’s sort of how it goes at the moment, but it is on the way up, I do know that. We’ve got exciting young horses and exciting riders, too — like Sofia Sjoborg, who we had as an individual at the Europeans and who went to Badminton last week [before coming here], and Aminda Ingulfson, who hasn’t been at this level very long. She’s a real fighter, and we have a few of these riders for whom just being on the team isn’t good enough. That’s exactly how I want it.”

The final team standings in Pratoni’s test event and Nations Cup.

Susanna Bordone becomes Italy’s National Champion with Imperial van de Holtakkers. Photo by Tilly Berendt.

Both the Italian National Championships and the Italian Armed Forces National Championships also took place throughout this week’s CCIO4*-S, though there was significant crossover between the entrants — whose sporting efforts are funded, in large part, by their participation in the Forces — and the eventual winner of both was the same: Susanna Bordone and Imperial van de Holtakkers knocked one rail  after having climbed from eighth place in the first phase to second place after cross-country, ultimately usurping two-phase leaders Pietro Grandis and Scuderia 1918 Future when the latter tipped three rails, slipping to third place.

Emiliano Portale’s old-fashioned galloping machine Aracne dell’Esercito Italiano impresses in the jumping phases for second place in the Italian National Championship. Photo by Tilly Berendt.

Second place — and the only clear in this line-up — went to Emiliano Portale and the impressive young stallion Aracne dell’Esercito Italiano, who was ninth at the start of the competition after a mercurial dressage performance earned them a 35.9. They climbed to fourth place yesterday, picking up 7.6 time penalties despite the horse’s exceptional gallop, and their clear inside the time today allowed them to finish in fine style.

Stay tuned for plenty more from Pratoni’s test event, including analysis, the secrets of the hills as told by designer Giuseppe della Chiesa, chats with chef d’equipes and North American representatives, and plenty more. Go Eventing.

The final leaderboard in the Italian National Championship.

Pratoni 2022 Test Event: Website, Live Scoring, Live Stream, Entries, EN’s Coverage, EN’s Twitter, EN’s Instagram

Italy’s Marco Cappai produces his test in front of the ground jury. Photo by Tilly Berendt.

One of the curiosities of this week’s test event at Pratoni is its ground jury appointments: though almost all the officials who’ll run the show when the World Championships rolls around in September are the being put through their paces this week, the ground jury for this test event will differ from the final line-up come WEG week. This is down to a procedural change that was enacted during last year’s Olympic cycle — now, the announced trio can’t be employed in full at an event in the lead-up to the championship.

But there is one man who will cross over between the two events: Canada’s Peter Gray, who helms this week’s team as president of the ground jury. This weekend, he’s joined by Mariana Sciocchetti Campello (ITA) as well as Laure Eslan (FRA). In September, we’ll see him return as a member of the ground jury once again, where he’ll be joined by president Christina Klingspor (SWE) and fellow member Christian Steiner (AUT). EN caught up with him to find out what his role as a ground jury member comprises, how he’s contributing to the development of this year’s World Championships, and what we might expect in September.

This is a return visit to Pratoni for Peter, who was part of the FEI Risk Management Committee years previously — a key milestone in one of his many roles in eventing, which has included acting as Canada’s National Safety Officer. Now, three years after earning his five-star judging licence, he returns in a different role, but one that arguably has just as much influence on the shape the final competition takes. The honour of being selected from the large list of qualified ground jury members certainly isn’t lost on him.

“I come to the role in a unique situation, in that I was an international competitor first, and then I became and international coach and trainer, and now I’m an international dressage rider — so that keeps me sharp for this phase,” Peter explains. “But I’ve also been on organising committees for competitions, so I kind of tick a lot of boxes, but I wonder how I got selected! I’m one of 150 who could be chosen, so I’m very honoured and very excited to be here.”

There’s no nomination process for being selected to judge at a championship — rather, it’s a call-up, as Peter explains: “They look at your track record, and probably ask around and check results from where you’ve been judging, and make sure you know what you’re doing. Every three or four years you’re meant to do a course, and when I was promoted to the five-star three years ago, at that time they said I was the sort of person they want to promote — I don’t know what they say, but I was happy to fit that, and here I am!”

Sara Algotsson-Ostholt rides Chicuelo as part of the Swedish team at Pratoni’s test event. Photo by Tilly Berendt.

The role of the ground jury is vast: not only are they the judges for the first phase, they also have the final call on whether horses are accepted into the competition and passed into the final phase, and they have to sign off the cross-country course as fit for purpose, too — though this part, Peter explains, has become less pressurised as the standard of design has continued on an upswing, replete with continued improvements where safety measures are concerned.

“In the past, the role of ground jury was more important for walking the cross country, because it has to be approved by us and we have to, as horsemen, give our stamp of approval of whether the course designer has been fair with the questions he’s asked or if he’s overdone anything,” says Peter. “Sometimes it’s a good check for the course designers, but with the top ones — and we have one of the top ones here — it’s just a formality. They do such a great job.”

Arguably the most intense part of the job is judging the dressage phase, particularly as the standard of performances in this phase continues to rise at a remarkable rate. For Peter, it’s crucial to engage in ‘blind’ judging — disregarding the renown of the rider in front of him and focusing instead on what they present on the day. Because he doesn’t judge in Europe as often as many other ground jury representatives, he’s able to make the best use of a degree of separation from those riders who put in world-beating performances day in and day out — and from those who are just starting to put their names on the map.

“I think I may have raised a few eyebrows yesterday because I judged what I saw,” he explains. “I’m not influenced by their results, or what they’ve done in the past. I don’t judge them a lot, and I think that’s a good thing because I can try to judge what I see with fresh eyes every time.”

It’s just as important to Peter to judge a rider such as Ingrid Klimke with the same exact parameters as one of the younger, less well-known riders he’s seen in the dressage ring this week, because even the slightest bias or lapse in concentration can make an enormous impact on the final results.

“Every phase is so influential now, and the dressage is no longer as influential as it perhaps has been, but these days everything is so competitive — a flying change in the first phase or a time penalty in showjumping can make the difference between winning and losing. I would say I’m one of those people who takes my judging as a real challenge; every time I’m in the box I’m trying to do the very best I can for every rider that comes down the centerline — this morning, I said to my scribe, ‘this could be the winner’, and I was just thinking out loud, but every time someone comes down, I’ve got to be ready in case it is.”

Though he’ll return in September as a member of the ground jury, this week we’re seeing him sitting at C as the president — but what, if anything, is the difference between the roles?

“Well, you have to really remember your test, because you’re the one to ring the bell if they go wrong,” he says with a laugh. “So you have to pay attention. But honestly, it’s really the captain of the team — it’s not a person who has more influence than the others, because we all act as a team, even though the president does have the deciding vote on anything, be it course approval, horses in the horse inspection, and so on. That all ultimately comes down to the presidential vote.”

France’s Nicolas Touzaint, who became the European champion at Pratoni in 2007, returns with Absolute Gold HDC. Photo by Tilly Berendt.

Because of the collaborative nature of the role, Peter has sought out opportunities to touch base with his September cohorts.

“I’ve worked with Kiki [Christina Klingspor, president of September’s ground jury] quite a bit in America, and I introduced myself to Christian Steiner, who was in Kentucky at the five-star. I was president of the four-star, so we had dinner. It’s nice to have met him and formed that working relationship,” he says. He’ll get another chance to work with Kiki prior to the World Championships: the pair will both be in situ on the ground jury at Aachen in July, which will act as an important selection trial for many federations. Because of his unique crossover between the test event and the World Championships, though, he’s a major conduit for feedback that will help make this September’s competition the best it possibly can be: “Certainly, it’s all very much in my mind about what’s going to happen in September, and I’m making notes on small things that could be improved, but the list really is small. It’s just hard to imagine how the infrastructure will expand as we go to many more horses and many more people — it’ll be five times as big.”

So far, though, so good: Peter is full of praise for Pratoni as a venue, a common feeling in the ranks on site here in Italy.

“Certainly I’m appreciating the integral parts of the competition that the horses are going through, and I think one thing that stands out is for horses and owners and riders, it’s a very friendly place to be. I think the horses have a really nice feel here; they all seem to be in a good place to be mentally — and how could they not? It seems like a very peaceful part of the world,” he says. “I’m particularly impressed with the course designer, Giuseppe della Chiesa. I haven’t seen any of his courses before, but he’s used the long routes in a very horse-friendly way. Instead of spinning them around in circles and making the long route actually exhausting for a potentially tired horse, he’s done a really good job of making them time-consuming but keeping a lovely flow and making it a very positive experience for the horses. I’m very impressed with that. For those that think it might have a little bit of a straightforward look, I think the terrain at the beginning and some of the questions have challenges that aren’t apparent right away. I think he’s got it bang on, I really do.”

Though this week’s competition is held at CCI4*-S, and thus employs a shorter route than September’s long-format Championships, it’s also a great opportunity for everyone on site to familiarise themselves with Pratoni’s uniquely rolling hills, which create a terrain and stamina challenge that’s above and beyond most events on the FEI calendar.

“I suspect the hills are going to be a real factor come September, though that may not be so apparent this weekend,” says Peter. “I think where some of the more warmblood horses will get away with it this weekend, come September, you’ll want to have your galloper with good endurance. I think also, related to that, something that won’t be completely fatigued on the final day for the jumping. You need a horse that can make the time but still come out fresh the next day. It’ll be a challenge for the selection.”

But while descriptions of the hills and reports of long patches of prolonged sunshine might make Pratoni sound like an event that’ll be hard on horses, it’s also blessed by its location: the ground here remains consistent regardless of how dry or wet the weather is, because it’s composed of volcanic sand – and on a molecular level, it doesn’t clump, become boggy, or harden. The footing feels surprisingly springy underfoot, though Peter puts this better than we can.

“Let me give you a word to describe the ground here: it’s like a magic carpet,” he says with a smile. Roll on Pratoni 2.0, then.

Pratoni 2022 Test Event: Website, Live Scoring, Live Stream, Entries, EN’s Coverage, EN’s Twitter, EN’s Instagram