The 2025 European Champions: Laura Collett and London 52. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
Just over a week ago, the 2025 Agria FEI European Eventing Championships wound down to a thrilling conclusion in the grounds of Blenheim Palace. As always, the championships served up a fascinating indicator of where many of the major players in the sport sit at this early juncture in the 2028 Olympic cycle, and, also as always, they gave us all quite broadly a sense of what we’re getting right and what we need to work on. After a good few days of staring at the blank walls of a darkened room in a bid to recover from the merry chaos of it all, I’m back in action – and with plenty of thoughts on what we saw at Blenheim and what could, or perhaps should, be next on the timeline.
A decisive victory for Collett
Laura Collett has been waiting some fifteen years for an individual Senior title after so much success in the Pony, Junior, and Young Rider programmes, and her Blenheim battle feels like the most fitting way to have finally taken that richly deserved gold. That match race with Michi Jung, which we’ve seen set up time and time again, played out perfectly, with the two riders neck and neck throughout the week; in each phase, neither horse nor rider made any kind of misstep to ‘lose’ the competition. At Paris last year, we saw a late rail cost Laura the gold in favour of Michi; at Blenheim, both combinations jumped easy, classy clear rounds, and ultimately, it all came down to cross-country performance.
That’s what makes this feel so special, particularly when Laura’s victory comes with the remarkable London 52. I’ve been thinking about ‘Dan’ and his career trajectory a lot lately, because in many ways, it feels like he’s been the horse of my career: I began reporting on eventing in 2017, the year he made his FEI debut, and almost immediately he was a horse I wrote about time and time and time again. I remember the quiet buzz of 2018, when he stepped up to four-star and made his Event Rider Masters debut, taking second at Arville; I remember how throughout the season, he flirted with top tens in these hotly-contested classes. I remember, like it was yesterday, his victory that autumn in the eight- and nine-year-old class at Blenheim, and what that meant to Karen Bartlett, who co-owns him with Keith Scott and Laura, and who had been part of the fabric of the Blenheim team for some twenty years. I remember that second place finish at Boekelo on his CCI4*-L debut.
And I remember 2019 – boy, do I remember 2019. Dan began the season heralded as the next big thing, and second-place finishes in CCI4*-S classes at Belton and Burnham Market backed that feeling up nicely. Then, swiftly after that, a huge victory in the ERM class at Chatsworth – a tough, terrain-y, technical venue that proved the horse could cope when the going got tough. In Dan’s ten-year-old season, just three years into his eventing career, he was ‘it’.
Laura Collett and London 52. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
But then it all felt like it fell apart on the world stage. The trouble with having all eyes on a young, inexperienced, phenomenally talented horse is that even those phenomenal talents need to do what young and inexperienced horses do: they need to make mistakes, often quite big ones, and learn to find their feet, to swim in deeper waters. When that all happens under a spotlight, the intensity is magnified; the pressure, I can imagine, was colossal for Laura. The pair picked up a 20 and retired on course at Bramham CCI4*-L, were sent to CHIO Aachen and had a 20 there, too – a painful 20 at the tail end of the course, when they were sitting in the lead after the first two phases. Still, they were given the nod for that summer’s European Championships at Luhmühlen, where they were sent as individuals rather than team members. Redemption felt so close at hand: they closed out the first phase in bronze medal position, and set out on cross-country looking strong and capable. But that year’s bogey fence, a colourful bird in the water at 20B, proved their downfall, and Laura ended her day with soggy breeches and a long, long journey home. Adulation can be a fickle thing, and there was plenty of chatter across the sport: was London 52 actually just a flash in the pan?
They say these things come in threes, and in this case, that proved true – though it feels like a bit of a disservice to Laura to credit fates and fortunes with everything that came next. In reality, there was a hell of a lot of work, much gritting of teeth to push through the mental pressures of everything that had come before and, I have no doubt, some serious pep talks at the hands of Yogi Breisner, who’s been such a huge part of Laura’s career. Whatever she did behind the scenes, it worked: on their next FEI run, in the Nations Cup finale at Boekelo in October of 2019, Laura and Dan were victorious.
From then on, Dan was a changed man – and Laura has often credited the huge buzz of Boekelo with bolstering his confidence. The next year, the pair won Pau on the horse’s CCI5* debut; in 2021, they were part of the gold medal-winning team at the postponed Tokyo Olympics; in 2022 they won Badminton; in 2023 they won Luhmühlen; in 2024 they were gold- and bronze-medallists at Paris; the list goes on and on and one. Championships have, perhaps, been the last demon to expel, with Dan’s now-rare mistakes coming on those big occasions, but they can now consider that issue truly exorcised. The fact that the win at Blenheim came down to cross-country speed is also a useful demon-expeller: if there’s been a lingering question mark over the horse, it’s been whether he’s a true run-and-jump kind of athlete. The pair’s performance on a tough cross-country day, which saw them deliver the second-fastest time of the day and make it look easy, is decisive and delicious.
Team Ireland earn their accolades at Blenheim. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
The state of the nations
The topic of the week – beyond that brilliant individual title for Laura and Dan – was surely the shock non-completion of the British team, who had come into the week looking like they could walk blindfolded to the top of the podium. But it wasn’t to be: four of the seven eliminations on cross-country day were British riders hitting the deck, and just Laura and Tom McEwen made it to Sunday’s finale, and then onward to that podium.
But that’s sport, isn’t it? And as the kids would say, it’s not that deep. A bad week for the Brits doesn’t mean the Brits are suddenly falling apart at the seams: instead, as chef d’equipe Dicky Waygood sagely said the next morning, “the bubble had to burst at some point.” What he also pointed out, quite crucially, was the manner in which the falls happened: each rider left the start box on a mission, riding determinedly and positively and, as is so, so key to this level of the sport, they took calculated risks to put themselves into competitive positions against the clock. But a calculated risk is still a risk, and sometimes shit does just happen, and even with hindsight, you can’t really see how it could be any different. (I’m looking at you, Piggy March, and you, gutsy little Halo – who can predict when a horse will try to sprout wings, and how quickly he’ll realise he can’t?)
The point of it all, really, is that all the right stuff was there — the grit, the drive, the positivity – except for the luck element, which remains an intangible but essential part of any sport. The Brits will bounce back, and realistically, they might even be better for it. This is a non-essential Europeans, in that it doesn’t count towards any qualifications and falls at the start of a new Olympic cycle, and so it’s a perfect time to learn, readjust, develop new talent, and so on, and so forth. A long wave of success will always eventually breed complacency, and while I don’t think any of the four riders who fell at Blenheim did so because they weren’t taking the job seriously, it still serves as a potent sharpener for the whole British apparatus. Don’t pity the Brits while they lick their wounds; fear their inevitable regrouping, instead.
Switzerland’s Robin Godel and Global DHI. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
Speaking of riders who leave the start box with grit, drive, and the courage to take calculated risks, we’ve got to talk about Switzerland. I’ve written about their trajectory countless times over the last six years or so, but not without reason: it’s been a pleasure to watch them transform from a squad of very capable riders to a squad of true competitors. Some of the credit for this transformation can go the way of Andrew Nicholson, who has been in situ as their cross-country coach since 2019, and who has taken some seriously good raw material and given it an edge. Where the Swiss once rode to complete, played it safe, and logged competent but unremarkable steady clears, they’re now a group of riders who, like the Brits or any of the ‘Big Six’ nation riders, leave the start box with bigger goals than simply completing. Now, we get to watch them take calculated risks and make big moves for them, and their rise feels both swift and inexorable as a result of it.
Last week, that meant that we saw them come into the final day defending a podium position, and while they ultimately swapped places with France and finished fourth after uncharacteristically expensive rounds for Nadja Minder and Mélody Johner, I hope they’ve walked away with a real sense of how close everything they’ve worked for is. I thought it was a really interesting team line-up for them this week: though the four riders are the same four we’ve seen at the last few championships, three of the four were on younger or second-string horses which showed that as a nation, they’re in a position to use this early-cycle championship in the way that a leading nation might – to build and develop and create strength in depth. That they finished so close to the medals without a line-up of A team horses is a seriously important milestone as we continue to follow the growth of the Swiss. The next Europeans will be on home soil for them – I suspect they won’t let that opportunity pass them by.
Both Sweden and Belgium, nations similarly on the rise, felt a touch cursed from the off: each had a withdrawal prior to the start of cross-country, which left them without drop-scores, and when Sweden’s Christoffer Forsberg opted to pull up on course because Hippos Sapporo didn’t feel totally himself, they were out of the game. The non-completion of Wouter de Cleene and Quintera also nullified the Belgian effort. Both teams wore absences like a shroud: Louise Romeike and Tine Magnus and their respective great greys, Caspian 15 and Dia Van Het Lichterveld Z, were much-missed from proceedings and will, I hope, make welcome returns for Aachen next year.
Lea Siegl and Van Helsing P of Austria. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
Could we ever have predicted a week in which the Austrian team – the only team to come into Blenheim with just three riders, and no drop score – would finish above the Brits? Probably not, no – but again, that’s sport, baby. Lea Siegl once again helmed the team, riding as she has throughout her Senior career with a maturity well beyond her years. Her fifth-place finish, the highest ever for an Austrian rider at a Championship, is richly deserved, and the fifth-place finish of the team, too, should give all three competitors no small well of pride to take away. This is a nation with limited resources for its competitors; there are few top-level Austrian riders, the federation is considerably less high-powered than its neighbours, and the training apparatus seems to rely largely on individual systems, but Lea, Harald, and Katrin keep on showing up and doing what they love, and it’s a joy to see it pay off.
Early in the week, I started raising the unpopular prediction that Germany would come out on top, dispelling the odd and oft-repeated notion among British-based fans that they don’t have strength in depth. They certainly do, and like the Brits, I felt that they could easily have fielded several very competitive teams at last year’s Olympics. This year’s line-up was particularly exciting because it opened the door for the next generation of superstars: Libussa Lubbeke was a brilliant pathfinder, Jérôme Robiné once again proved that he’s the real deal, and Malin Hansen-Hotopp, despite a moment of lost sanity in the final phase, made everyone wonder why she’s not a lynchpin of every team effort. All benefited from the generous well of knowledge that is Michael Jung, but it also didn’t feel as though he was leagues ahead of his teammates, dragging them along behind them. They each played a crucial part and reaped the rewards, which will be a huge boost ahead of a home World Championships next year. Individuals Nico Aldinger and Calvin Böckmann were also excellent and showed that they could have been extremely valuable on the team, too – though the happiest kind of finish is one in which there are no ‘might have beens’, because everyone’s done their bit admirably. The Warendorf factory farm for young talent in Germany deserves its own medal, too, arguably.
Germany’s Jérôme Robiné and Black Ice. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
France, despite the eleventh-hour loss of Nicolas Touzaint, acquitted themselves well in the grounds of the palace and proved that the FFE’s extortionate bill for ferry crossings this year has been well worthwhile. They’ve been back and forth across the English Channel, targeting Bramham back in June as a way to prepare their horses to run competitively over tough terrain, and that showed in the ease with which they all crossed the finish line last week. Like Germany, this was a great chance to bring forward next-gen talent, most notably in Alexis Goury, who finished sixth with Je’Vall in a blaze of glory and ‘allez, allez’ joie de vivre.
Having France on a podium does present some logistical issues, mind you: the world-weary announcer sounded as though he was at breaking point by the fourth time he pleaded with les bleus to step onto the podium, because they were so busy kissing the cheeks of every other competitor that they kept missing their cue. Perhaps best to schedule the bisous delay into all future prizegivings, just in case.
It was the Irish, though, who really felt like the team of the week. A tougher-than-expected cross-country played right into their hands, and they were able to execute a classy climb after all starting their week in the low-to-mid 30s. The silver medal they ultimately walked away with is Ireland’s first Europeans team medal since 1995 (though notably not their first Europeans medal in that long of a time: Cathal Daniels won individual bronze in 2019 and deserves his flowers for that), and joins their 2018 WEG team silver in the trophy cabinet. The last fistful of years hasn’t felt particularly straightforward for the Irish, with leadership changes and protracted legal battles at the top of the sport, but their riders are as good as they’ve ever been and very obviously hungry for success.
Even more heartening is the decisive performances of newer faces on the team. Ian Cassells and Robbie Kearns are practically part of the furniture at this point on the eventing scene, but this was just a second Senior call-up for the former and a debut for the latter, and each rode exceptionally under pressure. Both riders have been excellent producers of young horses for a long time now, and it’s great to see them keep top-level rides so they can have their well-deserved time in the spotlight. Robbie Kearns can get a special nod here: over the weekend, I was chatting with some journalist friends and we all agreed that it was great fun to see someone so obviously having great craic out on course, even with so much at stake. Anything, or anyone, that brings fun back to eventing is alright by me.
Blenheim Palace: a canvas for the imagination, perhaps. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
The good, the bad, and the plastic-wrapped
I’m firmly of the belief that every major competition brings with it opportunities to improve for the next time, and that’s not a nitpicky sort of thing – it’s one of those ‘work to better the thing you love the most’ sort of things. At Blenheim, which was largely a successful week, there were a few adjustments that might have sealed the deal on the whole affair as a roaring success.
There wasn’t much to be done about the state of the Palace – “okay, it’s not the best looking at the moment, but it’s a great place,” to quote Michi Jung – which was covered in plastic sheeting and scaffolding due to a major roof renovation. The plus side? It was only the colonnaded middle section of the south façade that was covered which, yes, okay, is the main bit, but the side wings were visible and with some creative relocation, photographers could still manage to capture glimpses of the location without the full-on sensor glare of sunshine on white plastic. It’s a shame, though, that the news of the scaffolding felt like it was sprung on us all at the eleventh hour when it turns out that the plan has been in place for several years, and so communications about it must have arisen when Blenheim first decided to make a bid for this championships.
Still, a palace background does not a competition make, and the bigger picture, really, is that we were at risk of losing the European Championships series entirely, before Blenheim scooped it up and reinjected some life into its veins after a long period where no venue made a bid to host. If it hadn’t run in 2025, would it have returned in 2027? Perhaps – but that’s not something I’d like to see put to the test, and I’m grateful that Blenheim’s expansive team took the whole endeavour on so we don’t have to. Putting on a championship is an eye-wateringly expensive operation, and so the support of insurance firm Agria, who are swiftly becoming one of equestrian sport’s most prolific benefactors, is no small detail. Engaging with the brands that fund our fun is key to continuing sponsorships, and as my horse’s insurance policy comes up for renewal, I’ll certainly be making a call to Agria to see whether signing on with them might suit our needs.
More important than any backdrop, too, is the ground – and that, ultimately, was a triumph. Just a month or so prior to the Championships, it was hard to imagine how anyone would safely be able to run on it: it was desert brown, bone-dry, and hard as the motorway, and it seemed almost certain that we’d see avoidable injuries occur over the course of the event. Because Blenheim Palace is such a prominent tourist attraction, access to the park for the team was much more limited than at the likes of Burghley, and watering efforts only began in the last few days of August – but the huge amount of water put down, plus some much-needed help from the weather forecast, really turned things around at the eleventh hour. Horses travelled well around the course, looked fit at the finish, and trotted up exceptionally well on Sunday: just one horse was withdrawn overnight, and none of those presented were sent to the holding box. That, plus just one horse fall on Saturday, marks a very positive weekend for the sport in my eyes.
Substantial glimpses of Blenheim Palace remained available, for those happy to turn a few inches to the left or right. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
Something that I thought about a lot as we approached the Europeans was this: is it possible to integrate other competitions in with a Championship? I’ve never yet seen it done, though I’m sure it must have been at some point. In any case, while the prestigious eight- and nine-year-old class, so often a kingmaker in our sport, was able to run alongside the Europeans this year, I’m not wholly convinced that either class was particularly improved for the decision.
Reporting on a Championship is such an intensive task that there was no chance at all of getting a cursory look-in at the CCI4*-S, which feels like a real shame: as a journalist, I know how crucial this class is to the broader infrastructure of our sport, and how great an opportunity it is to earmark the stars of the next few years, and I was disappointed not to be able to keep even half an eye on it. Riders and owners alike, too, often felt rather relegated to the sidelines – they were kept totally separate from the Europeans competitors, which makes sense to some extent, but their exclusion from the drinks reception at the palace feels shortsighted. For some riders and support systems, that’s a once-in-a-lifetime occasion, and to be downgraded to a marquee in the lorry park just doesn’t feel quite the same. I wonder if everyone might have benefited if Cornbury International, a week prior and ten minutes down the road, had taken on this class instead. They already host the British five-, six-, and seven-year-old championships and are champing at the bit to be granted a CCI4*-S – I have no doubt that they’d have pulled out all the stops to make it a real showcase for these exceptional young horses, and the organisers at Blenheim could have had a bit less on their very full plates.
In some ways, the existence of a secondary class made the Europeans feel like a beefed-up Nations Cup, and that probably wasn’t totally helped by a surprising lack of branding. There was a game effort made to have a purple, FEI European Eventing Championships-branded archway leading into the dressage arena, but that came down in Wednesday’s winds and was never seen again – and in any case, it was rather too far from the ring to realistically be seen from the grandstands or photographed from the primary functional photo pen. The tarpaulin-covered TV camera stands seemed an obvious location for some more branding boards, and just one fence on the cross-country course had any kind of FEI branding, though there were plenty of open green stretches behind jumps that would have benefitted from them and lent a real sense of occasion to the whole affair. It reminded me, sometimes, of the frustration of shooting the cross-country at last year’s Olympics – while photographers in each of the other sports were spoiled with Olympic rings at every angle, including on the rims of basketball hoops, it was a challenge to find any to incorporate into our day’s output there.
Many places on course felt like obvious choices for some European Championships branding boards, which would have added to the sense of occasion nicely. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
Showcasing the sport
It was brilliant to see a fully functional, championships-calibre mixed zone for each phase, equipped with television sets and branding boards and capably helmed by Amy Kingham, who was our media centre manager at the Paris Olympics last year and is, as such, no slouch. She ensured members of the media were able to speak to each and every rider, which makes life an awful lot easier – over the last few years of Blenheim, there’s been no mixed zone and no press conference, and that, combined with no phone signal, means an awful lot of extra running around and time spent trying to speak to the people you need, so kudos to them for getting this so right at the Europeans.
It can be easy, I think, to dismiss the concerns and needs of the media, but to do so misses the bigger picture. Few riders get into equestrian sport because they want fame – they do it because they love horses, and they love training and competing. But any sport’s existence on a stage larger than a local community centre is completely contingent on it being a viable source of entertainment for spectators. Those spectators might be watching from afar via livestreams, following along through live blogs, or paying fairly hefty sums to watch on site, but whatever the case may be, we have to ensure that they’re catered for and that excellent, factually accurate, entertaining storytelling is upheld across all mediums.
For some grandstand ticket-holders on the two dressage days, the week got off to a tricky start: two Subaru SUVs, advertising the event’s official vehicle partner, were parked at the A end of the arena, ostensibly showcasing the cars but actually just blocking the view of the dressage from anyone in the lower half of the stands. Perhaps in future the best move is to do sightline checks from all ticketed seats to ensure that everyone is getting a good view – and if a restricted view can’t be avoided, then tickets should be sold labelled as such and discounted accordingly, which is something that works fine in West End theatres. If sightline checks aren’t possible because access to the site is limited, as it was in the lead-up to Blenheim, perhaps next time the cars can be parked flanking the judges’ box at C, behind which there were no grandstands.
I have no doubt that the dynamic commentary team of Tina Cook and Steve Wilde took great care of livestream viewers, but I would have loved to have seen a few tweaks to the on-site announcing, which sometimes felt cobbled together. As an occasional commentator myself, I appreciate how taxing it is: I tend to allocate at least one unpaid ten-hour day to writing a page of notes per competitor, and I know that by hour three or so on the mic, your throat starts to feel like some sort of alien thing that’s possessed your body. Mistakes and mispronunciations happen, and I think we’d all do well to allocate some amount of grace for that.
But in order to really sell this sport, and in order to do justice to people who have worked and sacrificed for their entire lives to get to this moment, I do think we need to start from a place in which all our Is are dotted and our Ts are crossed. In a field of sub-55, you’re not likely to have pronunciation queries on more than half the field, but even if every single one is confusing, that’s a small enough list to Google them all and write them down phonetically in your notes so you can ensure you get somebody’s name right when they come into the ring for the biggest moment of their life. If we can pronounce Aoife, we can pronounce anything, you know?
The ritual of research and note-taking is such a necessary part of the whole endeavour; back when I used to write EN’s form guides, the 20+ hours I’d spend trawling through all articles, live-streams, and back-and-forth conversations with competitors would set me up so robustly for the week of reporting ahead of me, and I wouldn’t ever want to assign somebody else with doing it for me. I can’t speak to who did the notes for the announcers – whether it was themselves, somebody else, or AI (god, I truly hope not) – but they probably needed a quick sanity check so that Felix Vogg wasn’t continually referred to as Switzerland’s only five-star winner, or that Lara de Liedekerke-Meier’s 14th-place finish at Badminton wasn’t put forward as her greatest achievement with Hooney d’Arville. (Or, for that matter, that Olympic medallist Astier Nicolas isn’t called… Nicholas Astier.)
On a similar note, on several occasions the riders from the Czech Republic were announced as being from Czechoslovakia – a country that hasn’t existed since 1992. Nobody needs to embark upon a history PhD in order to be a commentator, but we do need to get the basics right. It’s not just a marker of respect (although that’s really important, too), it’s also a way of applying appropriate gravitas to every competitor, and every flag, which makes a continental championship feel appropriately exciting and further sells the narrative.
On the other side of the coin, I enjoyed the back-and-forth between the two ring announcers on the final day of competition, and I thought that the obvious personal biases were brilliantly handled. I’ve always been firmly of the opinion that representatives of the media should be able to voice their thoughts, and their allegiances, loudly and proudly – it’s just another way of telling a story and it can be a compelling way for viewers to find their own team or rider of choice, too.
My face when I first saw the course, probably. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
It’s just as important to know when you’re wrong as it is to know when you’re right
I was reminded at Blenheim of how easily things can be, well, not quite as they appear — which is probably a valuable reminder for someone who covers the sport for fans. I certainly didn’t need a reminder that walking the cross-country course is crucial; that’s something I make an effort to do and, when I have the time, I try to walk all the different lines and stride patterns, too, because the devil is often in the details. That was certainly the case with Captain Mark Phillips’s clever track. I’d seen it a few weeks before the event on a media preview day, though that’s never really the same as a proper course walk — you might get the chance to walk a line or two but largely, you drive around the course and see it from afar (which is no criticism — these preview days are massively helpful for the media!). My initial impression on that day was that it felt and looked like a small course; a similar one to the CCI4*-L course of the year prior, but dialled back in intensity. The coffin was now a half-coffin; the fences sold to us as being the most difficult felt like straightforward, if positive, distances to not-very-impressive efforts. “It’s giving Open Intermediate,” I said to some friends, who agreed. I figured I’d spot the rub when I walked the course on the Wednesday of the event.
And yeah, I totally would have done, were it not for a string of silly incidents and technical hitches and changes-of-plan that meant I couldn’t get out there on Wednesday, I couldn’t get out there on Thursday, and ultimately, I couldn’t get out there at all. When Saturday rolled around, surprise! It wasn’t at all an OI; it was, yes, dimensionally compact, but the Captain had created clever lines that allowed limited margin for error and required riders to know exactly where they were heading, and at what pace, before they took off for the fence before. In many places, the option to chuck in a bend so as to add an extra stride were limited; the unusual decision not to have a combination on course until fence 6 meant many horses and riders picked up early 20s at one of the smallest fences on course. The prominent tumbles of the Brits can make it feel, erroneously, like falls were commonplace throughout the day, but they weren’t: just 7 combinations were eliminated on cross-country, and time and silly drive-bys proved most influential. Less experienced horses, riders, and nations were able to have great, steady runs and come home with clear rounds and heaping fistfuls of time penalties, and the very top was suitably tested, which I’d been worried it wouldn’t be. One non-competing rider, who I’d been texting back and forth about our shared underwhelm at the course, texted me on Saturday evening: “Guess I got that wrong,” they laughed. “Egg on our faces, for sure,” I replied. It was a super course, on excellent footing — and I couldn’t be happier to have been wrong.
Next up to bat…
With Blenheim behind us, I’m looking forward to a return to Avenches in 2027 for the next round of the FEI European Eventing Championships. We ordinarily see the same few venues coming forward again and again to host these championships, but Avenches, tucked away in a medieval town just west of Bern in Switzerland, has stepped up to bat just once before. That was in 2021, and their hosting situation was an unconventional one: initially, all the European Championships across the disciplines had been cancelled due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, but after a period of deliberation, the FEI decided to reinstate the jumping and dressage Europeans – but not the eventing ones. A social media campaign, helmed by Michael Jung, popped up to support our sport and Avenches, run by the Vogg family, put their hands up as a venue and team that would be willing and able to host on short notice.
That Europeans was, arguably, my favourite of the bunch so far: it’s a gorgeous venue, fringed with leggy cyprus trees so it feels like you’re trapped in a Van Gogh painting; there’s a fondue tent; it’s simple but extraordinarily friendly; and the local area is a goldmine for exploring. I was impressed with what the team there managed to do on short notice four years ago; I can’t wait to see what they make of the job with a full ‘term’ to serve. Good luck to them, and well done to Blenheim’s team, who got a big job done and, I hope, have also managed to emerge from the darkened rooms post-event.
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