Vicky Madsen is a British event rider who currently competes at 4* level on her homebred horse By Crikey (William). William is not your traditional 4* horse being 1/16th Exmoor Pony and 1/16th Clydesdale and a good dose of Anglo Arab from his sire Tracey X. Last year Vicky and William competed at Luhmuhlen 4* coming 20thand this year achieved their highest ever placing at CIC3* coming 5th at Arville. Vicky has one horse competing at this level and last year contemplated selling William because the finances did not add up. William is not a natural dressage horse but he is fast and clever cross country so can often make up for the dressage.
A race car decorating the course at Pau
From Vicky:
I can’t pull the wool over your eyes any longer now that Le Lion has been cancelled: there’s a deluge going on here! Well Le Lion is quite a bit further north than we are, but still, it’s raining and the horses here are right wimps about it. The TBs looked pitifully at me last night when I led them out to the field (in rugs!) to spend the night in the rain!
Luckily Pau is on sand, so it should be fine, and the weather forecast is for an improvement…. Pau really isn’t far from here so the other day when we had to go there anyway we popped into the park where the event is held and had a little look at the arenas and the trade stand village. We could see quite a lot of the course too, some of runs right next to a busy road, and what we could see looks great, nothing like it to get the heart rate up a bit!
A sneak peak at the Pau trade fair
William meanwhile has been testing my mettle: he has a new turnout partner, the delectably cute Tinga, but I fear she may be the one who put a hole in his head, although I’m sure he deserved it. It was a bit swollen the first
few days but I’ve been riding him with just a headstall holding his bit to limit the friction on the graze. He will be fine, just a bit bald. Next day he must have trod on the side of his shoe and came in from the field with a nail poking out from underneath at 90 degrees towards the other leg. Luckily I didn’t succumb to palpitations before we got to the stable to pull the nail out, and our farrier who was just off a flight back from NYC was able to come and refit the shoe the next day.
William's poor head
We’ve had our last dressage lesson, and sadly our hoped-for jumping session with Louise Morley wasn’t a goer due to distances and venues, but I did build a course here at home and she’ll have a look at the video of it for me. I’ll probably pop him over a little grid once more before we set off on Tuesday, and he’ll be having a nice massage on the Monday too.
Yesterday I went to the CDI going on at Biarritz as a friend had got me a slot as a writer for one of the judges, and it was a really interesting afternoon. It’s a bit scary how much you can see going wrong from C! The Pony Team Test has very similar trot work to the test we’ll be using in Pau, so it was great to see what the judge can and can’t see from where they’re sitting. There’s no room for error on the angles of the lateral work, and any contact issues were immediately picked up on, whereas accuracy (in terms of the movement being performed at the letter) was not given as high a priority as I had previously thought. Today I ran through our test at home with all this in mind! Hats off to these dressage riders though, I won’t think of them as prissy again after watching them battle through the rain that had turned all their white breeches transparent!
Tinga schooling at home
I must also mention a really great week we had here last week with a friend from Belgium who came for a week’s intensive training. As we already knew her we shamelessly used her as a guinea pig for various things we’d like to incorporate into our future training clinics, so she had a couple of mounted and unmounted sessions with Karen Gunn, a cranio-sacral therapist who is also very very hot on the biomechanics of horse and rider, along
with some sessions with Margaretha De Klerk, a clinical psychologist and hypnotherapist who works a lot with riders. By the end of the week she was unstoppable on our range of TBs here, schooling Arodd for me, jumping a course on Jonas (a resident here), and working with Tinga too. It was really rewarding to see the difference a week of focusing solely on her riding made to her technique but mostly to her confidence and enjoyment of these wonderful animals!
Thanks for reading, I’ll try and keep you updated from Pau.
Vx
