Here are a few quick afternoon notes on a busy day around Eventing Nation:
1) Sven Homberg has resigned his FEI positions of Bureau Member and Chair of the Jumping Committee. Mr. Holmberg was one of two opponents to Princess Haya in last November’s FEI elections. Princess Haya won in a landslide, and Sven has continued to be critical of Princess Haya since the elections. John Madden, a renowned figure in US show jumping, takes over Sven’s position as Acting Chair of the Jumping Committee. We wish Mr. Holberg the best moving forward and I hope that we start hearing about more changes from the FEI than critics of Princess Haya resigning. [FEI Press Release, Eurodressage, COTH]
2) The Horse and Hound made my day by writing about Eventing Nation in their Prue Barrett story. They linked to John Lechner’s (ESJ) fantastic post about Prue from Tuesday. To my knowledge, this is the first link to EN from our friends at Horse and Hound, who arguably operate the number one sport horse media outlet in the world. Here’s what they said:
“American eventing website Eventing Nation ran an interview with Prue on Tuesday, where she stated her commitment to keeping the Australian eventing programme based in the Southern Hemisphere, a different strategy to that recently announced by the New Zealanders, who will be based in Britain in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics.” [Horse and Hound]
3) The past few days have been all about reining. Yesterday we found out that reining would be held at Rolex and today the USEF announced that the American Junior Reining Championship will become part of the North American Young Riders championship. Two weeks ago endurance was added to the NAYRC. Will we see vaulting, combined driving, and para-equestrian added soon? Hopefully, although adding all of these disciplines is really narrowing the number of venues that will be able to host Young Riders. I have advocated for a while to make the Kentucky Horse Park the permanent home of Young Riders and that appears to be almost necessary now. [USEF]
4) Eventing dogs are staying warm this winter [3D3W]
5) The local Aiken newspaper wrote about Boyd at the training sessions. [Aiken Standard]
6) Canadian Pan Am hopeful and EN guest writer Chelan Kozak has written a post for her blog about the west coast training sessions with David. Here is a quick excerpt with Chelan’s video below:
“Dressage on Tuesday was hard work (loved it). I had the 8 AM time slot, and got the day off to a ‘typical DOC day’ as my 45 minute session slipped into an hour and a half lesson. he got on Cal then I got back on. I have been struggling with keeping his connection exactly where it needs to stay when I change direction. Forward and back I am okay, but changing direction is challenging. I told David that I can ROCK the 20 m circle in one direction… Apparently that is not quite enough. We did endless exercises to get him more flexible in his hips, particularly haunches in. I have tried that plenty myself, but David was concentrating more on getting the bend behind than in front. At first, even if he had not enough flexion up front, it was not a concern. He wanted me to get him flexing behind. Then he got on and Cal was like, ‘who IS this guy… there is no way out’ Cal is a genuine horse who tries his best at all times, so eventually he got what DOC was asking, and it made an enormous change.” [Chelan’s blog]
6) Lastly, PRO has announced a scholarship for training level junior members of PRO. Junior members will be scored by PRO riders at various competitions during the year. The top two point earning riders from the eastern half of the country will each earn a scholarship award with Marcia Kulak and Jan Byyny respectively. The two top point earning riders from the western half of the country will earn a scholarship week with Hawley Bennett-Awad and Amy Tryon respectively. [USEA]
Go eventing.
