Monday News & Notes from FutureTrack

Guess who’s back in the saddle? Naysayers be damned – Aussie Shane Rose might have suffered 18 total fractures to his ribs, femur, elbow and pelvis in a riding accident just two months ago, but after doing his stint in a hospital bed, he’s ready to crack on with his goal of making it to Paris this summer.  We suppose that if anyone was going to make it happen, it’d be bionic man Shane, who’s got a track record of returning with a big grin on his face from a surprisingly nippy rehab process after the sort of fall that would make most people hang up their boots. Bonza, Shane – and allons-y, and all that!

National Holiday:

US Weekend Action:

Bouckaert Equestrian H.T. (Fairburn, GA): [Website] [Results]

Fair Hill International Recognized H.T. (Elkton, MD): [Website] [Results]

Hitching Post Farm H.T. (South Royalton, VT): [Website] [Results]

Hunt Club Farms H.T. (Berryville, VA): [Website] [Results]

Otter Creek Spring H.T. (Wheeler, WI): [Website] [Results]

Spokane Sport Horse Spring H.T. (Spokane, WA): [Website] [Results]

Spring Gulch H.T. (Highlands Ranch, CO): [Website] [Results]

The Vista Spring YEH/NEH Qualifier (Aiken, SC): [Website] [Results]

UK Weekend Results:

Aston-le-Walls (1) (Daventry, Northants.): [Results]

Frenchfield (1) (Penrith, Cumbria): [Results]

Major International Events:

Longines Pfingsturnier Wiesbaden (Germany): [Website] [Results]

Your Monday Reading List:

One of the quite nice things about being a writer is that occasionally, one of your old pieces resurfaces from the annals. That’s happened for me over the last few days as COTH has revitalised one of my pieces from 2018, when I spent the day with William Fox-Pitt discussing brain injuries, chicken farming, and what retirement might look like. Now that that retirement is here, it’s fun to revisit what he thought of the whole thing six years ago (although the adaptation of the old star levels to the new hasn’t been wholly successful in this new re-editing of the piece, so try to ignore that!). Check it out here.

We all spend a lot of time worrying – rightly – about our horses’ legs. But they can find really creative ways to injure their other body parts, too, so maybe start worrying a bit more, if you’ve got the bandwidth. Just kidding (sort of) – this piece from Horse&Hound is actually pretty optimistic, as it features a reasonably rare neck break, but also, on the flip side, a remarkable recovery for the young and promising Poppy. Find out how it happened, what the vets did, and how Poppy and her owner are getting on with life post-accident here.

Great news: Britain’s National Eventing Championships have found a home for 2024. They needed reallocating after the sad loss of Gatcombe’s Festival of British Eventing from the calendar, and now, it’s been announced that Hartpury, which hosts a major international each summer and has been the site of countless championships, will put these classes on alongside their international horse trials in August. Get all the deets, and the dates in your diary, here.

Following his trip to Badminton, Jessie Phoenix’s Wabbit has been featured in the Paulick Report. They might not be totally clear on whether Britain’s autumn five-star is called Burghley or Burleigh, but it’s still fun to see our sport unpacked for a different audience, and the insights into Wabbit’s early, failed career as a racehorse and how he’s been retrained is really interesting. Give it a read.

And finally, the discovery of a last, lost straw of Heraldik’s love-juice, which was auctioned on May 11 at the Marbach Auction, has got me thinking about the late, great stallion. There’s a pretty compelling argument to suggest that the Thoroughbred is the most influential sire in modern-day eventing, and if you’re wondering why that might be, it’s well worth diving into this long read that goes all the way back to the stallion’s inauspicious beginnings at a Czech riding school.

Morning Viewing:

We’ve been sharing lots of vlogs from 26-year-old amateur eventer Evie Llewelyn-Smith and her £1 horse Donut on their path to the Badminton Grassroots Championship – now, settle in to catch up on how the week itself went for the dynamic duo: