One Horse Spun; Five Held at Pau Final Horse Inspection

Yeah, no, we don’t know either. Photo by Tilly Berendt.

There’s no point in mincing our words: yesterday’s cross-country day at Les 5 Etoiles de Pau, the final CCI5* of 2024, was rough. It went on for hours and soggy hours; the whole course, which was ten fences shorter than expected and lost over two minutes of time as a result, felt like one big water jump. To pass from one fence to the next on foot, you’d simply have to accept that the sluice of sadness would make its way, en masse, from the floor and into your socks. A bit like that part in Titanic when the captain locks himself in his little captain-ing room and lets the Atlantic Ocean break through the windows, you know? Very that. Except that by about 4p.m., my heart definitely stopped wanting to go on.

But the mud we saw on site yesterday wasn’t the same as the mud we saw at, say, Badminton last year, or the European Championships in Haras du Pin. That was a deep, sticky, holding mud, that started out thick and gloopy and became more and more gluey as it dried in the sun – and that’s the kind of mud that’s seriously hard work for horses, because they have to expend extra energy pulling their hooves out of the muck with each stride.

Arthur Marx demonstrates how I looked when I took my boots off and saw the state of my socks last night. Photo by Tilly Berendt.

Yesterday’s mud, though, had such a high water content that it was basically – sorry – toilet water, and thatkind of mud is significantly less taxing, because horses are able to find some purchase on a lower level of ground and move through the mud, which splashes out around their footsteps rather than sucking them down into the mire. It’s still trickier than riding on the top of good going, and there’s still some amount of drag to keep in mind, just as when riding through a water jump, but largely, it has a significantly less punishing effect on horses who are happy to get a bit dirty.

The results of this were writ large at this morning’s horse inspection, which was jam-packed with remarkably fresh horses standing on their back legs and behaving, generally, incredibly badly. I never envy the grooms and riders who have to try to maintain some semblance of control in those situations, but I do love to see horses with a fistful of joie de vivre on a Sunday morning, because it’s not always the case.

There are a few things that contributed, in tandem, to all this fizziness: the ‘easier’ kind of mud, the shortened course, the smart, sensible, empathetic and sympathetic horsemanship we saw across the board yesterday – I didn’t hear a single watch beep out a minute marker all day – and, happily, the odd Pau tradition of holding the horse inspection very nearly in the afternoon. Today, it began at 11.45 a.m., after a rousing morning of horseball in the main arena (yes, really), and because the clocks went back last night, that meant that the horses had a huge amount of time to rest and recover – in some cases, a solid 24 hours. Maybe they also really liked that Linkin Park was being loudly and inexplicably blared through the speakers, too, and just fancied starting a mosh pit.

Great Britain’s Storm Straker and Fever Pitch. Photo by Tilly Berendt.

As at the first inspection, the ground jury did exercise an abundance of caution in monitoring the competing horses, which is a heartening move as we continue to centre horse welfare. Five, in total, were redirected to the holding box by James Rooney (IRL), Emmanuelle Olier (FRA), and Katarzyna Konarska (POL): these were Katie Magee’s Treworra, 18th after cross-country; Storm Straker’s Fever Pitch, 17th, Tom Rowland’s KND Steel Pulse, 56th, Dominic Furnell’s Bellscross Guy, 55th, and Joseph Murphy’s Belline Fighting Spirit, 32nd.

All but one would ultimately be accepted into the competition. That was Ireland’s Dominic Furnell and Bellscross Guy, who had completed yesterday’s cross-country with 20 jumping penalties and 52.8 time penalties.

Caroline Harris and D.Day — our overnight leaders, and also our pick of the best-dressed at the final trot-up. Photo by Tilly Berendt.

That means our final field for this afternoon’s showjumping sits at 55 competitors, as nobody withdrew overnight. Our overnight leaders, Caroline Harris and D. Day, sit on a score of 40.3, while second-placed Ros Canter and Izilot DHI – our 2023 champions – are a breath behind them on 40.6. Tom McEwen and Brookfield Quality sit third on a 43, while fourth-placed Piggy March and Halo are a rail and change off the win on a 45. The margins continue to remain tight throughout the leaderboard, and that’s significant: the showjumping here is the most influential of any five-star, with big, square fences, true showjumper-y distances, tough turns, and an arena surface that can be quite dead underfoot and doesn’t have the same ‘spring’ to it that Luhmühlen’s does.

“Hey, lady, you wanna buy a TV?” Photo by Tilly Berendt.

Showjumping will begin at 3.00 p.m. local time (2.00 p.m. British time/10.00 a.m. EST), and can be streamed, as usual, via Pau TV. We’ll be back with the full story on how the final day has played out once it wraps. For now, if you need us, you can find us crying into a plastic cup of rosé in the scrap of sunshine we’ve provisionally been gifted. Allez! Allez. Allez.

Les 5 Etoiles de Pau: [Website] [Entries] [Timing & Scoring] [Live Stream] [EN’s Coverage]

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