There’s something rather cool about completing your first Badminton when you’re the youngest rider in the field. Tom Bird, 23, has two Burghleys under his belt before this week, but now he’s done the “double
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Badminton’s Glentrool Trophy, awarded to “the horse and rider who have made the greatest improvement on their dressage placing” – in other words, the pair who have shot the furthest up the leaderboard, has a
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Sunday at Badminton always feels like three different days of three very different lengths, all rolled into one: there’s the morning’s long, slow final horse inspection, which is a full-scale, high-tension competitive endeavour in its
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This is it. The Badminton title awaits. There’s just the small matter of keeping the poles in the cups first… I’ll be with you for every fence, bringing you a ringside seat as the competitors
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Yesterday was a very good day in the office for Oliver Townend, who retained his first-phase lead with eleven-year-old Cooley Rosalent, adding just 1.2 time penalties, and also retained his ninth place position with eighteen-year-old Ballaghmor Class, who added
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There’s been plenty of discussion in the lead-up to today’s cross country challenge at the MARS Badminton Horse Trials about how different it all feels: for the first time in a few years, the sun
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As the vast Badminton crowd, sunburnt and star-struck, dispersed at the end of a marathon cross country day, EN sat down course-designer Eric Winter. This was Eric’s sixth Badminton track, and the unflappable, garrulous Welshman
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We’re not quite half-way through 2025 and here we hurdle into our third CCI5* event of the season! MARS Badminton is the first of two British 5* events with a ton of history bolstering them
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Here we go ENers! It’s Saturday. It’s Badminton. It’s cross country day. Buckle up for the best day. I’ll be with you all day long, live blogging ‘til I can live blog no more, bringing
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There is some sort of a joke about famous Belgians. I can’t actually remember what it is, except that the point is that there aren’t any. Excepting Agatha Christie’s moustachioed maestro, Hercule Poirot, of course.
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The fences are decorated and flagged, the ground is primed, and the consensus among this year’s MARS Badminton Horse Trials contenders is clear: this year’s Eric Winter-designed course is classic Badminton: big, bold, and built
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Tom McEwen made a valiant effort at clinging onto his dressage lead with JL Dublin, but after holding it for 24 hours, he was elbowed out of the top spot by late contenders Oliver Townend
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Nearly everyone who competes at Badminton puts in very long hours, riding horses at dawn and dusk. Only one of them, this year at least, spent the intervening hours – between sunrise and sunset –
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No one has been able to surpass day one frontrunners, Tom McEwen and JL Dublin, on the MARS Badminton Horse Trials leaderboard so far, and at this sunny midpoint of the Friday’s dressage, their 22.4
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View this post on Instagram A post shared by Eventing Nation (@goeventing) Good morrow ENers. I’m back with all of the dressage action from the second day at MARS Badminton. If you missed out yesterday,
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The perfect preparation for a first Badminton for Australia’s Graftango, who carried Samantha Cesnik to equal 25th on 36.2 at MARS Badminton on Thursday, was a sun-soaked sojourn in St Tropez. “She had a glorious
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At the Defender Kentucky Three-Day Event a couple of weeks ago, something terrible happened: I ran out of time to be recreationally mean on the internet. First it was Wednesday, which is prime Being Mean
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If the story of Thursday morning was how tough it was to get any marks at all out of the ground jury, then the story of the afternoon is surely how expansive of a lead
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Why bother with three names when you can keep it simple and share one? Jack Daniels (horse) and Jack Mantel (rider) made their Badminton and five-star debut this afternoon, watched nervously by Jack Thomas-Watson (co-owner,
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Thursday morning at the MARS Badminton Horse Trials often feels, for those of us in the mixed media zone, anyway, like a bit of a warm-up: we’re not firing on all cylinders quite yet, the
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“That’s always my thing, here,” muses course designer Eric Winter as we cruise around the Badminton Estate, gilded and glorious in the spring sunshine. “It was my thing when I worked at Blenheim, too: that
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It’s time for the third of three consecutive 5*s, and it’s going to be a good one. Kentucky gave us a quality German victory via Michael Jung and fischerChipmunk FRH; Adelaide saw Hazel Shannon make
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The competition hadn’t yet begun at the 2025 MARS Badminton Horse Trials this morning when a major change was wrought upon the leaderboard: New Zealand’s Caroline Powell, who won last year’s iteration with Greenacres Special Cavalier, opted
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