Just a casual photo. Courtesy of Yasmin Ingham Eventing.
Yasmin Ingham just continues to stun with her liver chestnut partner, Banzai du Loir, and the action from this past weekend is still fresh in my mind. I remember seeing them at Kentucky in the spring of 2022, and watching the ease with which they seemed to beautifully execute each phase. For anybody to look equally strong in all three phases is extremely rare, and for a five-star debutante (horse, in this case, not rider!) it’s practically unheard of. What do you know, at the tender age of twenty six, and a little more than a year later, she’s your World Championship title holder and first-ever British champion of CHIO Aachen. I won’t say called it, but, you know, called it!
The Maryland International + Horse Trials (Adamstown, MD) [Website] [Entries] [Ride Times][Volunteer]
U.S. Weekend Preview
Arrowhead H.T. (Billings, MT) [Website] [Entries] [Ride Times] [Volunteer] [Scoring]
Chattahoochee Hills H.T. (Fairburn, GA) [Website] [Entries] [Ride Times] [Volunteer]
Huntington Farm H.T. (South Strafford, VT) [Website] [Entries] [Volunteer]
Genesee Valley Hunt H.T. (Geneseo, NY) [Website] [Entries] [Ride Times] [Scoring]
Masterson Equestrian Trust YEH/NEH Qualifier (Lexington, KY) [Website] [Entries] [Ride Times][Volunteer] [Scoring]
Redefined Equestrian Horse Trials (Fort Collins, CO) [Website] [Entries] [Ride Times] [Volunteer][Scoring]
Summer Coconino HT and Western Underground, Inc. TR,N,BN 3 Day Event (Flagstaff, AZ) [Website] [Entries] [Ride Times] [Volunteer] [Scoring]
News From Around the Globe:
This is something I’ve been pondering for a while now, and I’m glad to see it discussed online. In modern horse sports, we talk and think about soundness and the quest to maintain it at various levels of competition, but it’s more than just having a great vet on your side. It’s our responsibility as horse owners and riders to know that lameness can be the result of imbalanced feet, a chronically irritated ligament that isn’t addressed until it’s a bigger deal, or even stiffness that forces the horse to compensate, making him sore elsewhere. Every time you step into the stirrup, you could be riding your horse closer to soundness, or closer to lameness. [Are You Riding Into Lameness or Soundness?]
Goodbye pyramid, hello spiral! I loved reading this book from Sue Grice, where the traditional Training Pyramid is updated and reimagined into the Training Spiral. The basic idea of the Training Spiral is that you can progress through all the elements of the Scales in order (Rhythm, Suppleness, Contact, Impulsion, Straightness, Collection), without having to perfect each one before attempting the next. Instead, each element is completed to the degree that the horse can manage at his given level of training. As soon as one cycle of this training—one tier of the spiral—is completed, the next can begin—only in this new cycle (Tier 2), the degree of difficulty or quality expected is increased. [Learn the Training Spiral]
There is literally almost nothing I love more than foal videos:
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