Boyd Martin and On Cue. Photo by Abby Powell.
Mark your calendars and set your alarms: tickets for the Maryland 5 Star at Fair Hill go on sale next week on Tuesday, August 2nd at 10 AM Eastern! We seriously enjoyed covering America’s first fall five-star last year and we’re so excited to head back down to Elkton, Maryland from October 13-16 to enjoy the second annual running of this excellent event. Plus, the event will again play host to the CCI3*-L Eventing National Championships.
Check out all the ticket packages here. If you’re looking to tailgate on cross country day, those passes will go on sale the following week on Tuesday, August 9th. We’ll see you there!
U.S. Weekend Preview
Horse Park of New Jersey H.T. (Allentown, NJ): [Website] [Entry Status] [Volunteer]
Hunt Club Farms H.T. (Berryville, VA): [Website] [Scoring] [Volunteer]
Major International Events
Hambro Sport Horses Burgham International CCI4*-S (Morpeth, UK): [Entries/Times/Scoring]
FEI Eventing European Championships for Young Riders (Hartpury, UK): [Website] [Entries/Times/Scoring] [Live Stream – FEI YouTube] [Live Stream – ClipMyHorse.TV]
Kilguilkey House International CCI4*-L/CCI4*-S (Cork Co, Ireland): [Website] [Entries/Times]
News From Around the Globe:
Fancy a shot at winning the chance to watch Burghley in style? All you have to do is sign up for Burghley TV before midnight on Friday, August 5th and you’ll be entered to win a VIP Tent and membership tickets for all days of competition, plus a cross country course walk from a top rider and a behind the scenes tour of the stables. You can sign up for Burghley TV here for £20/ $24.33 and learn more about the contest here.
From one adrenaline-filled sport to another, this retired bull rider has taken up eventing. Travis Atkinson rode race horses as a teenager and then spent 10 years as a professional bull rider on the rodeo circuit. Instead of riding practice bulls during the later part of his career, Travis started jumping horses bareback to stay fit. [Retired Bull Rider Builds Eventing Career In Utah]
Does your event horse’s focus feel a little scattered? That’s not necessarily a bad thing, according to a team of researchers from France. They performed a visual attention test with a group of horses and found that those trained for eventing “were characterized by more fragmentation of attention.” Now that might not sound ideal at first glance, but this fragmentation was linked to better-performing event horses and has also been a characteristic identified in elite human athletes. [Ability of horses to focus linked to their occupation, study finds]
Have your tissues handy for this story. Wendy Costello’s dream was to join The Dressage Foundation’s Century Club, which celebrates horse-and-rider pairs with a combined age of 100 or more, but sadly passed away in December 2020 after a battle with cancer, leaving her goal unfulfilled. Last month, Wendy’s husband Marty completed her goal in her honor, riding introductory level test B at the Potomac Valley Dressage Association Ride for Life benefit show. [Husband Completes Century Club Ride In Wife’s Memory]
