‘Welcome to Eventing’ is the newest of all the series here on Eventing Nation, and was the idea of one of our most loyal readers. The objective of the series is to chronicle the stories of either your first event, or the first event your horse competed at. We all know that Eventing is a game of experience, which usually translates into some comical recounting of those days before we had any idea what we were getting into by starting to event. If you’d like to submit the story of your first event, please send it along with a picture to [email protected]. We are running low on profiles, so please send yours in!
From Carly Starkey:
I thought I’d share my wonderful first event with EN so everyone else can feel better about themselves.
My OTTB Eagles Hill (Red) and I did jumpers before he injured his leg and had a year off. This year we decided to brave the world of eventing and entered our first starter trial at Plantation in June. Neither of us had any idea about eventing, but at BN I wasn’t worried about too much going wrong. After walking the cross country course at a liesurely stroll, I got back to the trailer with twelve minutes before I had to be in the dressage ring. With literally zero warm up time, we managed to make it through the test with Red stopping to poop in front of the judge’s car and attempting to grab a snack as he “free walked” across the diagonal. Needless to say, we scored poorly, but were prepared to make it up in stadium–Red’s forte where I was confident nothing could go wrong. Well, after feeling fairly certain the crossrail in warm-up was the only thing that was safe enough to jump, Red the Redhead came unglued at the Thoroughbred-eating fake stone wall under fence four and got us eliminated in our very first event. I walked out of the ring crying and prepared to quit the horrible, cruel world of eventing forever.
We’ve since dogged our way through a few more events and just finished fourth at Burgundy Hollow at BN going clear both stadium and cross country. Red has proved to be a fearless cross country horse, not
batting an eye at ditches, water, or banks, we’ll be making the move up to novice soon!
