When we packed up and left the media centre last night at Les Etoiles de Pau, the final CCI5* of the 2024 season, we did so in a tiny window of opportunity: the day’s heavy rain had become a torrential downpour, and in that moment, it had all but ceased for a few minutes. But the damage had been done, and the decision had been made to remove three fences: an angled trakehner at 17, an oxer at 28, and the first element of 29ABCD, a three-part combination comprised of a brush-topped rolltop at the peak of a mound and two skinnies on a bending line at the bottom of it.
It was no more or less than we expected, really – we knew there was deep ground on site already even before the rain, and we knew, too, that although Pau is generally a very flat course, its selection of man-made mounds would become oil slicks if too much rain fell. Those adjustments, and a couple of changes made to the routes between fences, to allow horses to avoid boggier ground, felt like a reassuring step.
And then the rain kept coming and didn’t stop coming. This morning, when we reappeared a few hours ahead of the start of the cross-country, we were immediately greeted with a totally new-look cross-country course – one that had a total of ten fences, and eleven jumping efforts, removed from it. Added to last night’s removals were fences 4 through 6, 16, 17, and 19AB, and 31 – a change that meant that Pau’s typically relentless twists and turns, which can make it feel like two CCI4*-S courses smashed together, actually had quite a lot of open galloping stretches.
Not, of course, that there would be much high-speed action. The previously deep going had turned into a bottomless soup; huge swathes of standing water rendered much of the venue impassable and the scant proportion of the ordinarily huge and enthusiastic crowd that braved the conditions had to slog their way through ankle-deep slop in pursuit of a bit of sport. It wasn’t to be a day for catching the time; it wasn’t even, really, to be a day for bothering with a watch at all. Instead, it was a day for riding every step with a conscientious awareness of the feeling beneath you and making decisions accordingly.
Before the sport started, I’ll admit I wasn’t thrilled. It was all rather Jurassic Park – the organisers had been so preoccupied on whether they could, that they didn’t stop to think if they should. Was it a step too far? Was it going to be a case of human arrogance and hubris, trying to put on an event even in these conditions? “If this was Germany or Britain, it’d have been canceled already,” sniffed one owner in disbelief as we discussed the carnage we felt sure was about to unfold. At best, I feared that this would make us look, as an industry collectively, like we don’t really care about our horses’ limits; at worst, I suspected a catastrophic injury could be on the cards. It was with a heavy enough heart that I headed out on course and into the muck, and not just because my boots had already sprung a leak (although, look, that did play a big part in it).
Happily, though, it turns out I’m just a bit doom-and-gloom at the end of a season that’s made me think, at least once per month, that I’m existing through the longest day of my life thus far. This was absolutely one of those days. But it wasn’t the catastrophe it could have been: there were just two withdrawals midway through the day (Boyd Martin with his second ride, debutant Miss Lulu Herself, and seventh-placed Samantha Lissington and Lord Seekonig, for what it’s worth) rather than the ten or fifteen or twenty I’d expected before the start of the day’s competition. And while there absolutely were problems out on course, they really weren’t any more prevalent than in any five-star competition – of the 71 starters, 56 completed, making a 79% completion rate (higher than Burghley last month, which was a 66.2% completion rate), and 41% jumped clear for a clear round rate of 58% (Burghley, again, boasted a clear rate of 49% with a similar number of runners). What was very different, though, was how swift they could stand to be. Nobody would come close to the optimum time today; across the field of 56 finishers, the average time penalties were 29.3, or a minute and 13 seconds over the optimum time.
The ground didn’t allow for quick riding, snappy getaways, or economical inside lines – the only lines to ride were whichever ones looked least sloppy – but the incredibly high moisture content actually ended up being something of a godsend. There was no part of the going that could have been reasonably described as holding, and instead, horses were able to travel through the soup, getting purchase on a lower, firmer level. Nor was it as slippery as it could have been, though those prospective slips were largely mitigated by careful riding. When they did happen, as in the case of New Zealand’s Clarke Johnstone and Menlo Park, fifth after dressage, who lost purchase behind as they took off for a wide table early in the course, and were lucky not to fall, they were breath-stopping – but we weren’t at all plagued with falls on the flat or horrifying skids in the way I’d expected we might be, and the loss of nearly all the mounds from the course certainly looked a wise move indeed when considering this.
Speed might not have been the name of the game, but an early-ish swift round – and ultimately, the fastest of the day with 10 time penalties for coming home 25 seconds over the time – actually changed the shape of the competition entirely. That was executed by Great Britain’s Caroline Harris and her ten-year-old British-bred D. Day (Billy Mexico x Dillus, by Dilum XX), who she rides for a tribe of owners in Lucy Matthews, breeder Fiona Olivier, Marie Anne Richardson, and Heather Royle. That round – which never looked rushed, and was arguably the effort that looked the easiest of the day, even in some of the worst rain – immediately propelled the pair to the top of the leaderboard, from where it was assumed they’d be pushed back down as the day progressed. But nobody – not even the two five-star-winning horses in the field – could come close to catching the pair, and now, they finish the day as the leaders in the clubhouse, having climbed and climbed and climbed from overnight 22nd place on their dressage score of 30.3.
“If I’m honest, I didn’t really want to run, because I was a bit scared about the ground, but I know the horse loves the mud,” admits Caroline. “He ran very well at Lignières in the mud recently [where he won the CCI4*-S], so some friends of mine gave me a kick up the arse to make me actually go – and he was phenomenal, foot-perfect from the start to the finish.”
Nowhere along the way, though, was the 35-year-old focusing on the time – instead, she let her exciting young horse, who also finished twelfth at Luhmühlen on his debut this year, find his own rhythm.
“If I’m honest, I have no idea [how we were so fast!] I don’t know where the minute markers or anything were – I just let him run and jump,” she says. “He’s quite small and nippy, so he doesn’t struggle with the mud at all, and he finished full of running – he could have gone for two more minutes. So I’m not sure how it happened! He just kept galloping and jumping.”
It’s a red letter day for a horse who’s quietly, and in quite an under-the-radar sort of way, been marking himself out as one of British eventing’s next big stars with his talented rider – but even more exciting is the fact that he goes into tomorrow’s final day with eight consecutive clear FEI showjumping rounds behind him. On a score of 40.3, and with just 0.3 between him and second place, that’s the kind of form he’ll need – especially with Pau’s notoriously big, square, difficult showjumping tracks.
But the partnership just behind them in second place know all too well that the story isn’t over until the final chapter is fully written. Last year’s champions, Ros Canter and Izilot DHI, looked set to win Luhmühlen this year, too – but on the final day, ‘Isaac’ had his first rails in five years, and they had to settle for a still very respectable fourth place finish. When Ros went on to win Burghley last month with her Olympic partner, Lordships Graffalo, she admitted how much that loss had actually hurt – and that, no doubt, will fuel her to coax another characteristic clear out of her quirky comrade tomorrow and try to regain the top spot again.
For now, though?
“I’m going to enjoy tonight, first and foremost, and try not to think too hard about the show jumping until tomorrow,” laughs the diminutive rider, who added 21.6 time penalties in a confident, polished round to Isaac’s first-phase score of 19. “From last year’s experience, the party is very good here, so we’ll be heading there a bit later. My mum says she’s going to babysit, so that’ll be nice! Tomorrow, we’ll make a plan, once we get through the trot up and see how the horse feels. My horse is a very good jumper, but it’ll be probably down to me to give him a good ride. So I’ll have to make sure I don’t drink too many drinks tonight!”
Her round on Isaac was at the tail end of the day and in the most deteriorated ground – but that didn’t put Isaac off one bit.
“It was definitely worse in places, and I think the difference this time is that there was no option to find any fresh ground at all,” she says. “So I ended up, with Izilot, taking lines that were very wide or slightly different to what I walked, that I probably added that little bit of time on. But I think, considering the conditions that the organizers have had to face, the ground has held up. It doesn’t look good, but the horses haven’t had a bad experience today.”
“He’s got the most enormous stride, it’s an absolutely incredible feeling,” she continues. “Sometimes slightly trickier to ride because you can’t just keep on kicking all the time, which is what makes you fast. But I couldn’t be prouder of him today. He isn’t a natural galloper for long distances, and I was pleasantly surprised by how he came through the finish.”
Nor did the conditions earlier in the day for her debutant ride, MHS Seventeen, who jumped clear with 20.8 time penalties to move up from 31st to 14th.
“I felt that both my horses kept their ears pricked the whole way around today,” she says. “Despite the challenging conditions, the mud was so wet that, although it slowed them down, I didn’t feel that it sucked them and delayed their jump or anything like that. So I think they came out having had a really positive experience.”
Tom McEwen left the startbox very early in the day with Brookfield Quality, who had made his debut at the level at Luhmühlen this year, but was retired late on course after a freak patch of inclement weather brought on a severe nosebleed. And so for many people, the memory of that blood and that storm and the chaos of it all cast a huge, floating question mark over the fifteen-year-old gelding – one that he happily dispelled out on course today.
“I felt like a Pony Club kid back out hunting again out there,” laughs Tom. “I was loving it – and so was Norris, thankfully. But it’s really hard work out there. There’s patches that are really deep, and it’s only going to get worse in this continuous rain, so I’m happy to have gone early and laid down what I think is quite a good benchmark.”
Because he went so early, he continues, “it was hard to gauge how it was riding. But I was one of the few people that really did want to run this morning when it was still raining and you could hear it on the lorry roof. So I was delighted! I actually think it created an incredible spectacle for the whole day. People rode brilliantly, so it’s been a great day for the sport, even though it’s rained more than England. So that’s one good thing! But Norris is awesome. I could let him go in his own rhythm. There’s a few things that I wanted to do, and I should have ridden on my distances rather than riding from what I’d seen before. But like Caroline was saying, we went out with no minute markers, and you ride off a feeling, and try to get round.”
He and Norris added a reasonably scant 17.2 time penalties to their first-phase score of 25.8 to climb one place, from fourth to overnight third.
While Tom was sitting in his lorry in the downpour, happily counting down the minutes ‘til he could get out and go puddle-jumping, his friend and Norris’s former pilot, Piggy March, was no doubt having a very different experience in her own. She’d spent the last twenty-four hours or so wavering back and forth over whether to run Halo, her five-star debutant and the diminutive stallion who now helms her cut-back string of horses.
“I didn’t know if this was the right thing for him or not, and then I watched the horses go round, and they looked like happy horses,” she says. “It’s muddy, it’s incredibly wet, but they were smiling, and they were still jumping to the end, and I just didn’t want to give him a bad experience. But then I’m not very good at going out very slowly, and just wanting to get round. I’m competitive, and I like to try and do well. So I thought, ‘I’ll just set off and give it a good go’. So I rang the girls an hour before and went, ‘yeah, chuck some tack on. Let’s go!’”
That decision paid off. Other than one little moment of gritty five-star riding, when the stallion twisted over the corner at 15B and both horse and rider found a combined equilibrium from who knows where, the round was smooth, packed with gumption, and – yes – happy. They picked up 17.6 time penalties along the way and will go into the final day in fourth place, up from first-phase 10th.
“I’m just so proud of him. He’s 11, which isn’t that young, but he’s not done masses, and he’s certainly done nothing in the mud,” she says. “He doesn’t like the puddles, and he doesn’t like getting his toenails dirty – but he really dug deep for me. He ran incredibly well; he just got a bit tired in literally the last minute. But up until then, he was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve got the mud. This is fine!’ I kept thinking, ‘good boy, you’re doing really well!’ It’s hard work out there. It’s not ideal conditions at all. But he was happy enough, and he’s finished.”
China’s Alex Hua Tian also had an excellent day on a level debutant in Chicko, and enjoyed his own return to the level after having focused so much of his time, energy, and horsepower on championships.
“I don’t run 5* very often. As a Chinese rider, we focus on championships – Olympics, World Championships, and so 5* is not normally what we focus on,” he says. “But this horse is very special; he’s a cross country machine. He has a huge heart. His owners, Kate and Pete Willis, they adore the horse so much, and at his age – 14 – I felt he deserved to come here and have a real go. It’s a real shame it’s rained so much, as we were hoping for top of the ground conditions, and I think he’d have been really quick, but I think he dug deep today. He was absolutely brilliant.”
Despite not having the conditions that Chicko most enjoys, the pair delivered one of the rounds of the day, climbing from thirteenth to fifth after picking up 16.8 time penalties for one of the swiftest efforts on the leaderboard.
“I’m so proud of this horse – I have huge faith in him,” says Alex. “It’s his first 5* but I knew he’d dig deep. He’s Irish, he likes the mud, he’s a good jumper. He’s always very positive; he’s always got his ears forward. So I loved it out there, it was great. First thing this morning, I thought the ground was going to be horrendous – and watching the first half, actually, they were traveling quite well. I think by the time the last of us were going, it was starting to get quite heavy going, and it’s quite hard to find a good footing in between. I just had to say, ‘Chico, come on. We’ve got to ignore it. Just push on’, and he just kept going – so I’m very, very very proud.”
Boyd Martin pushed on through the residual aches and pains of his tough Maryland to log an occasionally agricultural but undoubtedly confident and effective early round with Fedarman B, who has previously finished in the top ten here. Though he decided not to run his later ride, debutant Miss Lulu Herself, his midday efforts were well worthwhile: he and Bruno go into the final day in sixth place, with 17.6 time penalties on their tally.
“I was thrilled with him,” he says. “He once again proved he is one of the best cross country horses I’ve ever sat on. That was horrendous conditions and he dug deep and just gave me everything around a very challenging course. I had a rough weekend last weekend so I wasn’t sort of bursting with confidence but I’m very, very grateful that Bruno is such a champion in the cross country. The last 48 hours they’ve been taking out jumps, cutting out loops and it wasn’t till about 30 minutes before I started that I really had a clear idea of what the course is gonna be and the officials made some excellent decisions in taking out some parts of the course.
“My cross country/jumping coach Peter Wylde and I really analyzed the course and there was just a number of combinations that we had a plan on how many strides to go in and a few those numbers changed just because the ground was so boggy. But Bruno is such an adjustable horse and just fought very hard just to clear through the flags. With going early, obviously I don’t get the luxury of watching how things are riding but I’ve got so much faith in this horse and it just gives me so much confidence.”
Of Lulu, he says, “she’s a very careful, green horse at this level and we were to go right at the end of the day and in the most treacherous conditions. I just didn’t have a good feeling about it and so I promised myself that I wouldn’t be stupid and trying to have any ego about it. I talked to my family and the owners and thought we [would save her for another day]. It’s tough when you’ve gone to this huge expense and traveled a long, long way to get here, but there is always another day. Deep down, I think it was the right thing to do.”
Austria’s Lea Siegl and her Olympic partner, DSP Fighting Line, came to Pau with one goal in mind: to dispel the demons left behind from their debut here last year, which ended in a shock fall and a smattering of facial injuries.
They may have been chasing a positive completion – and a happy end to an up-and-down season, which started with a broken leg for Lea – but they got much more than that. They climbed from 16th to seventh after adding 18 time penalties to their first-phase score of 29.5.
“It feels good. After all the shit in Paris [where Fighty was eliminated at the first horse inspection] and last year here in Pau, I’m even more happy that today, everything went smooth,” she says. “It was quite fun to ride – the ground was not easy, but it is like it is, we can’t change the weather. It’s something we can’t do. But they tried their best in front of the jumps, putting all the sand. So I’m quite happy that they really tried hard and it was rideable. He’s a nice galloper, and I knew that the weather, it doesn’t suit him, but he runs better on this ground than other horses because he’s so light and easy galloping, so it felt good with him. It didn’t feel too hard.”
The last competitors out on course, Oliver Townend and Cooley Rosalent, had the chance to take the lead: Ros and Isaac had already finished with their time penalties, and Emily King and Valmy Biats, with whom they’d been equal second after dressage, had slipped to 23rd after knocking a frangible device in their otherwise excellent round.
But it wasn’t to be today – though for Oliver, three confident clears across three young horses, two of whom are five-star debutants, is a happy enough day in the office. He’ll head into the final day in 25th place with Crazy Du Loir, 20th with pathfinder En Taro Des Vernier, and eighth with Kentucky champion Cooley Rosalent, with whom he added 23.2 time penalties.
“She definitely had the worst of the ground,” he says. “I couldn’t really find any new ground, and when I did, I was 12 or 14 feet away from where I should be. But I just tried to be as quick as I could, and also look after and give her a good experience, because I think she’s going to be very, very good. I went as fast as I could, but all three horses were incredibly fit, and all three have finished very fresh – they’re a huge credit to the team at home.”
Ninth place is held overnight by Sweden’s Frida Andersen and her Olympic ride Box Leo, who added just 17.6 time penalties and climbed from 32nd place, while the top ten is rounded out by Tim Price and five-star first-timer Jarillo, who looked a picture en route to collecting 22.4 time penalties, just dropping one place on the board in the process.
Will Coleman and Off The Record climbed ten places, from 39th to 29th, after picking up 26.4 time penalties – but, Will admits, this just hasn’t felt like their week.
“All I can say is when we decided to target Pau we sort of planned on a typical year here — firm ground and fast going and technical twisty track and instead we got a 9.5 minute five-star in a foot of mud,” he says. “It was a bog the whole way around by the time I went, conditions that just don’t suit my horse particularly well and he really dug deep for me. We had time, like everybody did. The horse came home and is well and we look forward to tomorrow and then call it a wrap on 2024.”
“There were a couple places where I thought you might get an extra stride here or there. To be honest, by the time I went, the conditions had deteriorated so much that my only plan became to keep my horse as balanced and [keep the impulsion] as I could, not worry too much about numbers and how you were going to do it, just make quick, clear decisions. It was a really physical effort for both of us. To my horse’s credit, he’s such a willing fighter of a character and I’m really proud of him. It’s not the result we came here for and that’s just kind of how it’s gone this year and that’s ok.”
In any case, he continues, horsemanship was at the fore of today’s competition — a happy result by any metric.
“I think they did what they could [in making changes to the course]. You want to preserve the integrity of the competition without putting anyone in jeopardy, and they did that, but really the responsibility was on the riders to make good decisions and I think you saw a lot of people put their hand up when it wasn’t going to be their day, and that’s sort of what we have to do. It was really challenging for all involved, but I’m glad the day is done and we can look forward tomorrow now. Today was pretty tough out there.”
56 pairs are eligible to come forward for tomorrow’s final horse inspection, which begins at the extraordinarily reasonable time of 11.45 a.m. (10.45 a.m. BST/6.45 a.m. EST, because tonight, the clocks go back here and in the UK, but not in the States, and I’m really sorry, but this nonsense makes my brain turn to mush every single year). Then, the showjumping will begin at 15.00 local (14.00 BST/10.00 a.m. EST), and the prizegiving will happen sometime as the sun goes down, because why not, hey? Why. Not.
For now, though, wash the mud out of your eyelashes, go dance on some tables with Ros, and enjoy that extra hour of sleep when you get around to it (if you’re on this side of the pond, anyway). We’ll see you tomorrow for lots more Pau action – and in the meantime, if you’re still hungry for a dirty great big day of cross-country excitement, head on over to Cheg’s live updates thread to recap every single ride in nitty gritty detail. Go Eventing!
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