Ardingly Area Festival Report

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lizzie_liz

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Today was an interesting day to say the least!! We sent off on time to arrive in plenty of time, and half way there we realised we had left Honeys hay behind so Honey had no hay all day
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Nonetheless we got there in plenty of time and watched a couple of the prelim tests and think I saw Worried1's test, will let her tell you all how she got on.

Honey seemed rather excited when we got there as she spotted the xc fences and thought that maybe she will be jumping. How wrong she was.
First test was N33 and boy am I glad I did the warm up test. Honey is never spooky in dressage arenas until today of all days. Ardingly is not even a spooky arena!! She ended up bucking and leaping in the air in her first medium canter
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to get a 2!! I had no idea what sort of mark she would get, turned out we got a very embarrassing 55% but we came 6th. Marks were very, very low, as low as 48% but the winner got 66%

For the Area test I decided I would warm up for longer to try and get some freshness out of her. My warm up was interesting, she decided pigeons were scary and lept up in the air when we passed them and that she couldn't halt but instead go side ways, backwards and up in the air in circles
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I therefore decided spurs were coming off as she was just way too fresh!!
Our time came to do N22, I had no idea what she would do, so I went for the conservative test and give myself half a chance of staying on, so I didn't really go for medium canter.

They messed up the scores and originally put 70.8% up as my mark
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I was shocked to say the least but it turned out I had actually got 61.06% to not good enough to qualify
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It turned out we came 9th out of 21 and only 4 marks off 4th place who only just got 62%. The winner had 65% and the person in last had 50%.
I was confused by the marks as there were some nice horses getting lower marks than me so not sure what the judges were looking for.

It was a good day especially as in 2002 we thought we would never ride her again let alone compete her. I now have a nice plaque from today
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Did look for you but obviously missed you.
Well done for today.
The warm-up caught a few people out as halfway through my prelim test in the free walk I spotted a riderless horse bucking in the doorway which then exited out onto the concrete walkway by the loos and back to the lorry park!
Hope to catch you next time.
 
Thanks, I have no idea what was up with her today. Oh dear about the person dismounting unintentionally but at least it was the warm up and not the tests!
 
It really doesn't especially as we were watching almost all the tests bar the ones that were straigh after me and one horse in particular did a lovely test but didn't even get above 60% in either test. I really felt for the rider whereas some of the horses were a bit on the forehand and were getting highish marks!!
I am actually starting to get really disheartened with dressage at the moment and not even getting that excited about it any more.
 
Lizzie_liz there was some real discrepancies in the judging today especially in the prelim petplan and your class. One horse in your N22 had 36 marks different between the 2 judges!! I'm a judge and I've never seen anything like it.

In the prelim there were also some large differences.
 
I didn't study all the marks but the horse after me, so the 2nd horse in has about a 20 mark difference!!

My comments on my sheets were fairly accurate but I wasn't that impressed by the judging, there were way too many low marks and I didn't think a lot of the horses deserved such low marks.

You were riding weren't you today? how did u get on?
 
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JLav....just out of curiosity, why is it that there were 2 judges at Ardingly but only one at Wix?

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Really, did you only have 1 judge? I thought you were meant to have 2 judges?
It is really interesting having 2 judges, my 2 sheets only differed by 2%
 
Don't know why they only had one at Wix. I thought it was normal to have 2 at an Area Festival as it's a championship.
If we had only had one judge today then the results would have been very different!!
 
I had a good day today and both horses qualified, Georgie came 4th in the Novice open and Hud won the Medium Open so it was worth the long day!
 
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