Booboos
Well-Known Member
After 20 months I finally made it to a competition in France! The delay was a combination of pregnancy/baby, the fact that the French are fair weather riders and don't compete during autumn/winter and the French registration requirements.
Just to give you a brief flavour of what I had to go through, just for my competition license I had to send in copies of my ID, bank identity verification document, signed forms, copy of my UK comp record and doctor's certificate. All this had to be validated by my RC and it's still not all in order as I appear to be missing verification of the equivalance of the French exams, so after all this time my result appears as Eliminated (as you're about to see though that is no great loss to the French dressage world!!
)
I was banking on the South of France sunshine to take the edge off R, but in, a perhaps rather predictable turn of events, it rained. It only rains once or twice a month here in the summer but it had to rain this day just to welcome the English bred to French competitions!
So nerves were at an all-time high, herewith photographic evidence:
the offspring was packed off to her dad for the morning - neither of them was ecstatic by that turn of events but they survived, while I enlisted the help of my groom, another friend and my instructor for general moral support on the day! One pleasant side-effect of the fact that there are very, very few competitions here is that my instructor is around at all of them as she competes herself and has numerous students, so nice to have her around to oversee the disaster that was about to come
The competition venue was basic. There was almost no parking at all, I literally had to wait for horses to swing their bums in before I could go past with the lorry on the drive in
, there were loads of loose dogs, tractors, mini ponies and general chaos everywhere. One unlucky lady had her horse escape, and the silly bugger left all the other horses and the grass to run out the driveway (no gates anywhere!) and out to the village (a couple of miles away). She then spent an hour trying to catch him!
So fearing the worst, I unloaded the fire breathing monster with strict instructions to my groom to keep feeding him polos and even managed to get on. The warm up was surprisingly calm, despite the slightly unusual conditions: in the 20x40 indoor we had to content with the usual problems of many horses working in at the same time, but in addition to this the surface looked like something a builder had dumped and forgotten to clear up and there were two flooded 10m circles directly under the sprinklers that no horse wanted to step in. To add injury to inconvenience at A and C there were two massive metal hoops, for horseball apparently, that were only marginally cleared my head!
After a half hour spent trying to dodge other riders, the puddles of death and the hoops of actual death, we tootled off to the arena (with another overdose of polos on the way). As you would expect R went up a DEFCON at the mere sight of the arena and I had just managed to persuade him to walk past a horse eating speaker covered in a plastic sheet when the speaker came to life annoucning our imminent disaster...and the judge rung the bell
The rest is what you would expect. Some 7s for the good movements and some 3s for anything that threatened to bring us next to the speaker! There were two judges and they managed to arrive at exactly the same conclusion 58.966% - can't blame them really! One judge showed remarkable insight and competence by awarding a 7 for rider's position but in all seriousness there was nothing to complain about, they were both spot on.
So here's the good:
the not so terrible but very wet
the bad
and the downright ugly (just before entering at A, trying to cope with the speaker attack):
The whole test was in sitting trot, so I was nearly dead by the end of it, but the main thing is we survived to see another day! Whether we'll see another competition I don't know as there are none in July and only one in August before everyone packs it in for the autumn!
Just to give you a brief flavour of what I had to go through, just for my competition license I had to send in copies of my ID, bank identity verification document, signed forms, copy of my UK comp record and doctor's certificate. All this had to be validated by my RC and it's still not all in order as I appear to be missing verification of the equivalance of the French exams, so after all this time my result appears as Eliminated (as you're about to see though that is no great loss to the French dressage world!!
) I was banking on the South of France sunshine to take the edge off R, but in, a perhaps rather predictable turn of events, it rained. It only rains once or twice a month here in the summer but it had to rain this day just to welcome the English bred to French competitions!
So nerves were at an all-time high, herewith photographic evidence:
the offspring was packed off to her dad for the morning - neither of them was ecstatic by that turn of events but they survived, while I enlisted the help of my groom, another friend and my instructor for general moral support on the day! One pleasant side-effect of the fact that there are very, very few competitions here is that my instructor is around at all of them as she competes herself and has numerous students, so nice to have her around to oversee the disaster that was about to come
The competition venue was basic. There was almost no parking at all, I literally had to wait for horses to swing their bums in before I could go past with the lorry on the drive in
, there were loads of loose dogs, tractors, mini ponies and general chaos everywhere. One unlucky lady had her horse escape, and the silly bugger left all the other horses and the grass to run out the driveway (no gates anywhere!) and out to the village (a couple of miles away). She then spent an hour trying to catch him! So fearing the worst, I unloaded the fire breathing monster with strict instructions to my groom to keep feeding him polos and even managed to get on. The warm up was surprisingly calm, despite the slightly unusual conditions: in the 20x40 indoor we had to content with the usual problems of many horses working in at the same time, but in addition to this the surface looked like something a builder had dumped and forgotten to clear up and there were two flooded 10m circles directly under the sprinklers that no horse wanted to step in. To add injury to inconvenience at A and C there were two massive metal hoops, for horseball apparently, that were only marginally cleared my head!
After a half hour spent trying to dodge other riders, the puddles of death and the hoops of actual death, we tootled off to the arena (with another overdose of polos on the way). As you would expect R went up a DEFCON at the mere sight of the arena and I had just managed to persuade him to walk past a horse eating speaker covered in a plastic sheet when the speaker came to life annoucning our imminent disaster...and the judge rung the bell
The rest is what you would expect. Some 7s for the good movements and some 3s for anything that threatened to bring us next to the speaker!
There were two judges and they managed to arrive at exactly the same conclusion 58.966% - can't blame them really! One judge showed remarkable insight and competence by awarding a 7 for rider's position but in all seriousness there was nothing to complain about, they were both spot on.So here's the good:
the not so terrible but very wet
the bad
and the downright ugly (just before entering at A, trying to cope with the speaker attack):
The whole test was in sitting trot, so I was nearly dead by the end of it, but the main thing is we survived to see another day! Whether we'll see another competition I don't know as there are none in July and only one in August before everyone packs it in for the autumn!
The whole system is driving me mad at the moment and I'm having problems as I never competed in the UK !!
Well done for getting out there and doing it! 
