On Friday 8th March, we travelled up to Bury Farm Equestrian Centre for the British Riding Clubs Dressage to Music Championships kindly sponsored by Equine Bio Genie. This was our first BRC championship and the stand out thing of the day was how helpful and friendly everyone was. We - Amelia Ward on Tireve What’s Wanted, were competing in the elementary DTM. Bury Farm is a lovely venue with lots of space to warm up so we made the most of the sunshine and stayed outside during our warm up. Fred had travelled well but was feeling a little flat whilst warming up. Unfortunately our warm up was disturbed by another competitor asking lots of questions but I was still quite confident entering the ring.
It wasn’t meant to be for us that day, Fred felt a little sticky once we got in the ring, my music was started a smidge later than I asked and when it came on it was so quiet! However the show goes on and we went in with the aim of smashing it. The test started well with a great medium canter but at my first simple change the wheels started to wobble. Fred did the most beautiful canter to halt! So I went into my trot work thinking I need to repeat that simple change somewhere and was so caught up in my thoughts that I did my trot floorplan wrong and leg yielded in the same direction twice so now I had to fit in another leg yield too! So coming towards the end I managed to add in my simple changes turning it into a serpentine, nailed out the leg yield and got onto the centre line just in time to finish! I was really disappointed in myself when we left the ring but so proud of how hard Fred tried for me (he’s 29 now!) even though he wasn’t feeling 100%.
I was pleasantly surprised to see a score of 69% on the board. I stayed in the top 10 for 3.5 hours and was only knocked out by 2 of the last 4 riders to finish eventual 12th. It was rather frustrating having waited for the day hoping to be in the prize giving but hey ho. When I went to pick up my sheets I found that one judge had really liked us and had us finish 6th and the other judge really didn’t and had us finish 23rd! It’s always lovely to know one of the judges really liked you and I had some great scores coming in from her. It was a big class with some really quality combinations so I’m really pleased with our first BRC Championship effort. Roll on intermediate Champs in April!
A huge thank you goes to Horsham and District Riding Club for providing this opportunity and paying for my championship entry. We had such a lovely day and felt very proud to be representing such a lovely club.