Pony Club Championships

This year the Pony Club Championships are being held at Shelford Park Nottingham. My Daughter and the rest of the team from Llangeinor Pony Club qualified at the Area Dressage, hence a visit to Nottingham, We travelled up on Monday and it is quite a long drive from South Wales to Nottingham and stayed overnight at a private yard in Wymeswold near Loughborough. I have to say the yard was fantastic, the owners were away but the yard staff couldnt have been more pleasant and helpful we were given full use of their facilities which included large outdoor school with 60 x20 dressage arena laid out to practise in, beautiful internal stabling, shower rooms for the horses (with warm water) and shower room for us to use too. We arrived at the Championships around 9am. Although it was a dry day it looked as though it had been raining a lot the previous days as it was very muddy with a lot of lorries and trailors being towed in and out by tractors.

We weren’t expecting to do tremendously well in the event, although Victoria Tamplin got an Individual 4th in her arena and everyone worked very hard and rode extremely well. Despite the fact that the team was not placed the kids enjoyed the day and it was a commendable achievement to get to the Championships. It is a shame that all competitors aren’t given something to commemorate their visit.

We were a little disappointed with the dressage area. My daughters arena was bordered by the main road and the entrance to the site , throughout her test she had a continual stream of lorries revving up through the mud as did another member of our team and although it probably didnt make any difference to my daughters test it did to the other person. Also the dressage warm up area was an absolute nightmare and dangerous it was impossible to ride a circle in trot without crashing into at least three others. I have never seen so many horses trying to warm up at one time. perhaps a rethink is needed there. It was a shame the weather wasn’t better as there were many events on and it would have been nice to see more public watching. We watched some of the show jumping and a marvellous dressage to music display by Pammy Hutton.

Posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 2:14 pm You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.