Today I should’ve been at Badminton Horse Trials with the lovely On The Brash, who is fit and raring to go at home with New Zealand event rider, Caroline Powell in Suffolk. I’ve owned Rufus (as he’s known at home) since he was six months old. He lived with me until he was nearly four when he was then sent to Northern Ireland to be broken in by my step-father Eric Smiley before coming home to start his career with Helen West, Bicton Arena’s Manager, who rode him to Intermediate level. Rufus has been with Caroline for nearly three years now and she has taken him round Badminton once and Land Rover Burghley Horse Trials twice.
I adore Rufus, he is my horse of a lifetime. The storms we have weathered to get where we are now have definitely been worth it. I don’t get to see him much and I must admit I was really looking forward to seeing him this week. Having Rufus complete at Badminton in 2018 was a dream come true, he loves cross country and always has his ears pricked – I was in tears when I watched him come through the finish line and I will especially miss it this year. But, we look forward to 2021, getting back to Badminton and potentially the Tokyo 2020 Olympics too!
Whilst it is deeply disappointing not being able to welcome you through our iconic gates, our primary focus is to support the huge efforts being made by the government to keep us all safe. The current lockdown will continue to at least the 10th May and there is much speculation about when and how the restrictions may be lifted. The Government has started talking about a “Re-start strategy” and not “exiting lockdown”. We believe that this is because we are unlikely to exit lockdown all at once. The existing measures are likely to be lifted in phases, and new measures may be put in place. Whenever the re-start begins, it is set to be a marathon rather than a sprint.
We have been in regular communication with the governing bodies of the Sport and a great deal of work has gone into preparing a number of scenarios to ensure we have an appropriate plan in place for when we have a green light to re-start. This includes working through adjustments that can be made to run within the confines of social distancing and incorporating new advances in technology to enable this. The BEF’s most recent announcement gives an excellent overview of this work:
We will continue to keep you updated and very much look forward to welcoming you back to Bicton Arena.
Helen West, Bicton Arena Manager
During this lockdown, I have kept myself busy doing some of my “summer” jobs at home. Pressure washing/disinfecting the winter stables, deep cleaning tack, harrowing and rolling paddocks as well as tidying the yard.
In between these jobs I have been riding my horses to keep them ticking over, doing basic schoolwork and pole exercises. As the guidance has been not to do jump exercises, I have been free schooling the horses and this allows me to keep an eye on how they are moving. I find free schooling handy because it allows me to see how they are going – most of the time I am riding on my own and don’t have any mirrors on our ménage.
Last month I entered an online dressage competition with Castle who scored a 71.90% to win his section. It was very easy to register, no membership fee! Sadly, with new guidance this competition has also been suspended so my other two horses Blue and TJ didn’t get a chance to compete.
Castle also been keeping me on my toes, constantly reminding me of his humorous nature! We were asked to take part and provide a video clip for the Loo Roll Challenge, which ended up with Castle pulling the funniest face every time we tried it!
I have been watching videos of last season’s competitions to analyse my riding style and looking to see if there are any tweaks I can make. I have also been continuing with Pilates work (at home), to help keep my body balanced and supple for the horses.
With all of this in mind, the Governing bodies for each discipline have been doing a fantastic job in releasing statements for competitions and training and excellent advice. I know BE are still working out how to resolve the issues that the cancellations have caused – especially (in my case) the 2020 qualified Science Supplements Cup competitors – fingers crossed for us all they can work out solution for when the sport is allowed to start up again.
Horses with a purpose are used to hard training and routine like humans and they won’t completely just “let down.”
I think it’s important to still give them some attention and sense of routine. Some horses may just like being left alone, in which case is really easy to let them be and not worry about them. For horses that are more demanding / human dependent, or who will start pacing the fence line out in the paddock as soon as you turn your back are the ones we all struggle with the most.
My top tips would be to only turn out as much as they’re used to at the start and maybe progress to longer if you can, or maybe even try turning out with a friendly horse to keep company. Horses that like and need a job are best to still do some sort of controlled exercising even if it’s every other day.
Alternate what you do with them so that they’re not always out hacking or just going in the school. You could even use this time to polish up on your ground work (eg horsemanship, stable management). Something enough to keep their brains thinking.
You can try giving them treat balls or hanging toys to keep them entertained in their stables.
Feeding wise, they get as much forage as they need, I like to cut their hard feeds a little but not so much that they start to lose condition. We feed our horses Baileys and even with cutting down on their feeds I’ll always give them a low starch diet to keep them looking and feeling good and Performance Balancer which helps keep their top line too. Of course, with any changes you want to be aware of any Tying up or Laminitis!
Any routine is changeable, and all horses adapt differently but if they’re happy then we’re happy. 🙂
Coriander Cousins – Groom for 5* event rider Chris Burton
Beccy Barrett has branched out and gone into “showjump restoration.” As I am sure you can imagine, the showjumps take quite a hammering with the usage they get, so we have a rolling maintenance programme which includes sanding them down and re-painting them. With the enforced lockdown, this seemed a worthwhile job that could be undertaken whilst adhering to social distancing measures. Beccy has swapped the award-winning Rolle Estate Office at Bicton for the salubrious storage barn to commence with “project paint”.
Day 1 saw her rearrange the setup to enable greater productivity. She had Matt and Bart moving things around for her in the workshop to optimise her setup. This included making space for Pixie, who was set to be her trusty co-worker and see off anyone who dared approach the storage barn. Following day 2, when a glitch in the system resulted in two newly painted poles falling to the ground and getting covered in dust and grit, the production line was adapted and refined to prevent repeat disasters. Whoever knew she would prove to be such an expert in workplace efficiency.
Having now painted in the region of 100 poles, which all had to be sanded, under coated and then top coated, Beccy has perfected her brush technique. I haven’t quite got the heart to tell her that she is still on the schooling set, and that we have 3 competition sets for her to move on to. This may prove a false starter as paint has become increasingly difficult to source since the lockdown began. Our competition sets require bespoke paint as they are different shades of red, blue, green and yellow, so she may yet get a reprieve if we are unable to source the right paint. When we do eventually get up and running again, clients will be in for a treat when they hire the arena as the schooling set will be transformed. In the meantime, if anyone out there has any paint contacts, please do get in touch so that we can keep Beccy supplied with materials to crack on with the competition sets.
Hi Everyone!
Well after the first blog I was managing Castle’s fitness routine quite swimmingly (excuse the pun!), despite the rain I had increased his fitness work mainly by roadwork and in the ménage. My intention had been to start our season with one of the mid-March competitions but then the first of the never-ending storms arrived, Storm Ciara! With no time to recover Storm Dennis had arrived! Unfortunately, events being cancelled!
So, to plan B – anything that’s open!! In between the storms, we had our first stay away show this year with Castle – we trucked off to Weston Lawns (near Coventry) after getting a wild card qualification for the Arena Eventing Championship, from our placing at Bicton in the Baileys Arena Eventing competition. Unfortunately, no frillies as Castle was rather excited (happy) to see some cross-country jumps, which meant we incurred a few speeding tickets!
I thought I should take Castle to his first Combined Training event of the year, his first dressage test since Bicton last October. He did brilliantly with a dressage score of 32 and clear show jumping to win both his classes!
We thought the storms had finished no, next came Storm Jorge. So, Moreton, Epworth and Aston-Le-Walls were all abandoned. Then the devasting news Pontispool and Stafford abandoning as well.
After competing at the British Showjumping weekend at Bicton, the COVID-19 outbreak has had a big impact on the whole country. Competitions and training have been grinding to a halt with the country at a standstill. All governing bodies have been releasing statements on social media within days of each other stating cancellations upon cancellations of major events, like Badminton Horse Trials and the Science Supplements Cup. With the restrictions that have been applied by the Government, there’s more difficulty on looking after our beloved animals. I am fortunate to live on a small holding farm; however, I can imagine the difficulty of trying to look after your horse at a livery yard.
I feel sorry for everyone involved in our sport not only competitors but also organisers who had been looking forward to the new season, but health is the main priority.
Stay safe everyone and keep your fingers crossed that this blows over soon.
Abbie
Nothing in our recent history has prepared us for the threat posed by coronavirus. We have all had to make unprecedented changes in how we live, travel and work. As valued supporters of Bicton Arena we wish you and your families the very best for the coming weeks. Stay healthy, stay safe, and we look forward to the day we welcome you all back to Bicton Arena.
With significantly more time on my hands than I would normally have at this stage of the competition season, I thought it might be fun and interesting (hopefully) to write a blog. At this point in time we have no idea when competitions will be up and running again, so instead of trying to look into that elusive crystal ball, I thought I would stop fretting about what I cannot control and explain a little of the behind the scenes “stuff” that we do at Bicton Arena.
I spent Friday 13th March putting out cross country fences and setting the tracks for Bicton (1) Horse Trials. This is one of my favourite parts of my job, as I am sure many people realise course designing is one of my passions. I have spent roughly 4 months obsessing about my courses for the April Horse Trials on paper. Following an extremely wet October International at the tail end of 2019, I had already earmarked bits of ground that I would not be using for April. To be fair, the ground has come back remarkably well, but I am always mindful that we run 3 Horse Trials dates per season, so I am careful where I plan for the tracks to go to utilise the ground to its best potential and allow for repairs.
I usually have a pretty good idea of what I will be designing as I have spent endless hours watching fences and pieces of ground ride, as well as walking potential different bits of ground and looking for new ideas. I then go for a walk with my trusty iPhone which has the “Cross Country App” downloaded on to it. The App maps where I am walking, and I simply drop a pin at each point I envisage having an obstacle. Once I have completed this I can sit down with my laptop in the warmth and comfort of the Office or my sofa at home and edit the tracks using the Cross Country App Toolkit. This is an invaluable piece of kit for me personally as it enables me to play around with distances and number of efforts to see where I am at.
Once I have established where I am going, what the distance will be and the number of jumping efforts, I then make fence lists. I usually do this in Excel and have two columns for each level of track with fence number and then the details of the fence i.e. “Brush Roll”. It can be quite entertaining when Matt goes out to the Park with the fences as my definition of “Log Stack” may be somewhat different to his! We have worked together for many years now, so thankfully he knows exactly what I call each fence, but in the early days it provided much entertainment when I arrived to place a fence with him and had something entirely different in front of me.
Whilst I am formulating my fence lists the danger is that I start getting creative and inventing new fences which need to be built. This is where I get carried away with my colour coding of the spreadsheet as I highlight new builds in a different colour. I use another colour for frangible fences, a different one again for “TBC” (to be confirmed) and so on. By the end of this exercise I hand Matt a very pretty spreadsheet which he looks at and promptly scratches his head. I was excited about unveiling some of our new fences for the April Horse Trials, but alas the unveiling will have to wait until July or October now. In the meantime, I have provided a sneaky peak below:
Now Matt will tell you that this is simply version one and that by the time I have changed my mind several times, what we end with is in fact more likely to be version five or six. I strongly refute such claims, as women never change their mind! What can happen is that when I meet Matt with the telehandler to physically place the fences, I realise that something will not work, or that a different type of fence would work better, so then I make a “small tweak”. This is one of the things I feel very strongly about as a course designer, you must keep your mind open and not become fixated on what you originally had in mind. If I feel something will ride better on a different piece of ground, or with a different profile of fence then I make the changes.
I always say that the night before an event runs, I must be able to sleep soundly. If I am obsessing about a fence in my mind, then it is not right. Many cross country designers are also builders and I although I have gleaned a lot of information over the years in terms of how cross country fences are built, I sometimes I have an image in my head of how I want a fence to look, and then when the practicalities of how it needs to be built are explained to me, I realise why it doesn’t look as I had envisaged. This can lead to me having to compromise on artistic look, but never on safety.
Placing the cross country fences is something I really enjoy. I am not so sure Matt does as apparently I can be quite demanding. If I want it moved two inches to the left and then change my mind and go six inches to the right, this is not unheard of! I love the ideas that come into my head when I am out in the Park placing fences. This is something that will never happen behind a laptop screen or using a phone app. This is what cross country designing is all about. I am so spoilt at Bicton as the Grade One Listed Parkland is so beautiful and we are blessed with topography and natural features that other venues do not possess. It does however mean I have to be more mindful of where fences are situated. The inclines and declines can make a big difference to the severity of the questions I am asking. The other thing I must be very mindful of is running across a camber. It is really unbalancing to run on a horizontal slope, especially for the younger horses and less experienced riders. I always keep in mind how it would feel if I was cantering into a fence that I have set.
I had placed 80% of the tracks for the April Horse Trials before the season came to a grinding halt, so we had not incurred the costs of anchoring, dressing and flagging the fences. All the fences will now come back in and be stored until we know what the future looks like. If we leave them out in the Park it will kill the grass underneath them and it is much easier to harrow, roll and seed the Park without the fences in the way. The newly painted fences will be covered so they do not fade.
Dressing the fences is one of my favourite parts of the build process. You can transform fences with dressing. A relatively boring, bland fence can look entirely different with greenery, flowers and props. It is also an essential course design tool as we can help horses judge their take off point with appropriate colour to provide face edge visibility, dressing and trees in their eyeline. Wood coloured edges have very little visibility for horses, so you will often see that we have painted the leading edge blue or cream (which they pick out well). Horses are a prey animal and due to the location of their eyes in their head, they have 350 degrees of vision i.e. they do not see immediately in front of them. They also have relatively little binocular overlap (for judging distance), about 60 degrees, which means that we can help them considerably with depth perception by placing Christmas trees, for example, either side and slightly in front of fences.
I hope you have found this small insight interesting. I have focussed on cross country course design given that the Horse Trials were set to be our first major competition of 2020, but I plan to follow this up with an insight into other aspects of the business operation over the coming weeks. Beccy and Gemma are busy sanding and painting showjumping poles as I type, so my next instalment will cover things non-cross country related.
Helen West, Bicton Arena Manager
Firstly, thank you to Bicton Arena for asking me to blog in the run up to Badminton!
My name is Abbie Burbidge, I am a 20-year-old British Event rider and have been riding for as long as I can remember! I moved from Essex to Devon in late 2017 with my family. I am still an active Pony Club member with the Essex Hunt North Pony Club and I’m also involved with various Devon Pony Club branches.
Let me introduce my most recognised horse at home – Castle Fantastic. He is a 15.2hh, 13-year-old ISH gelding who I have owned since he was four! Over the years, Castle (as he’s known at home) and I have competed in many disciplines and have been to 12 different Championships including, Royal International, Side Saddle Championships, BE U18 National Championships, Pony Club Championships and the Dodson & Horrell National Amateur & Veteran Championships to name a few. We qualified for the Science Supplements Cup at the Bicton Arena October Horse Trials last year where we competed in the BE100 3Day class and finished second.
Alongside Castle, I have two young horses, Feeling Fantastic (TJ) a 16.2hh 6-year-old ISH, who is coming back into full work after an injury last year and Bluebird (Blue), a 16.2hh 5-year-old ISH gelding who is showing a lot of promise to be a fantastic event horse this coming season.
Castle’s Badminton fitness program is going well. We are now doing more gallop work as well as intense dressage and showjump training. This work will help Castle’s fitness for Bicton Arena’s April Horse Trials event, which is the perfect pre-Badminton run.
Winter competitions with Castle, Blue and TJ, have so far been successful with all horses being placed in the top 10. My aim with Blue and TJ is to affiliate them BE and hope to qualify for Grassroots 2021. I am also aiming to have a good placing at Badminton with Castle, after that I would love to try and compete in my first 1* event with him this season.
We’re counting down the days till the season starts, fingers crossed everything runs smoothly as 2020 is shaping up to be a busy year!
Bicton Arena and NAF build on its association for the 2020 season. The 90m x 50m pro-wax competition arena will be known as the NAF Five Star Arena. NAF’s support of the venue will encompass far more than just title sponsorship of the arena with an increased overall presence throughout the season.
Bicton Arena Manager Helen West comments, “We know that this alliance will be the start of something great to come.” NAF prides itself on every horse deserving Five Star treatment from Shetland ponies to Shires, from leisure horses who are a part of the family, to gold medal winning performance horses. NAF is also the only Official Supplier of supplements and care products to the British Equestrian Teams. “This inclusive approach is very much a shared objective of both NAF and Bicton Arena,” adds Helen.
Eloise Chugg-Martin Sponsorship and Events Manager for NAF said, “As part of our continued commitment to supporting grassroots through to top level equestrian sport we look forward to working closely with Bicton Arena and supporting Helen and her team for 2020 and beyond.”
Helen herself has a long-standing relationship with NAF and has fed its products for many years during her professional eventing career and won the Pro-Feet CCI* at Hartpury International Horse Trials in 2013. More recently NAF has supported her with her showjumper Eebay who came second in the Talent Seekers Final at HOYS in 2018 and MBF Swagger who Helen is currently competing on the circuit.
Find out more about NAF here: www.naf-equine.eu/uk.