Did I tell you guys that I had a horse in for schooling? His name is bob and he's nine and a real old school hunter type. I think he's quite gorgeous really though a little plain headed. So two days after the Hickstead day they had a XC schooling day over the same course and so I took both bob and China. China went out first and jumped most of the Pretraining (80cm/2'9") fences and did the drops into the water and he proved far braver than I rode him. I was too protective and so we had some ugly jumps when I should have ridden on a bit more. Still I was super pleased with him and he was really brave, though still green but had an awesome run home on him picking up fences as we went and even jumped a few training ones (95cm/ 3'1").
Bob had on first arrival not shown a great deal of talent over fences
So the idea was to go jump solid fences and he'd learn to jump or not as it were. He actually proved to be very brave and though a little nappy for his first ever outing ( seemed like a million people charging around by the time I went out on him) but he was actually super. We totally clobbered the first roll top I jumped maybe five times before he got both his front end and his back end organised but once he had it he was so good
As a strategy it worked super because now he's jumping like this
Picture so you can see the old school hunter type of bob. Lots and lots of bone but lovely and forward for such a big horse
Ooh he is handsome!
ReplyDelete