Well Solo went to Plantation Field and he was a REALLY good boy, however that did not stop him being eliminated…..sigh!
All seemed well planned and organised, but the reality was a nightmare. Dressage day dawned bright and clear and Selena took Solo for a little hack to settle him down before she warmed up. All going well, she continued her warm up near the main ring about ten minutes before her time. Boyd Martin came over and asked her to listen to him go through his test – since he was riding seven horses, he had every right to be a bit concerned about which test was which! As he spouted the test, it came to Selena that it was not the test she knew…eek. She rushed over to someone else, Boyd having gone in the ring and sure enough, she was at the Two Star ring and Solo was in the One Star. With about three minutes to the start of her test, she cantered off across the road to find her ring.
If that was it – all would have been well. She arrived at the new ring with 20 seconds to spare – while watching the horse before her finish it’s test, she had the horrible dawning that the test just being completed was still not the test she had learned, and this was the One Star ring. Sure enough, she had learned the wrong test. After a mad scramble, she got a hold of an omnibus and Colombo’s owner, Elaine Davies, read the test. Still all did not go well. About half way through both Elaine and Selena parted company and Elaine tactfully allowed Selena to continue unaided. All went well, or so we thought, but when the scores went up, Selena had been given three errors of course and that meant elimination. The awful fact was that there were only two errors of course, the third error was Solo refusing to walk properly in one movement. One judge gave her a one and the other gave her a zero, the zero earned her the third error (movement not performed) and she was out.
The high point was that Solo did NOT fry. He kept his head and was very rideable throughout the whole fiasco.
Solo and Selena had a lesson from Bruce Davidson on the Thursday morning that really helped. Bruce encouraged her to persevere and push Solo more through in front of the leg. Solo doesn’t exactly like it, but he does give in eventually. Since he was not competing, we decided to splurge on another lesson on the Sunday morning. Colombo did not jump until after one o’clock and Solo and Selena hacked up to Bruce’s for another grilling session on the flat. This one was even more successful and in retrospect was probably way more worthwhile than running in the competition – sometimes disasters just work out for the best.
Thanks to help and support from our friends, we are taking him to Morvan Park (you knew we would….) to run in the OP. This will definitely be the last this year. He has to work on his dressage until he goes down to Florida in November.
