High Hopes and Upgrades: A Thunderbird Show Park Update

As the COVID-19 situation continues to make summer horse show dates a moving target, Horse Sport reached out to Chris Pack, Chief Operating Officer and Tournament Manager of Thunderbird Show Park in Langley, BC, to see what was happening at this popular and normally busy venue.

For the first time in Thunderbird Show Park’s 47-year history, Tbird had to cancel both the Canadian Premier, May 19-24 and the Odlum Brown BC Open, May 26-31, and had been working with the FEI to hopefully postpone the CSIO5* Nations Cup event to one of the park’s August tournaments. However, “Due to the FEI announcing that the Nations Cup would not be a qualifier, we won’t be running it again until next year, but instead will focus on the ATCO and VOLVO Canada Cup in August (fingers crossed!),” said Pack.

A couple of weeks ago it was announced that entries for the June, July, and September outdoor tournaments would open April 26th, but that has recently changed, “I wish we had better news, but we had to push back our opening for the June/July shows to May 20th as things are still too uncertain at the moment.” The Tbird management team is also currently working to offer an additional week of competition September 16–20

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On the positive side, Tbird has taken advantage of this unanticipated delay in the normally busy outdoor show season to make improvements to the park’s facilities. “We are trying to make improvements while we have this unusual amount of time on our hands and to keep our full-time employees working,” explained Pack. “So together with some amazing sponsors, who instead of pushing their sponsorships to another year when the Nations Cup show was cancelled, they allowed us to use the funds to make a signature silica FEI hacking ring beside the FEI barns! As well, we have converted our Hunter 3 into the Onni Group Telegraph Trail ring which again is in our signature silica formula. And in partnership with SKY-HI, we have replaced all our north portable stalls with custom-made 10×12 stalls with a 4’ overhang to keep all the horses and people’s tack boxes shady and dry.”

It is clear that Tbird is working hard during this exceptional moment in history to help keep the horse community’s spirits up. “We are trying to find the silver lining in this unexpected downtime and will have the grounds looking amazing for when we are able to host our friends again!”