Canada opened the individual vaulting competition at the FEI World Championships in Aachen with two athletes inside the top five, led by Averill Saunders in third place in the women’s compulsory test and Talmage Conrad in fifth in the men’s competition.
Saunders, currently ranked 13th in the FEI women’s world rankings, scored 8.291 to finish third in a field of 46 competitors. Canada’s Charlotte Axani finished 25th with 7.091, while Megan Leeper was 31st on 6.822.
Saunders’ performance was particularly satisfying after an unusually unsettled warm-up.
“Normally, in a competition, my warm-up is always very much on point. I’m very much a ‘show up and perform’ type of athlete, and so today it was a little bit not that way for the first time this season,” she explained. “It was a really big deal to be able to go into the competition arena and still deliver what I know I can do despite maybe the unsettling feeling I had prior to going in.”
One of the highlights was her mount, an element she has worked particularly hard to improve.
“For me, in the last years of my career, I’ve really grown to love the mount. It’s an exercise that’s biomechanically much easier for boys to perform than girls, so it can be quite an accomplishment to have a really good mount as a girl,” Saunders said of the manoeuvre that requires great upper body strength.
The result takes on additional significance as Saunders, 22, has decided Aachen will be her final World Championship as an individual vaulter.
“Vaulting has been my primary focus for the last 13 years. And I think at a certain point it’s time to move on with other things in life. I think I’ve accomplished a lot of the things that nine-year-old me didn’t think would be possible,” she said.
Saunders plans to remain involved in vaulting. Already a judge in Canada, she is a candidate to become the next athlete representative on the FEI Vaulting Technical Committee and hopes eventually to become an FEI judge.
Charlotte Axani and Lightning Jack 12. (Cealy Tetley photo)
Conrad added another top-five result for Canada, scoring 8.192 to finish fifth of 19 in the men’s compulsory competition. The result puts the Canadian, currently ranked seventh in the FEI world rankings, in a strong position heading into Friday’s Technical Test.
Conrad said he went into the arena with one clear focus after a warm-up that left him feeling there was still room to sharpen his performance.
“I felt good. He felt really good, which is most important to me. And then it just kind of left a little room to tighten things up, which is really easy to do when you have all the extra energy from the crowd. I got out there with a very clear, single thought, and it really came through for me.”
Conrad is competing on a horse based in Europe that he has worked with for the last two years, including at the 2024 championships in Bern and at previous competitions in Aachen.
Among the Canadian women, Axani was also pleased with her opening performance.
“I was really happy overall. It’s a lot of training, a lot of time spent with your horses, with your lunger, your team. The whole year leads up to this moment and now today was everything that I was hoping for. It all came together at the right moment.”
Axani has represented Canada on a squad in 2016, competed individually as a junior in 2017, and represented Canada at the 2024 championships in Bern.
Megan Leeper and Zorro. (Cealy Tetley photo)
Leeper is making her senior championship debut after twice competing at championships as a junior. Aachen is also her first three-star competition and she was pleased with her performance,
“There were just a couple of points that I was really focusing on, and I feel like I achieved that, so I’m happy.” Her goals included avoiding touching her foot during the mount and properly landing her dismount.
The 23-year-old is competing on Zorro, a horse the Canadian contingent brought to Europe after raising funds to cover the trip. Leeper said borrowing a European horse, a common approach for overseas vaulters, would have been particularly difficult because she is competing both individually and in Pas de Deux.
The Compulsory and Technical tests form the first round of the championship. The individual competition continues Friday with the Technical Test. The top 15 qualify for the Free Test competition taking place Saturday.
Results here.
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