Paul Hart and Heartbreak Hill
(Photo : Vumafeed)

WORLD EQUESTRIAN GAMES
2010

The South African Eventing team depart for Kentucky in 12 days time.

Reporting on their progress from their training camp in St Jean, on the west coast of France, Paul Hart tells us that they are well on track and he believes that the horses are going to peak at the right time!

Paul says that St Jean is beautiful and they are doing a lot of beach riding for fitness, which started in earnest last Saturday. The going is great and not too soft.

They are training towards their optimum time for WEG which is 12 minutes at 570m/minute. The WEG track is 7km long and they are incorporating a lot of interval training to ensure peak fitness over the cross country course.

Their morning training continued yesterday and Paul had the following to say :

"We went to the beach to do fitness training yesterday again. We got there at seven am to perfect conditions.

We started with 20 minutes trotting and then seven minutes canter at 500m/minute followed by a two minute walk and back to canter for another seven minutes and then another two minute walk followed by a 10 minute trot on the beach and a minute walk in the sea for their legs.

Harry loves the sea and every time he thinks I won't notice he tries to roll in the water! In the afternoon we lunged for twenty minutes and then hand walked them for 30 minutes.

We are also cycling about 25km a day so we can stay fit!"

It sounds like our team are well on track to do us proud and we wish them the best of everything as they get closer to their goal.

The World Equestrian Games start on 25^th September in Lexington, Kentucky. Will you be there?

Compiegne Equestre

SOUTH AFRICAN RIDERS AT THE COMPIEGNE CCI*

Suzanne Boswell writes about our SA riders event in Compiegne :

What a successful weekend for our South African eventers at the CCI** at Compiegne, France. There were 101 starters with 80 riders and 12 countries being represented at this show, including the legendary Mark Todd!

After a very successful dressage phase our South African riders Paul Hart, Martyn Swanepoel, Graham Winn and Hayley Parker were well placed in the middle of the field. The best dressage score was a 33.2 from Jung from the Netherlands!

The entire team was wearing their SA flag hat covers and it was a very proud and poignant moment for SA eventing!! Paul and Heartbreak Hill were first to go into the country. They went clear for jumping but had some time faults as their team coach, Jean Philippe wanted a steady clear round.  Paul said Harry could have gone much faster but he was ecstatic about his round. Next to go was Martyn who had an unfortunate stop at No.4 and finished about a minute over the time. Graham was next in, Zorba went off at a cracking rate but had an unfortunate fall at number 3, both horse and rider are fine thankfully. Hayley had a run out at the skinny at 17 and also incurred time penalties.

On Sunday was the showjumping. The jumps were big and the oxers were very square which is something our course builders should take note of here. The course was quite spooky and there were hundreds and hundreds of spectators. Each of our riders took 3 poles. Jean Philippe was extremely pleased with our team performance. visit www.psvphoto.com to see pictures of all 3 phases.

The next event will be Saumur from the 20 to the 23rd of May.