No trip to Welly World is complete until you feel like the place has run you over like an Australian road train. It’s a kind of black magic, the way the place just demands every ounce of life out of you, from the time you arrive until you fasten your seat-belt on the flight out. I believe the Welly phenomenon has a lot to do with the incredible density of one-degree-of-separation people and situations. Here is an example:
I went to see a Canadian rider’s daughter and her horse in White Fences one sunny morning. The daughter’s horse was, I had been told, across the road from where the mom has her horses. Ignoring the address I’d been given, I just drove up the driveway that was directly across the road. I walked in and asked the assembled trio of people in the barn aisle if I would find the mom there. “She’s across the road,” was the reply from a young man.
“Yes, but she told me her daughter’s horse is over on this side,” I said.
“That’s two driveways down, the white place with the green trim,” said the helpful fellow. Where else in the horse world would you randomly walk into the wrong farm and be told exactly where you will find the person you are looking for?
The GDF had astounding numbers last week for the five star. The impending Pan Am Games have left no one lurking in the wood work; and with GP now part of the Pan Am formula there were even more GP horses in the CDI than there were in the small tour – and that was a lot, at 46. The scores weren’t all that high, except with a few exceptions that seem to have perhaps been slightly influenced by star status. I didn’t see Laura Tomlinson’s rides in the PSG and I-1, but I do wonder if she really was 3 to 4 points better than everyone else.
Shocker of the weekend was Legolas’ seventh place (Seventh! Place!) in the GP. Katrina Wuest apparently really didn’t like what she saw. The horse has probably never broken the bottom of 70% since Steffen started riding him, but Katrina gave him 67.3% and a 13th place rank. Again, I was too busy racing around to see the ride, but I heard that the horse made an unscheduled stop at a non-halt moment in the test. Silver lining: there would have been a few pretty chuffed riders in the top six in that class.
I was so frantically run off my freestyling feet I never even made it over to the WEF, where the numbers are as ridiculous as ever, with over a hundred horses in many of the higher jumper classes. I did manage to meet Canada’s best-kept Adult Amateur secret, Wesley Newlands, and her very sweet and talented new four legged partner, Evita. Check out those cute mare ears.
I also had fun catching up with a few transplanted BC natives and their best canine friends.
Dressage rider Alex Duncan and the Buddha-like Oslo
- Dressage husband Lorne Dueck and one of three vicious guard terriers that roam the farm
Before I leave you today, I have to eat a slice of humble pie. The Eventing in Welly wasn’t lame at all. It was AWESOME. Sure, the course was easy for the four start crowd that Sr. B. managed to attract with his 50k purse, and yes the course was squeezed onto a postage-stamp of a derby field (whose divets were patched with sand that had been dyed green – only in Welly World), but it was a trial run (no pun intended) after all.
The most positive after-effect of Wellly Eventing was that the discipline gained a whole passel of new fans. The illiterate Aussie commenter on the live streaming of cross country (more on him in a moment) somewhat exaggerated when he declared the crowd at 5,000, but there actually was a goodly number of people watching – even if it was somewhere well south of that number. And they loved it. LOVED it. I heard from all kinds of non-Eventer types afterward how much they enjoyed watching what is equestrian sport’s most underrated adrenaline-junkie discipline. The organizers also did a good job of keeping the Eventers separate from the DQs in spite of the shared venue. I asked one trainer who had students showing in the national dressage show that was running at the same time how it went with the Eventing. ‘We didn’t even notice them’ was her response.
I wish I’d had time to ask Michael Stone about the plans for Welly Eventing next year and beyond, but the success of the pilot episode surely points to a future permanent installment in Welly World.
The only thing about the Eventing I did not totally love was the afore-mentioned Aussie commentator, whose name I honestly don’t know. If I did I wouldn’t hesitate to name him, because he truly deserves a public shaming. There was a horse in the competition named Sanskrit. Neither the Aussie nor his American co-commentator knew what Sanskrit is. Aussie guessed it might be the name of a pop song…so he looked it up on his phone and read out loud the information that it’s an ancient Indian language. Unfortunately he failed to manage to pronounce the word ‘liturgical’. Which earns him my award for worst candidate for future gigs as a commentator, cute accent notwithstanding.
While I’ve been getting beaten up by the frenetic pace of Welly World, EC has been hard at work trying to convince its members to vote on the new bylaws that, if passed, will take away voting rights from the very people whose votes are needed to pass the new bylaws. More on that little bit of treacherous irony in the coming days. If you aren’t sure what the score is on the new bylaws, please don’t vote until you know exactly what’s at stake. I promise to do my best to help out with that in my next post.
