Tuesday 19 April 2011

From My Library .... Brigstock International Horse Trials 2010

Here's a different sort of horsepower to that I normally shoot, and rather than having four wheels these have four legs!  For a treat last year I took my sister to the Brigstock International Horse Trials - she's the horsey type and has owned her own horse for many years so she loved it.  For me it was an interesting photo opportunity but I'm not sure about things that have a mind of their own and don't have an effective brake pedal!

We certainly picked the right day - the weather was fan-tas-tic!  No excuses for poor photographs today (well, there was but I'm not going to use them).  First we toddled round the cross country course, the competition being well underway by the time we arrived.  As it had been very dry for the weeks leading up to the event there we no good, deep water jumps so we had to be satisfied with just a bit of a splash ....


No problems here so we carried on round the course to find a slightly more interesting and challenging jump.  We found that at 'Larkins Leap'.  Here's how it should be done ....


But not everyone was quite so committed ....


Both rider and horse survived to tell the tale and clear the jump at the second attempt.

One of the official event photographers directed us to a jump involving a forked tree - riders have the option of taking the safer, but longer, sequence of jumps, or they can go right over the tree!  We arrived as the last few horses were clearing the jump - the first one doing just what we wanted ....


And the next one did exactly the same ... bravo!


Now this rider attracted a lot of cheers and applause but did nothing special as far as I could see!  Then somebody in the crowd asked if we'd seen Oliver Townend?

Now, this might come as a surprise, but I actually knew who Oliver Townend was!!  He'd been all over the news a few weeks before trying to land the Rolex Grand Slam for winning consecutive four-star events - Badminton, Burghley and Kentucky - having to go to great lengths to get to Kentucky because of the volcanic ash air travel chaos - arriving after an epic 51-hour journey via Paris, Madrid and Miami, including a £1,600 taxi fare - only to suffer a crashing fall with the horse landing on top of him knocking him unconscious!  His lack of serious injury was attributed to an airbag-style jacket that inflates if the rider leaves the saddle - impressive!

Anyway, I put two and two together and, checking the rider's number, confirmed that, yes - the rider on the grey who had all the applause was indeed none other than Oliver Townend!  Bravo indeed!  (For those interested in these things, the horse was 'Jeepers Creepers').


A funny story:  prior to the arrival of said Mr Townend I'd got chatting to another photographer, a slightly overblown pompous soul who had been published here, there and everywhere ....
  
Anyway, after Townend had passed by, and realisation had dawned, I was approached by a couple of ladies who, it turned out, managed Townend's website!  They'd missed him jumping, they seen me looking at the pictures with some delight, and would I mind if they used MY PICTURE on his website!  "No problem" says I, giving them a card to email their details through.  You can imagine that overblown pompous soul, who had overheard all of this, was positively hopping from foot to foot by this stage, though obviously bought up properly by his Mom not to be rude and interrupt, he waited until we had left before accosting the young ladies and thrusting his card in their hand!  Needless to say I heard nothing more (turns out it's a members only website and you have to pay - so I would have been a bit narked if they'd made money from my photo with me not getting a penny!).
Anyway, back to the photos - there were more jumps ....

And yet more jumps ....

And then in the show ring, there were even MORE jumps ....


You can get too much of a good thing you know ...!!