EQUESTRIAN INSTITUTE FALL HORSE TRIALS

Date: September 16, 2018

Running order of Divisions:

See Course Designers Evaluation sheet below

Starters/Clear Rounds:

Open Preliminary – 11/4 (36%)

Training Junior – 11/5 (45%)

Training Open A – 13/7 (54%)

Training Open B – 14/8 (57%)

Unfortunately entries at this event meant that the Intermediate Division was reduced to a Combined Training Division.

The arena for this Event is square with sides of only 250ft. I always find that this is one of the more difficult shaped arenas to design in because there is no ‘long’ side, so the track can end up being spiral in nature.

The original plan submitted (see below) gave the impression, as drawn, that the first 5 fences would come up very quickly, With 84ft being proposed between fence 3 and 4, the turn from 2, and to 5a, could have ended up being very tight. The Course Designer took my suggestion of moving fence 1 to the other side of fence 10 to give a smoother turn to the second fence. Fence 4 was then removed to give just a single fence on the diagonal to the turn back to the first combination. This fence was then placed after the combination, with fence 6 re-angled to give a related line from 4a to 6. This line shows a good example of how to get away from the spiral affect mentioned above and add some additional flow to the course.

Originally fence 11 was to be removed from the Intermediate course for the Preliminary Division. With this fence basically unrelated to fence10, this meant that there was very little difference in the technicality of the track between the Divisions. Removing fence 9 instead, changed that.

The Course Designer in his Evaluation of the course makes the comment that the position of the last fence past the in-gate did create a slight problem with pre-loading. The layout of the course also meant that the first fence, and triple combination, was jumped out of the in-gate. Flipping the course 180 degrees would have been a solution to resolve this and would have probably saved some time had there been more entries.

Richard Jeffery

USEF Eventing Show Jumping Course Advisor