Adrienne Lyle spent her morning splashing in puddles with Wizard, and that paid off in spades for her when she swam to the top of the leaderboard in the Grand Prix freestyle (74.95%) on a wet and sloppy Saturday night, June 20, at the Collecting Gaits Farm/USEF Grand Prix Championship.
Lyle, who won last year’s Brentina Cup, just edged out yesterday’s Grand Prix winner Leslie Morse on Tip Top 962 (74.25%) and Lauren Sammis on Sagacious HF (72.45%).
The freestyle schedule was in flux throughout the day as U.S. Equestrian Federation officials focused on working around the wet weather conditions. Eventually they moved the Grand Prix competition up to 3:30 p.m. in the hopes of avoiding dangerous thunderstorms.
Lightning didn’t become an issue, but the Grand Prix riders had to engage in creative choreography during their freestyles to avoid the largest puddles.
“Wizard is a giant chicken with water,” admitted Lyle, 24. “If there’s a tiny stream at home, he will run backwards to the other end of the barn. I had a feeling he might need a little practice, so I took him out, and we played in the puddles in the upper ring today. We walked and trotted around until he was comfortable with it.”
Lyle rode the 10-year-old Oldenburg gelding to a medley of country music songs that predominantly featured Big & Rich’s “Save A Horse (Ride A Cowboy).”
“It’s different, but I’m a country fan, it’s all I ever listen to,” said Lyle. “[Terry Gallo] sent me a couple demo songs of country music, and I loved it. I thought it fit Wizard well, it set a strong beat, and he’s a big, powerful horse. We’re from Idaho so we’re allowed to do country.”
Lyle rode early in the freestyle, and by the time Morse went ring conditions had deteriorated.
“At the beginning of the class it looked solid, but by the time I went, it was getting sloggy,” she said. “The centerline was very tricky. We were trying to stay away from it.”
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Morse credited the impressive maintenance crew for doing their best after so much rain. “They’re getting it accomplished, but it just got a little old and wet towards the end,” she said.
Morse rode a new freestyle with Tip Top, one that features music by Annie Lennox and Stevie Wonder. Small mistakes kept the test from matching her earlier ride with the 15-year-old Swedish Warmblood stallion.
“It’s extremely difficult, and, along with the rain, I think Tip Top did phenomenal,” said Morse. “He was so submissive and so on my aids. Everything I asked for, he did, and he did it with a smile on his face. I couldn’t ask for more. I will be making some changes. We’ve used this competition as a trial, and I’ll keep tweaking it here and there until it’s absolutely solid.”
Yesterday’s second and third-placed riders—Pierre St. Jacques on Lucky Tiger and Michael Barisone on Olympus—went at the tail end of the class. Heavy going prevented them from showing the same brilliance as the day before. Barisone ran into serious trouble in his first pirouette when Olympus broke to trot, and St. Jacques put in a somewhat lackluster test that didn’t quite keep pace with his music.
For Sammis, the freestyle proved to be a much better test than her mistake-filled Grand Prix.
“I think yesterday he was a green horse,” said Sammis. “There’s been a lot of talk about him, and I’m very flattered by it, but we need to keep in perspective that this is a green horse, and the goal is next year. He did exactly what a green horse would do in the Grand Prix in his first time in pouring rain at Gladstone with trucks, people and everything. I can’t fault him for that. Today he came out and he had a little bit more confidence and he felt OK and he gave his all.”
Sammis rode to the same Billy Joel freestyle that helped her earn an individual silver medal at the 2007 Pan American Games aboard the 10-year-old Dutch Warmblood gelding.
“I just wanted to add the Grand Prix portions of it with the thought that we’d be redoing our music in the fall,” she said. “But the judges seem to like it, so I’m a little bit hesitant now about whether I should be redoing it.”
Dea Digs Deep
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The small tour horses once again got the best weather and footing today, this time by going first in the morning. And this exciting group of up-and-coming horses used their advantage to continue impressing the judges.
Katherine Bateson-Chandler and Dea II (74.57%) once again just edged Jan Brons and Teutobod (74.52%) for blue in the Intermediaire I, but Shelly Francis was close behind them aboard Wig Wam (71.73%), and the scores didn’t dip below 70 percent until sixth place.
Bateson-Chandler rode Dea, a 9-year-old Hanoverian, last in the class. “I came up the hill, and I saw Jan’s score. I was determined to be on my game because I knew I had a big score to beat,” she said. “I came in and pushed for every movement as much as I could, and she rose to the occasion.”
Brons wasn’t unhappy to be second because he felt “Teddy” gave it his best shot. “He stepped well up to the plate and smacked as hard as he could,” he said. “I rode very well, and that’s what it was. I don’t know if the order was reversed if it would have made any difference.”
Francis, who placed eighth in the Prix St. Georges, said that even though the competition was tough, she knew she had a chance to be on top.
“So many of these horses in the I1 this year are really, really good quality, and I think there was a whole pool of them that could have placed over one another on any day if they had a real fancy, schmancy test,” she said. “It was good competition and fun, very fun.”
All three small tour riders are hoping to start contesting Grand Prix tests later this year, and they are aiming at next year’s selection trials for the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games.
Grand Prix freestyle results…
