Clark Montgomery and Loughan Glen finally got their first run of the season in at the Belton Horse Trials CIC*** (England) on April 15-17. They won the class last year, and this year they placed 17th out of 126 entries, with a 42.0 in dressage, one rail in show jumping and 7.6 time penalties on cross-country.
Loughan Glen and Clark Montgomery got their first cross-country run of the year at Belton. Photo by E.S. Photography
[Belton is] one of the first big events that the United Kingdom is able to get done. Mark [Phillips] does the course, which everybody seems to enjoy over here, and the footing is usually quite good. It offers quite a bit of atmosphere to get your horses into before they go to, say Badminton.
He was pretty keen to be there since he hasn’t had a full run yet. He was a bit on the muscle [in the dressage,] and Belton always has quite a bit of atmosphere to it anyway, so he got in there and completely blew his first medium trot—just cantered the whole diagonal. So we didn’t get off to a fantastic start, but he was good from then on—just a little bit tight. He wasn’t crazy competitive after the dressage, but that’s not what we were there for. It was mainly just to get that first cross-country run in.
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About Clark Montgomery And Loughan Glen Home Base: Aston Farm in Tetbury, England “Glen’s” Stats: 13-year-old Irish Sport Horse (Limerick—Tattymacall Mustard, Cut The Mustard) Glen’s Owners: Jessica Montgomery, Kathryn Kraft, Holly and William Becker Big Performances In 2015: ADVERTISEMENT |
We show jumped the next morning. He jumped brilliantly, but just got stuck in the mud at No. 3, a vertical, and had that down. From then on, he tried a lot harder for me and jumped great. I really had no complaints.
He’s not a horse that loves the mud, and never has been. I think because he’s a bit heavy, and he gets a bit stuck in it. It wasn’t necessarily mud, because there’s a bit of sand, but it was a bit of heavy going, for him at least.
My plan [for cross-country that afternoon] was to start quite aggressively, just because he hadn’t been out at all yet. Belton’s no joke. It’s big enough and technical enough, so I didn’t want to start out too pensive then have something stupid happen. I started out pretty great guns, but then after the first combination, he felt brilliant, and there wasn’t anything he was going to be backing off of. I backed off the speed a little bit. [As I’ve discussed before], if I wasn’t in a position to be quite competitive and the footing wasn’t his type of footing, there was no reason to push him or to run his legs off.
He’s had a lot of hacking [since] and came out of it fantastic. Our sights are set to the Chatsworth CIC***, on May 13-16, now.
To be perfectly frank, I was pretty freaking nervous about getting this first run out of the way. It would have been nice to have a nice little intermediate run and all that, but we weren’t able to get it in because of the weather. I was pretty wound up about Belton being his first run. Now that that’s over, I think I can relax knowing that he did come out of Blenheim [last fall] really well.
That was almost seven months since he’s run. It’s a long time to sit around and hope that he’s the same horse that you ended last season with! But he wants to run, he wants to run fast, he’s picking up on all of his fences.
Knowing that he is, we’re just going to relax a little bit and start polishing up on some things. We’ve got to get the dressage back down to his normal score in the 30s. I think he’s show jumping quite well. The one rail was a bit unlucky but we’ll just make sure that he’s back to jumping a bit cleaner.
The cross-country, we’ll just take a breath just realizing he’s picking up on his fences really well and just do his normal fitness work getting ready for Chatsworth.
I like to cross-country school once before an event just to polish up a little bit. The Monday or Tuesday before Chatsworth I’ll go, and I just like to jump in the water and jump a couple of narrows. It’s more to make sure I’m as clicked in as I want to be more than it has anything to do with him.
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In this series, the Chronicle follows six riders as they seek to fulfill their Olympic dreams in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. We’ll check in with them every few weeks as they pursue a team spot, seeing how they’re getting their horses ready and preparing mentally.
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