All smiles for Sarah Bullimore and Conpierre on last day at Barbury

A super weekend of sport at the Barbury Castle Estate was capped by a win in the CCI-S 3* (Section C) for Sarah Bullimore with Christopher and Susan Gillespie and Brett Bullimore’s, Conpierre. The combination put in a commanding performance from start to finish to complete on their dressage score of 22.9

“Conpierre is a 14-year-old that we’ve had a long while and he’s been a fabulous horse,” said Sarah. “He can be quite cheeky and he was squealing as he went around the warm-up in the dressage and show jumping, but I’m really pleased with him today as he’s been fantastic and did manage to keep a lid on his excitement! He had a great run cross country, so it’s been fabulous to actually have that under his belt.”

Fred Powell took second with Grafiba after an eye-catching cross country round (28.2) and Alexander Bragg completed the top three, with Shannondale Aristo (29.7).

The Barbury team was delighted to host the first running of the Novice Masters, a brand-new British Eventing competition for combinations competing at Novice level to aim for. This competition proved extremely popular and was hotly contested throughout the weekend. In the end, less than one penalty separated the top three, with Harriet Ford and According to Archie (26) taking the win, ahead of Saskia Davies and Singing Usk (26.3) and Ellie Ormrod and Keyland William (26.9).

“The whole experience of doing the Novice Masters was amazing,” said Harriet. “The fact that I could do my dressage in tails, it just had such a great feel, especially being here at Barbury.

“The Novice Masters is a great thing for people coming up through the levels and especially for someone like myself – I am trying to get more owners and some more rides, so it is really good to have this success with a home-produced horse.”

It was also a great weekend for Olive Nicholls, who took the honours in the Pony Trial (Section M) with her lovely pony, Kingston David and third place in the RoR Retrained Racehorse Eventing Championship (Section J) with Gods Ground. The daughter of Champion National Hunt Trainer, Paul Nicholls, Olive hopes to combine eventing with point-to-point riding after she turns 16 later this year.

“I would love to continue eventing, definitely for a while, but I would also love to go into racing and to train eventually,” said Olive. I really enjoy working with the ex-racehorses, the horse I was competing here is such a nice ride and so easy to deal with.”

The overall winner of theRoR Retrained Racehorse Eventing Championship was Tara Jefferies and Good Boy Alex, who completed on a score of 30.8 after the second show jumping round – the top 10 combinations jump two rounds of show jumping in this class.

“I always thought he was going to be good,” said Tara. “I didn’t know he was going to be this good, but he just keeps getting better and better! He’s my absolute best friend. I think the thoroughbreds do, in general, have a fantastic brain and once you get them on-side they’ve just got a heart of gold and will do anything for you.”

Results

A full list of results from across the weekend are available on Eventing Scores, here.

Live Coverage

All the cross country action from Saturday and Sunday was streamed live on Horse & Country TV and is still available for H&C+ members to watch via live catch up. Find out more at https://app.horseandcountry.tv/betv.