The 2015 season will be one to forget for a lot of people, as it feels as if it has contained more than the usual number of dramas. Who would ever have guessed that the top 3 riders in the sport would all have major falls, two of them very serious?
A brief round up of our most memorable moments of 2015.
Funniest moment: Michael Jung trying to do his flies up while trotting up La Biosthetique Sam at Burghley.
Best save on the XC:
Tina Cook at Burghley, proving that an honest horse that stays straight and somehow keeps going, and a rider with supreme balance, grip, and I-WILL-NOT-fall-off determination, can definitely defy the laws of physics.
Best save in the SJ: Nicola Wilson at the Europeans, nearly giving an entire nation’s eventing fans a heart attack, but another to manage a gravity-defying successful Klingon moment.
Best Amateur: Charlotte Brear, who has taken her only ever event horse all the way to clear around Burghley on their first attempt at 4*, fairytale stuff.
Globetrotter of the Year: Alice Dunsdon and Fernhill Present, bagging number 5 of their set of 4*s, with just Badminton to go to complete the set.
Photo by kind permission of Jenny Lupton
Performance of the year: Michael Jung, unable to walk the course due to the leg fracture sustained at Burghley (thank goodness for Segways), riding the relatively inexperienced FischerTakinou clear inside the time through the mud and undulations of Blair Castle at the European Championships, to win. Is there anything he cannot do?!
Looking forward, one of our big wishes for 2016 is to see Andrew Nicholson and William Fox-Pitt making full recoveries. We hope that the Olympics will have a testing but fair track, showing off the best of the best but not annihilating the rest (a very tricky balance, obviously!) and that the FEI will stop changing the rules of our game.
Thank you for all your support in 2015, and we wish all our readers a happy and successful 2016.
