“Isn’t that just a mint with a hole in it?!”

A dark and snowy December morning saw the Imperial College Equestrian Team meet for their second competition of the year at Trent Park Equestrian Centre in Enfield. The team met at 7am at Baron’s Court tube and began the long tube journey to Oakwood for their home competition, by the time we got to the stables the sun had risen and the snow was beginning to melt, but the team was not looking forwards to plaiting and grooming horses in the freezing cold!

On arrival at the stables we were greeted by a decorated Christmas tree and Christmas carols which instantly brightened our mood, and after a quick briefing by Captain Rachel the team began cleaning the horses and plaiting their manes and tails to hopefully win brownie points with the judge! Due to the snow, Kent were running late, but we managed to do the draw and start the competition nearly on time, despite it taking half an hour to find the dressage boards that had gone missing at the centre. The scoring in the BUCS equestrian competitions is complicated – the rider who does the best dressage test or show-jumping round on each horse scores 0 and then the difference between the other riders score and the best score on that horse is their score as a penalty, i.e. 0 is the best. The dressage tests are scored out of 250 points, and the show-jumping out of 210, and scores in both phases generally range from 55% to 80%.

Claudia Saksida rode her horse, Kaliber, a dark bay gelding who was replacing our first choice horse Samba, because he had pulled a muscle, really well despite his difficult nature and complete lack of interest in dressage, and she scored 16 penalties after the dressage phase. Andre Wilmes rode second on his horse, Jay, an experienced chestnut gelding and rode a masterclass of a test to win on his horse and score 0 penalties. Rachel Gregory was third on her horse, Franklyn, a chestnut gelding, and rode a neat and accurate test to score 1 penalty and Liane Marshallsay was last on her horse, Galileo, a big palomino gelding, and her test was beautiful to score 3 penalties

At lunchtime after the dressage Imperial were in second place behind the University of Kent, who were in the lead by 19 points after they managed to win on three of the horses! Royal Holloway were in third and LSE in fourth. Lunchtime saw frantic course building and tacking up of the show-jumping horses. Some of the teams were surprised at how big the show-jumping course was (we built it as big as we could!) but after the course walk everybody was happy and the competition got underway.

Imperial had again been drawn as team four, which meant that Claudia was again the first Imperial competitor. Claudia was riding Monsoon, a tricky dark bay gelding, but she jumped a tidy round but had an unfortunate pole down, leaving her on 3 penalties once all four riders on her horse had completed. Liane was second on her horse Teak, and had a pole down and a run out (when the horse doesn’t jump the jump so you have to do a circle and jump it again) and was given 16 penalties. Rachel was third on Freddie, a bay gelding, and she jumped a stylish clear round to be judged the best rider on her horse, giving her a score of 0. After a nervy few minutes when two riders from LSE fell off in the warm up, Andre was the last to ride on his horse, Lucy, a big bay mare. He also jumped a stylish clear round to be given the best jumping score of the day and win on his horse, scoring 0 penalties.

The final results revealed that the Imperial team had taken advantage of the home competition and won by a narrow margin of ten points. University of Kent were second, Royal Holloway third and LSE were fourth. Andre won individually and Rachel was second. After the first two mini-league competitions Imperial are top of the league.

A huge thank you goes to all the helpers on the day, without whom the competition would not have run as smoothly as it did!