Vienna Masters

The weekend of Sept. 19-22 saw Orion and I in Vienna. This was my first time ever in Vienna and this is a city where I most certainly want to go back to because it is such a beautiful and magical place! The competition was held right in front of the Vienna town hall, which took an impressive amount of planning and organization to get a competition ring built up right in the middle the down town square.

From my home base in Germany it is over 1000 km to Vienna so we left on wednesday evening and drove the truck with Orion through the night and arrived in Vienna at 8 am on thursday morning. Which gave Orion a bit of time to rest up before the vet check at 4 pm.  

 Something that Lecoya and I have never experienced before is because the competition was right town down they had to park all the trucks and the lorries much further away where there was a large enough parking spot, so Lecoya and I had to take the subway every morning and night to the competition! Lecoya looks pretty scepitcal in this picture but she got pretty used to this after the first day and once again proved that she truly is the ULTIMATE side kick, by my side WHERE EVER I go ;-) 

Another very exciting part of my Vienna experience was that we got to tour the Spanish riding school, below is a picture of the main arena which is the most elegant arena I have EVER seen! 

The Grand Prix was friday early afternoon and unfortunately it had rained so much that the footing conditions where VERY sloppy. But as the song goes “The Show Must Go On!” and that it did, the show organizers did there best to accommodate the difficult conditions and Orion and I splashed down that center line.

What has never happened to me before in a test is that there were about 20-30 pigeons which had landed in the middle of the ring, and every diagonal or center line the flock of birds would burst into the air, and I must admit that the pigeons actually distracted me more than they did Orion. As a result I made a mistake in my two tempi changes and in my canter zig zag. Although we had some great highlights in our test, the mistakes (from the rider ;-/) were expensive and we ended up 9th with 68%. 

 

The freestyle was held on Sunday evening and the weather conditions were much better,  which was great for the footing, but because it was held in the evening all the jumbotron screens which surrounded the whole entire base of the arena, made for a very intense atmosphere because of the ever changing reflections and lighting.  We scored 71% and ended up 8th. Considering the atmosphere Orion most certainly was a true star, and I once again must admit that counting was not my strength this weekend, in the freestyle I also made mistake in my tempi changes.... Grrr! This was frustrating because these little mistakes were simply very expensive for our overall score and when you are in such a inspiring setting and at such a prestigious competition, all you want to do is perform your best... BUT and this is a big BUT this was exactly my mistake... and this is a lesson that has been really tough for me to learn... when I ride down the centre line I need to not seize up by "over trying" but start trusting that WE CAN do it! ... This is much easier said than done, but it is a lesson that is a process, and now that I know that Orion trusts me in no matter what setting we are competing in, maybe the rider should also follow suit and be just as brave ;-)