Welcome back to the blog, I've been slightly remiss on
blogging, but I shall endeavour to restart!!
The team arrived in Oman late on Thursday, as you can see we don't travel light!!After a rather leisurely breakfast on friday we went to the grounds to inspect the course and check out the club house.
The club house was beautiful and had a rather stunning
swimming pool, although was lacking in water - we hope this will be filled
ahead of the competition.
Saturday was a busy day for me and I spent it working on the
ITPF documents and speech writing. This was ok whilst the team were back at the
venue, but I did feel a little put out after seeing them all enjoy the pool.
Today we got up at 05:30 to have breakfast at 6am ready to
leave in plenty of time for the draw of horses.
The British, Australians and South Africans were ready on time and
waiting for the rest of the countries. I am coming to the conclusion we may be
given slightly earlier times to encourage some of the others to actually be on
time… I’m all for leaving it later, but
the team insist on being punctual.
The team order was drawn first, and GB are the eight team to
run in competition. The horses were then drawn, and after 2 horses being drawn
for each team, we inspected the horses and microchips were read to confirm the
identity of each horse. Following by
another round of drawing the last 3 horses.
This did make the whole procedure rather a long time!!
Once we had drawn the horses half the teams practiced,
including GB, and the other half went back to the hotel to return in the
afternoon.
GB managed to draw 4 chestnuts and 1 bay horse, so we are
very much a team of brown horses!
Practice went well with lots of swapping and trying out
different horses. Finding equipment was a bit hairy and seemed very much a free
for all, this meant we were very glad that everyone has brought their own
bridles and in my case my usual stock saddle.
I got given a bay horse to ride and stuck with him for the
entire session; however after the first run it did take me a long time to pull
him up!
The others all coped well with their horses and were getting
to grips with them, we have a few jumpy ones, but nothing nasty.
Practice came and went too quickly, and we only managed 5 of
our 6 runs before the track closed.
In the afternoon we mulled over the horses with a team
session in the pool
The evening event was at the town hall with the launch of
the new International Tent Pegging Federation logo, World Cup and website.
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