Show updates and wrap-up

Saturday morning was the Junior Individual test. We rode late in the morning when both Oslo and I thought it was way too hot. Oslo became very tired and unfortunately, I had to really hold him up through the test. Oslo kept his brain and gave a good effort allowing us to get all our right-to-left changes clean, which is our difficult change. Overall, we ended with a score of 65.2%. All the scores were so close in the top-15, with no scores over 70%. With our score of 65 we moved into 10th place which was a bit of a disappointment for us, but it meant that we got to ride our Freestyle on Sunday. Also, the judge Joan McCartney had me in the bronze medal position which made me smile after a hard day.

Saturday night was the top-15 Young Rider Freestyle. They were amazing to watch, and with one rider to go, Canada was sitting first, second and third. The anxiety of the Canadian crowd was huge. After the final ride, we waited for the scores to come up on the board and finally it came up 0.1% lower than Julie Watchorn, which was our Canadian in third! Canada had swept the Freestyle with Alex Duncan taking Gold, Leah Wilson taking Silver, and Julie winning Bronze.

Sunday morning I rode at 10:30 am and again it seemed way too hot, so we had only 15 minutes of warm-up. Oslo was getting tired of the whole showing situation, making him super-hot, or as mom likes to say, “a freak”. We knew though, that if we had too much warm-up, he would be even worse, so we took the chance of having a really short warm-up. We managed to hold everything together, but consequently had to ride a bit conservative. Overall, the test was fairly good, but since Oslo was not on my seat, we had one late change – and it’s usually his good one. At the end, we received a score of 68.3%, which was 0.6% from Bronze, putting us in 6th place overall. Everyone loved our music, with the stingy judges giving us no less than a 7 on music and Gary Rockwell even giving us an 8!

The closing ceremonies were amazing and a very memorable moment. Our Junior Team got to stand on the podium and received our Gold Medal along with a beautiful cooler. We even got to sing our Canadian anthem. It was totally spectacular.

Canada also did very well in eventing and show jumping, receiving Team Bronze in eventing, Team Silver in show jumping, Individual Gold in eventing and Individual Silver in show jumping. Therefore, I think it’s time the North American show came to Canada!

We’re on our way home now and Oslo is very excited to get back into his field.