Burnham Market International

We are very grateful to all involved for putting on a replacement Blenheim Palace event, but I don’t feel out of line by saying we were disappointed with the presentation of this event. I do appreciate there are no spectators and we are in very tough financial times, but the CCIS4* XC course appeared, to us anyway, to be quite unimaginative and certainly significantly on the softer side. This was combined with a pretty compact stable site. Anyway, as I say, we do appreciate everyone’s late efforts to run the event in such difficult circumstances.

Blenheim Palace 8/9YO CCIS4* was a long term aim of 8yo MBF Dassett Legacy (Zam). Unfortunately the dressage score for Craig and Zam was not what we had hoped for! As always with Zam, he tries and never misbehaves, but there were too many places where marks we lost and sadly the combination were quite off the competitive pace after phase one. We don’t think it helped that the class was combined with a normal S4*, meaning some very established horses were performing their tests amongst the young horses, which is perhaps raises the bar somewhat.

But with that behind us, the combination jumped a very classy SJ round with one unlucky rail falling – the back rail of an over on got annoyingly caught. But otherwise Zam jumped a brilliant round with numerous compliments over the days that followed!

And he kept up the high standard XC with an effortless clear round! He didn’t have a fast run as he wasn’t competitive, but made nothing of all the straight routes and ate up the track. He certainly made the step up to the International 4* stage seem very straightforward and is all set for a very exciting 2021!