The Canadian flag flies at the entrance to Catherine Burrell’s stables just north of Marlborough. Catherine is host to Canada’s Olympic eventing team as they make final preparations for the Greenwich Park competition – and the team love being close Marlborough and surrounded by such wonderful countryside.
When we visited them they were getting ready to travel to the Hunters Equestrian dressage arena near Cirencester for a pre-Olympic dressage run-through – performing alongside Olympic teams from Australia, Japan and the United States. The Canadian team – five riders and an alternate, with six horses, grooms, coach, vet, farrier – arrived on July 9 and will leave for London on Monday (July 23.)
The team is led by the coach David O’Connor – an American who leaves the team after the Olympics to become coach to the United States team. He won a gold medal at the Sydney Olympics.
Peter Barry, a debut team member who comes from Quebec, rides Kilordan Abbott. Rebecca Howard was a member of Canada’s successful team at the 2011 Panam games in Mexico. She rides Riddle Master.
Shandiss Wewiora is the alternate member of the team. Unless another horse drops out, her mount Rockfield Grant Juan will stay at Catherine Burrell’s stables, but she’ll get to watch at Greenwich Park. Juan is a big nine year-old from Ireland – she says he’s been enjoying the rain.
Michele Mueller is another rider joining the team for the first time. She only started eventing in her thirties and her horse Amistad has taken her to the top level. She says he seems to like the English weather.
Jessica Phoenix has been a team member four times before, but it’s her first Olympics. She was chosen for Beijing but her horse was injured so she didn’t compete. Riding Pavarotti she won an individual gold medal at the Panam Games in 2011 – helping the team to a silver medal. For London 2012 she’s riding Exponential.
Hawley Bennet-Awad rides the big bay horse Gin and Juice – generally known as Ginny. Hawley is now based in California but started her eventing career in British Columbia.
Graeme Thom, the Canadian team’s chef d’équipe, told Marlborough News Online that the team have had a great welcome in the town and from neighbours. They’ve stayed in Marlborough before and he says people acknowledge their Olympic team jackets and he’s now recognised in Waitrose. “We love the town and everyone’s unbelievably friendly.”
It was quite a journey for riders and horses from Virginia where they had been training, via New York (for quarantine checks) to Marlborough – thirty hours door to door. The riders have to acclimatise as much as the horses: from riding five horses a day to concentrating on just one horse and, most unusually, with some down-time thrown in, is quite a change. The team have been able to use a local six-and-a-half furlong gallop and, for relaxation, had an afternoon’s clay pigeon shooting.
“The whole team – riders, grooms and support – have been terrific. And we want to record a big thank you to the whole neighbourhood and especially Catherine. Here we have the luxury of turning the horses out to graze – when they get to London it’ll be so different.”
Canada’s eventing team are on a tight budget. Graeme is a volunteer and has been chef d’équipe for six years – a job that takes in everything from logistics, via pumping up the tyres of a horse box, to dealing with the competition juries.
They’re all excited about the Greenwich Park cross country course which Graeme says is “very twisty and narrow” and has two hills the horses take twice. Graeme thinks the team’s strengths will be in the show-jumping and the cross country: “I’m very confident we can be competitive.” And he’s sure the team wouldn’t have got this far without the expertise of coach David O’Connor.
Might rain spoil the cross country course? “They’re saying that Greenwich Park has excellent drainage and if they get six or seven days of sunshine they’ll have to start irrigating the course.”
If it does get wet, they can always shorten the course or cut-out problem parts of the course. What they must not do is postpone part of the competition because of rain. “Most of us are booked out on flights home on August 1 and flights taking horses across the Atlantic don’t run everyday.”
