Asda Athletes

At the Scottish Championships two weeks ago i managed to maintain my 14-18 title in my individual, 1st in our Pas de Deux and 1st in winning team. I also achieved equal success at the British Championships where i won all three class i was competing in: Individual, Pas de Deux and i was in the winning team.

I would like to say a huge thank you to everyone that help me make this year a success and i am so pleased to have rounded off the year being Scottish and British Champions!

After two solid rounds in our Pas de Deux, myself, Rebecca with John and Tyke received gold and are the first people to ever win the junior Pas de Deux. This is the first time this class has been held at the junior Championships and we were able to return home with a gold for Britain! We finished ahead of Germany’s Gera Grun and Justin Van Gerven and Austria’s Vannessa Hutter and Katherina Wegscheider with a score of 8.003. Just as unexpected as our gold in Pas de Deux, my bronze was too. I was extremely pleased with my scores because i had beaten my personal best compulsory score ending my second round on 7.451. I also managed to achieve the highest freestyle score of the competition on the Sunday achieving another personal best on 8.309. My final score was 7.692 and in silver and gold place respectively Thomas Brüsewitz from Germany and Ramin Rahimi from Austria. There were also a number of other nations represented including Australia, Mauritius, South Africa and Russia.

By the end of the competition i was on such a high and it felt amazing. It was such a weird feeling and it all felt surreal. And as always Tyke is the unsung star who performed beautifully throughout the entire competition!

Final training was last night which went really well, and we washed Tyke earlier today. Just need to finish off my packing before we leave on Tuesday to go to the Europeans in Slovakia, can’t wait!

I couldn’t have asked for a better result – 1st place and I am the first male individual to win an international competition! All four rounds went really well, beating all of my personal scores. I maintained first position after all of the rounds beating Miro Rengel from Germany and Sammy El Khattabi from France.

On the Friday morning Tylers Kernel (Tyke) had to be vet checked along with all the other horses to ensure no harm had come to him on his journey over. He looked fantastic and passed easily! I started off the competition with my compulsory round on the Friday afternoon which I was really happy with. When I was in the warm up arena I made sure I had warmed up well to ensure I was as ready for the competition.

The next day, I produced a good freestyle round which went well, however there were some faults that would need to be corrected if I were to get through to second round, which I did! This meant I had to do another round of compulsories and freestyle. So later on, I went back into the main arena to do a second sent of compulsories which I was pleased with.

On the Sunday morning I had my final round of freestyle. I knew I had to a tighter freestyle than the first day so I was beginning to get slightly more nervous but both me and Tyke performed fantastically and retained our first position.