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Horse Riding

Woodbridge School’s Inter-Schools Eventer Challenge at Towerlands
11th October 2009

This year Woodbridge School held their annual Inter-Schools Eventer Challenge at Towerlands in deepest darkest Essex! This is a long way for us Norfolk folk – we had to go all to the way to the fantastic facilities at Towerlands, near Braintree to take on schools from all over East Anglia. Georgina Roberts on Jordan, Isla Craggs on Blaze & Martha Craggs on Bubbles took up the challenge.

This is the first year for some time that Town Close has competed at this event and we entered the 80cm class. This class is open to riders of any age in full time education. Each team has four members with the best 3 scores counting towards the final result. We only had 3 members in our team so every round counted and we could not drop any score.

The Eventer Challenge involves jumping 7 coloured show jumping fences immediately followed by 8 wooden cross-country fences. In our class, all the jumps were 80cm. The cross country section of the round is timed. The event is also judged on JAS rules, Jumping And Style, so marks are awarded for correct, effective riding and the ability to show the difference between the show jumping and cross-country phase through their style of riding.

Georgina and Isla jumped beautiful clear rounds with fantastic JAS points, Isla got 8 and Georgina 10 (the lower the better), most people were in the teens and some in the twenties so it was an excellent score for both girls. Martha was incredibly unlucky. Her pony Bubbles took exception to a lot of tinsel at Jump 5 and stopped dead in horror – it is a little early for Christmas decorations! But she got a fantastic JAS score of 11 in spite of that.

Town Close came 8th overall with Isla narrowly missing out on an individual place. In fact, they were the youngest team by far, and Martha was the youngest competitor – and on the smallest pony!, so it was a really good result.

Over 20 teams from schools all over East Anglia competed including South Lee, the eventual winners, OBH, Debenham High, New Hall, The Perse School, Culford, Woodbridge School, Hartismere High, Chelmsford County High, The Plume School, Gosfield School, St Francis College, St Mary’s Girls, Thomas Mills and Beyton Middle. It was a fantastic day and well worth the journey.

We hope this will encourage more children to join a Town Close team next year. There are classes for everyone from 70cm-1.05cm. It was great fun, beautifully organized AND we came home with a ribbon!

St Felix Triathlon – 27th September 2009

Another perfect day for the annual St Felix Triathlon – a combined competition of swimming, riding and running. Glorious sunshine helped our teams on their way and we were ably supported by Mr & Mrs Parker & Zac who came to cheer us on.

Town Close put up a junior team and a senior team this year.. The Junior Team (U9) was made up of Emily Miles, Phoebe York, Mila Sayer , fergus Gregory and Emily Bloom. They had to swim for 2 mins, jump an 18” cross country course and run 1000m. It was the first attempt at Triathlon for all of them and they competed brilliantly and thoroughly enjoyed their day representing Town Close.

The Senior Team (U11) was Georgina Roberts, Isla Craggs, Evie Rossi , Esther Anderson and Martha Craggs. They also had to swim for 2mins, and run 1000m but their cross-country jumps were 2’3”. They came 6th as a team and Isla was 6th individually. It was a very strong class, won by St Felix, and Town Close did very well to get placed.

However, we were lucky to have Georgina at all as one of the tyres on their horsebox caught fire on the way to St Felix!! Luckily they managed to stop and put the fire out in time. Apparently the ponies were very calm about the whole thing and they arrived at St Felix with moments to spare. Georgina did brilliantly to put it out of her mind and compete fearlessly for the team. It was a very dramatic start to the day, and we were very glad they arrived in one piece!

All’s well that ends well and it was a very happy day for us all. Well done to both teams and to Isla and Fergus for their individual rosettes.