Mikey Pender’s successful visit to Vilamoura in Portugal continued on Friday when he won two classes for the Hughes Horse Stud team including the afternoon’s featured 1.45m two-phase competition on the Irish Sport Horse mare HHS Fortune.
There were 66 starters in the class, 30 of whom progressed to the second phase with 13 of these going double clear. Kildare rider Pender was easily the fastest when stopping the clock on 33.40 with Marion Hughes’s Catoki eight-year-old which was home-bred by the owner out of the Ard VDL Douglas mare HHS Daisy. Italy’s Guido Franchi finished second on another mare, Kiena van Berimar (34.51) with French rider Mathieu Billot slotting into third on the stallion Lagavulin 2 (34.76).
Earlier in the day, Pender recorded a narrow victory in the 51-runner 1.40m speed class on the Bravo Hughes team’s ISH gelding HHS Toronto, a Cavalier Royale eight-year-old bred by Hughes’s husband Miguel Bravo.
At Montpelier in France, Co Louth-born Mark McAuley, on board the 10-year-old Selle Francais gelding Vivaldi du Theil, was narrowly beaten into second (33.40) in the evening’s 36-strong 1.50m jump-off class by the host nation’s Olivier Robert on Vangog du Mas Garnier (33.38).
In Qatar, Ireland’s para-dressage team of Kate Kerr-Horan, Rosemary Gaffney, Tamsin Addison and Michael Murphy finished their first qualifying event this year for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in third place on a total of 382.21 pre cent behind Belgium (418.738) and The Netherlands (407.930).
A delighted Kerr-Horan, who recorded Ireland’s best result when second in the Grade III class on Thursday, feels the experience of competing in the Al Shaqab arena in Doha will be very beneficial in the months ahead.
“The whole experience has been amazing and this venue is incredible,” said the Co Wicklow rider who partnered Bloomfield Farm’s Serafina T. “The first two days have gone very well for me, my mare is still young and inexperienced so I am thrilled with how she has coped with everything. I was pleased with my scores but I know there is more to come once we cement our partnership and she gets more experience in big, electric atmospheres like this.”
Irish chef d’equipe Dara Kearney commented: “Overall I am pleased with how our riders handled conditions here. It is the first time any of them were here and it is very different to anything they have experienced in the past, very atmospheric. I am particularly pleased with Kate in only her second international on Serafino. It has been a fantastic learning curve for all our riders.”
All four Irish riders are competing in Saturday’s individual freestyle competitions.
At the four-star show in Dortmund, Germany, Ireland’s national dressage champion Heike Holstein recorded her first qualifying score for the European Championships at Rotterdam in August when achieving a mark of 68.217% for 14th place on the home-bred 10-year-old mare Sambuca, the youngest horse in the class. This was just a third international Big Tour outing for the combination. German superstar Isabell Werth finished first and second on Emilio 107 (76.804) and Don Johnson (74.587).
