British Open Show Jumping, Sheffield, April 2006

This year EVS were invited to do four days of demos at the British Open Show jumping Championships, held at the Hallam FM Arena in Sheffield. Although this seemed like a lot to take on the week before Saumur, i.e. the final selection trial for team for WEG, we decided to accept because we thought it would be a great opportunity to perfect our freestyle.

We all arrived on the Wednesday afternoon, before the competition had started, and had a look around the arena – it was huge! We had a quick dress rehearsal, were fed at the canteen and went back to our hotel.

The next morning we were up early as we had a training slot at about half 7, which we used to improve our compulsories. After breakfast (full English fry-up, very healthy for vaulters!) we had a team-shopping trip into Sheffield, where we bought loads of England wristbands to exchange with our foreign friends. When we returned we went for a run, did some conditioning and trained on the barrel. We also discovered we had our own personal dressing room, where we could get changed, warm-up and keep our stuff. We almost felt like celebrities!

Our demo was about mid-afternoon and very exciting, because instead of just running in the normal way, we had decided to make a very different entrance. Becky, Ricky and Lucy entered doing back flips and somersaults down the middle of the arena, and the rest of us came in though the side gates standing on each other’s shoulders! We had the music turned up very loud, spotlights on all of us, and thousands of people watching – the atmosphere was great! The vaulting part was pretty good too, although there were a couple of mistakes, especially when a certain vaulter got distracted watching herself on the big screen! Tiny coped very well with the large crowds, even when they started clapping in the middle of team freestyle.

The following days were spent in a similar way, although throughout the week our confidence grew and our performances improved, so much so that Steph even managed her new needle on stand move at the end of the freestyle. It was thrilling to perform in front of so many people, in fact on Saturday evening (we did two demos that day) we vaulted for an audience of over 6000 people! This was a great experience because it meant by the time we got to Saumur we were well practiced in front of lots of people.

In between training and demos we watched some of the other performances, and were particularly impressed by Lorezo, whom we then of course had to go make friends with. We also made friends with the army men wearing t-shirts with commando written on the front, starting the conversation with a classic “Are you really going commando?” Soon we’d even coaxed them into giving us all a nice sweaty commando t-shirt each!

After each demo we’d walk round the stands so we could talk to anyone interested. We all found it quite funny when people started asking us for autographs, but after signing hundreds of programs we soon decided it wasn’t really that much fun being famous. We also all liked our new Joules kit, which was a polo shirt, a jacket and a cap. It all looked very smart.

Overall, we all had a great time, we significantly improved the performance of our freestyle and we all became closer as a team. Hopefully we’ll be invited back next year, although this time it’ll be a bit closer to home at the NEC in Birmingham.

Sarah Reid

         British Open Showjumping Championships Website