PARK Life – The Festival of British Eventing

The Festival of British Eventing at Gatcombe Park celebrates 33 years in the calendar this year.
Julie Harding discovers why riders love its championship format, undulating cross country courses and links with the royal family

The festival’s chairman has designs on success …

Captain Mark Phillips has been busy this summer. A fair proportion of his time has been taken up designing a brand new cross country course for the TopSpec Challenge for ‘The Corinthian

Cup’ a National Restricted Novice Championship. This is a new class being hosted at the popular Festival of British Eventing, presented by the British Equestrian Trade Association (BETA) from the 7-9 August, 2015.

“I’m pretty excited about the whole concept of The Corinthian Cup,” says Captain Phillips, chairman
and course designer at Gatcombe Park’s festival, speaking on his mobile phone as he drives around his home county of Gloucestershire. “I’ve built the Restricted course, which starts and finishes in the same place as the other tracks, so the basic direction is the same as well. Designing four-star courses takes a lot longer than other tracks,” adds the Land Rover Burghley CCI**** designer, “but when you are thinking up a course for a lower level, one of the things that you mustn’t forget is that novice horses and riders are exactly the same as they were 40 years ago, so you have to be careful not to ask too much.”

Captain Phillips believes that contestants in the TopSpec Challenge for the Corinthian Cup are going to enjoy competing alongside the likes of William Fox-Pitt, Pippa Funnell and Andrew Nicholson at this undulating venue.

The idea for the new class at the festival, which this year has dropped its advanced sections so that all four classes are championships, came from wanting to give competitors from the Grassroots Championships at Badminton another goal.

“The festival’s Dodson & Horrell Novice Championship is run at intermediate height (1.15m) and so it was too big a step for those who had jumped around the BE100 (1m) at Badminton Grassroots,” explains Captain Phillips. “So British Eventing came up with this new championship and suggested the restricted novice category that is open to riders who hadn’t ridden at advanced, or intermediate level in recent years.”

The lucky winner will be awarded the Corinthian Cup, in appreciation of Richard Meade OBE, who was Britain’s most successful equestrian Olympian, back in the days when the games were only open to amateurs and is kindly donated by dressage doyenne Desi Dillingham MBE in memory of her aunt, Barbara Kemp. Barbara designed and built the 1976 Summer Olympic three-day event cross country course in Bromont, Quebec and was the first woman in the history of the Olympics to design a course for the games.

Ringing The Changes

New this year at the festival in the other classes – the British Eventing Open Championship, The Smith &

Williamson British Intermediate Championship and The Dodson & Horrell British Novice Championship — is extra distance for the cross country track in the park bowl. This will take competitors closer to the home of HRH The Princess Royal. This was the home shared by Captain Mark Phillips and his then royal wife in the early 1980s, and it was here that the couple devised the idea of hosting a horse trials in their own ‘back yard’. They launched it in 1983, in an era when riders tended to turn up in Land Rovers and trailers, rather than the palatial lorries they own now, spectator numbers barely hit five figures over the weekend compared to the 40,000- 50,000 today. There were no championship classes then and certainly not the 150 horses that now run across country on both the Saturday and Sunday of the festival.

“We started off by just putting on a ‘plain-Jane’ horse trials,” says Captain Phillips. “The Princess and I wanted to put something back into the sport. Frank Weldon [former Badminton director and course- designer] came over and told me what he thought I could do with the track. I designed that first course. The Princess and I felt that if we put on a good event with good footing then the good horses and riders would come.”

Australia’s David Green, then husband to Lucinda (née Prior-Palmer), won the Croft Original Championship in Gatcombe’s inaugural year.
In subsequent years the roll of honour reads like a Who’s Who of eventing — Lucinda Green and Village Gossip, winners in 1984, Mark Todd and the legendary Charisma (1985), Bruce Davidson and JJ Babu, winners of the first British Open Championship (1986), Ginny Leng and Night Cap II, victors in 1987, and so on.

In the early years Captain Phillips was still pursuing his own eventing career, but he preferred not to compete on home ground if possible. “I rode around Gatcombe Park as few times as I had to,” he reveals.
“I would ride my horses up and down those hills every day of the week to get them fit, but if you are running an event it is difficult to focus on riding at it as well.”

Today Captain Phillips enjoys watching his daughter Zara compete on home ground.

“Zara usually rides here, but it is too early for entries so I’m not sure if she is bringing a horse this year.”

A couple of years after the inaugural event, Gatcombe Park took over the advanced championship that had run at the defunct Locko Park. By 1986 the now famous British Open was up and running.

“It was my idea to have a championship rather like the open golf contests,” says Captain Phillips. “It was meant to encourage international participation, but while it worked up to a point, even now you don’t get a lot of riders crossing the Channel to come. All the UK-based foreign riders entered, though, and of course they still do.”

Things generally went to plan, although the weather, even in August, could sometimes throw up some unexpected challenges.

“We had a Croft Original fence one year and it rained so heavily that a river ran in front of it.”

When I waded through, the water went over the top of my wellingtons. We didn’t cancel. There wasn’t much health and safety in those days. It was a different sport,” says Captain Phillips. Over the years Captain Phillips has built up a great team to help him run the festival many of whom have been with for several years – Tim Henson has worked as event director for the last 18 years – and they are one of the reasons the festival runs successfully year after year.

“If the team ever became a headache I think I would give up,” he laughs. “The fact that I enjoy running the festival is due to having a fantastic group of people at the helm. It’s because the event is run by such good people that I often feel like I don’t have a job to do.”

The festival also boasts a loyal team of sponsors, including British Equestrian Trade Association, which celebrates its 10th year as presenting sponsor. Other backers include the Championships sponsors Smith & Williamson, Dodson & Horrell, TopSpec and British Eventing, plus Land Rover – a supporter since the first event – Hunter, Hamptons International and Equex China as well as many other loyal supporting sponsors.

If there was space, Captain Phillips would put in more tradestands, arenas and attractions at the festival, but the topography around Minchinhampton is far from flat, constraining any future thoughts of expansion.

“We would like to have more of everything and make things better and better,” says Captain Phillips. “However, we’re so restricted in the amount of flat ground that we have. In terms of the cross country, when you go somewhere like Luhmuhlen or Badminton you have to try and maximise every undulation in the terrain. At Gatcombe Park it’s the opposite. You have to try and minimise the effect.”

As for the secret of the festivals’ success, Captain Phillips believes that hoards of spectators turn up year after year because, apart from there being some great eventing action, he and his team put on plenty of other forms of entertainment. “Not everyone wants to watch horses from 9am to 5pm,” says Mark. “Variety is good in terms of entertaining the crowd” for example for the first time this year, the Kangaroo Kid (aka Matt Coulter) will perform daredevil stunts on four wheels rather than four legs. Matt has entertained millions of fans around the globe with his record-breaking jumping stunts that have even included jumping a flying plane. There will be lots to see and enter with our canine friends too – fly ball, dog agility and a fun dog show will all take place over the weekend. “BETA sponsors The Pony Club Team Showjumping Competition which we have had for many year now, while this year we’ll also be adding Pony Club mounted games. It’s different and the kids have fun doing it. That is what it should be about” added Captain Phillips.

Toddy’s Early Memories

Mark Todd was the rider everyone needed to beat in the early days of Gatcombe Park Horse Trials. He was victorious in 1985 with his great back-to-back Olympic gold medal winning horse Charisma when it was still the Croft Original Championship. He won again three years later on the same mount.

“In 1988 we were competing at New Zealand’s final trial before the Olympics,” says Mark. “At a couple of events beforehand Charisma had been pretty wild. He was 16 by then and people said he was past his best, but I knew that he was fit and over the top, so winning the British Open meant that we headed to Seoul full of confidence.”

Mark remembers his first win at Gatcombe Park on Charisma, when the event was only two years old, occurring in the rain.

“Charisma didn’t like wet going, but he still managed to win. He was a fast horse, but he was also good at the other disciplines [of dressage and showjumping],” says Mark who recalls the early cross country courses at Gatcombe Park as being even hillier than they are today. “You would have to climb up and then run downhill again by the house. I remember a bank fence on the downhill run, which you had to jump off and then negotiate a bounce brush at the bottom of the slope. That wasn’t easy. Fence three was also even bigger and scarier than it is today. The ground fell away more steeply than now and I remember one horse falling over the rails at the bottom and disappearing into the undergrowth. It was definitely tough in those days, and impossible to get the optimum time. Of course making the time is still difficult even now, but a handful of people have managed it,” says Mark, whose name is on the British Open roll of honour again in 1989 with Bahlua and in 1999 with Word For Word.

“The festival’s show jumping, too, tends to cause problems. The ground for this phase isn’t flat, plus there are lots of distractions around the main arena. They used to have dressage in the main arena, too, and that proved electric for many horses.”

Mark will be competing at the festival again this year, he believes with Oloa. “You need a horse that doesn’t mind galloping fast up and down hills. If you’re going to ride there you have to go fast or you’re not going to win,” he says. “I rode there last year and I’m sure I’ll keep going in future years. It’s an exciting event, not least because they run the British Open cross country in reverse order so you never know until the final moments who’s going to win. The festival is definitely one of the iconic events of the sport.”

Visit www.gatcombe-horse.co.uk

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