This weekend our team competes in the familiar venue in Lummen, Belgium. This is the third and final weekend of the Spring Tour, including the 5-star CSIO Nations Cup and a parallel international 2-star event. This is the season opening nations Cup event for the Finnish team and also the first featuring the new chef d’equipe Lars Parmler.

Sunday: Mikael and Evli Maike placed 8th in the Grand Prix!

The horses arrived to Lummen on Wednesday morning and they were lightly ridden in the afternoon. Mikael’s CSIO-level horses are Evli Maike, Vanity and the BWP gelding Voice (after Heartbreaker), which is also showed and ridden by Mikael. For the 2-star classes Mikael ride Evli Nandele and Calbay. Noora’s CSIO horses are Evli Cagliostro and Quinault, and in 2-star classes Evli Popcorn and Carnell. Maiju’s horses for the CSIO-level are Casandra Z and St. Germain, in 2-star classes Winnie PV, Ultimate and Conquest. That equals to a healthy 14v horses!

On Thursday on CSIO5* 1m40 level jumps Evli Cagliostro, Vanity and St. Germain, on CSIO5* 1m50 level Evli Maike and Casandra Z. In the CSI2* classes we have the following entrie: 1m30 Calbay, Ultimate and Winnie PV, 1m20 Carnell, 1m25 Evli Popcorn. Quinault, Voice and Evli Nandele starts their show on Friday.

Report - Nations Cup

The Finnish team had mixed feelings ahead of the Lummen Nations Cup. Mikael had to acknowledge with frustrations that his horse Evli Maike wasn’t on par with the expectations. The Finnish team had thereby to Nation Cup novice horses, Maiju’s Casandra and Nina’s Wivina. Experience was present in Sebastian’s Calandro and especially in Noora’s Evli Cagliostro.

- Maike is coming back from a long pause and did the first appearances in Arezzo and now two weeks back in Lummen seemed already really promising. It meant that the pieces of the puzzle seemed to fall in place, as Isaac du Jonquet need to rest after the Vegas finals and Evli Nandele seems still nervous after the unfortunate stumble in 's-Hertogenbosch. However the time to prepare this older horse remained too short, since we had to do the unfortunate conclusion with our chef d’equipe Lars Parmler that Maike didn’t appeared at her best on Thursday’s, Mikael tried to summarize the backgrounds in his decision to withdraw from the Nations Cup.

The Finnish team did its best, but the many uncertainties would unfortunately not avoid influencing the final result. From the novices Maiju’s Casandra did a splendid job, but Nina’s Wivina seemed ever so insecure on this level. Noora’s Evli Cagliostro is definitely never short of experience, but the gorgeous stallion’s age is a factor often overlooked by his appearance.

- Cagli jumped quite ok, but in the light of our results, it’s a fair statement that we both underperformed with Nina as jumping professionals. Cagli was the oldest horse with clear margin in the Nations Cup. For us it means that I cannot prepare him the way I would like to do ahead of such important classes. We simply cannot jump as many shows and classes it’s normally done. On Friday we did well until the long water, where I failed to get him in good balance for the jump. This bad jump then led to Cagli becoming stronger towards the end and us taking another two rails from the course, Noora told about her efforts with Cagli.

The show continued on Saturday and there had been many good rounds and placings to be upbeat about. Yet there was one face and a smile a bit brighter than the rest, as Maiju was very at ease with her Nations Cup début.

Sunday

Mikael took on Sunday a sweet small revenge from the Nations Cup disappointment and placed 8th with Evli Maike in the 1m60 Lummen Grand Prix. Mikael had a very unlucky 5 hundreds of a seconds overtime in the first round and decided on going a conservatively also in the second round. Nevertheless it was an excellent result in a big Grand Prix and proved Mikael has now brought back the mare clearly closer to the level she has been on before the long break. In the 2-star Grand Prix Mikael rode a good round with Evli Nandele, who steadily seem to regain the self-confidence lost in the unfortunate mishap in ‘s-Hertogenbosch.

Mikael and Noora are now heading for Valencia and the second Global Champions Tour leg.

Results and starts:

1. Lummen LIVE

Website:

1. Lummen Lente Tour