Lyndal Oatley & Sandro Boy at Stockholm Post Year’s Highest Aussie CDI Grand Prix Score
11 years ago StraightArrow Comments Off on Lyndal Oatley & Sandro Boy at Stockholm Post Year’s Highest Aussie CDI Grand Prix Score
STOCKHOLM, Nov. 30, 2013–Lyndal Oatley rode her Olympic partner Sandro Boy at the World Cup event Saturday to the highest CDI Grand Prix score of any Australian this year to launch the campaign for a place on her nation’s team at next summer’s World Equestrian Games in Normandy, France.
Lyndal and the 12-year-old Oldenburg gelding (Sandro Hit x Argentinus) scored 71.128 per cent for eighth place in only their third show of the year and in a field that included Swedish star Tinne Vilhelmsson-Silfvén, Edward Gal and Hans Peter Minderhoud of the Netherlands vying for points to qualify for the World Cup Final next April.
The 33-year-old German-based rider told dressage-news.com she was “super happy to be off in the right direction” with the score that came in the first competition for which results count toward qualifying for Australian WEG team selection.
The pair was awarded scores of more tha 70 per cent by all five judges–Gustaf Svalling and Annette Fransén Iacobaéus of Sweden, Peter Holler of Germany, Isabelle Judet of France and Susanne Baarup Christensen of Denmark.
The performance by Lyndal and Sandro Boy, the top scoring pair on the Australian team at the 2012 London Olympics, came a year after the pair claimed the first ever double victory at an international CDI for Australia outside their homeland and earning the highest ever scores at a CDI for an Aussie combination in both the Grand Prix and the Freestyle at the Kaposvár World Cup event in Hungary.
Saturday’s Grand Prix result not only was the highest by an Australian combination this year, according to a review by dressage-news.com of the official records of all Australian CDIs and for Aussie riders in Europe and North America, but was the only result above 70 per cent.
Lyndal competed Potifar in her first WEG, at Kentucky in 2010.
Selection of horses and riders for Australia’s dressage team long list for the 2014 World Equestrian Games will require results from European competitions for all but one of eight combinations under a policy created by Equestrian Australia. Head-to-head competition at two European events will be staged next summer among the final eight combinations on the long list to determine the team for Normandy.
