Steffen Peters & Legolas Win Burbank World Cup Grand Prix in 1st CDI Since 2013 Aachen
11 years ago StraightArrow Comments Off on Steffen Peters & Legolas Win Burbank World Cup Grand Prix in 1st CDI Since 2013 Aachen
BURBANK, California, Feb. 21, 2014–In the first competition since last summer, Steffen Peters rode Legolas to victory in the debut of California Dreaming Productions’ Mid-Winter Dressage World Cup Grand Prix Friday in a spiffed up Los Angeles Equestrian Center with a host of improvements that won plaudits from riders.
America’s top combination scored 76.540 per cent in the first CDI performance since the World Equestrian Festivsl in Aachen, Germany last June. The result was just shy of their personal best of 76.574 the pair scored in Del Mar, California last April.
Günter Seidel of Cardiff, California and Coral Reef Wylea placed second on 71.960 per cent and Brian Hafner of Sonoma, California on Lombardo LHF was third on 66.360 per cent.
Steffen said the Grand Prix “was the best so far ” for the 12-year-old Westfalen gelding (Laomedon x Florestan II).
The flying changes were clean and the judges, he told dressage-news.com, were generous in their marks for the piaffe and passage that is Legolas’s strength and has more weight in the scores with the Grand Prix test introduced this year.
Legolas, owned by Akiko Yamazaki, was exctly where he wanted the horse to be ahead of the selection trials in June for the United States team for the World Equestrian Games in Normandy, France at the end of August.
“If we can have exactly the same performance level he is at right now with expression, strength we will be happy to carry the entire package to the WEG.”
“We are all now working extremely hard to keep the horse at this level and getting better.”
Steffen, Kathleen Raine and Christine Traurig have arranged training camps of two weeks every two months at Steffen’s farm in San Diego with their long time coach, Johan Hinnemann of Germany.
The show that was a combined production of veteran show organizer Glenda McElroy and David and Alisa Wilson, prominent in the dressage community in Southern California, was “amazing.”
“The footing was fantastc,” he said. “The whole show had more of an international atmosphere.”
The World Cup Freestyle is scheduled for Saturday.
This event is the first of three CDIs staged by California Dreaming Productions.
Two CDIs will be held at San Juan Capistrano on the Southern California coast in late March.
Results:
