Anna Buffini/FRH Davinia la Douce & Sarah Tubman/First Apple In Final Showdown for American Riders for Omaha World Cup
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WELLINGTON, Florida, Mar. 1, 2023–Anna Buffini on FRH Davinia la Douce and Sarah Tubman on First Apple are in the final showdown for one of the American riders to go to the World Cup in Omaha in a month.
The decision for the third rider from North America to join Steffen Peters on Suppenkasper and Alice Tarjan on the American-bred Serenade MF
will be decided by their musical performances under lights at the Global Dressage Festival Friday night following the warm up Grand Prix Thursday.
Anna has flown from Southern California with her 16-year-old Hanoverian mare to challenge Sarah, based in Wellington, on her 13-year-old KWPN stallion that comes down to this Grand Prix Freestyle.
Sarah has 54 points with three of her four qualifying classes counting. Anna has 51 points from three qualifiers in California.
For Anna to catch up, the 28-year-old needs to be the top North American that would give her 54 points, equal to the total for Sarah, 34.
That would mean the highest Freestyle score would break the tie. The highest at this stage is Anna’s 80.180% posted at Thermal, California two months ago. The highest for Sarah is 78.250% at Wellington almost two months ago.
Anna and Davinia competed at the World Cup Final in Leipzig, Germany a year ago.
France’s Morgan Barbançon in Wellington for the first time will also be riding in the World Cup event for which she appears to have qualified for Omaha in the Western European League. She told dressage-news.com if it turns out that way she will take Sir Donnerhall II OLD, the Oldenburg stallion on which she competed at three World Cup Finals as well as the Tokyo Olympics, the 2022 world championships and the 2019 and 2021 European Championships.
Also riding will be Dong Seong Kim of Korea on Galleria’s Bohemian, that will be the first CDI on the horse he bought from Denmark’s Cathrine Laudrup-Dufour. Cathrine and Bohemian competed at the Tokyo Olympics and the 2021 Europeans.
Kim competed in a national Grand Prix last week for no score but grew in confidence during the ride and performed what would have been high scores in piaffe-passage.
