June 8, 2021: Escolar and D'Alessandro in Balve

I was super satisfied with D'Alessandro. He presented himself very well in his very first advanced dressage and overall. On the first day, the seven-year-old was a bit spooky once, but basically very nice in hand, and we got 72.8 %. In the second test, we finished fourth with a pleasing 74.439%. The "little one" showed that he has a lot of potential. That this young horse, for example, does not yet show the pirouettes in ultimate perfection, I find absolutely understandable.

My performance with Escolar made me less happy, because we had extremely expensive mistakes on the first and last day. In the Grand Pix these were the a tempi changes - really annoying, because as close as the ranking was we would have been clearly further ahead without this mistake. On top of that, our big guy just didn't have his best day and wasn't really fresh.

In the Spécial we showed a good round and got a score of 76.353%, which was rank 9. You can see how close it was by the fact that half a percentage point more would have meant rank 5....

In the freestyle Escolar went again very nice. Unfortunately we had another big mistake, because he started cantering in the trot half-pass to the left, which was of course expensive. Especially since half-passes appear at one point only in our freestyle, so the lesson was basically not shown. We ended up with just under 78 percent.

How things will proceed in regards to Tokyo will be seen in the next few days.