About an hour into today’s cross-country phase at the MARS Badminton Horse Trials, it all looked a bit as though the writing was on the wall: the course was too soft, the time too gettable, and the whole day of sport set to be a non-event for the 59 starters and the 100,000 or so spectators on site.
“I was getting,” admits course designer Eric Winter, “a little bit worried.”
Certainly, the course had walked easier than in 2024, when it last ran in this direction. The twisty routes through multi-part combinations of that year had been replaced by much more direct lines through a proliferation of two-parters, and as this pivotal phase loomed closer, the general vibe around the place was a much more relaxed one than it necessarily has been in previous years. Several people even – dare we say it – expressed some amount of underwhelm.
So when the first couple of riders headed out on course and returned home with easy, steady clears – 4.4 time penalties for pathfinders Harry Meade and Et Hop du Matz and 13.6 for US rider Cosby Green and Jos Ufo de Quidam – and the third rider, Tom Jackson, added just 3.2 time penalties on the five-star first-timer United 36, and then Holly Richardson and Ballyneety Silver Service, a relatively inexperienced combination in the field, made the time by some twelve seconds, it truly did look as though the writing was on the wall.
But the beauty of a clever Badminton track is in the details that don’t come to the fore until a large enough sample size is on the table for review, and while this year’s course may not have been heaving with technical questions, Eric had made some canny calls in the way he’d used terrain, creating a cumulative effect that shifted horses off their balance and rhythm frequently enough to open the door for costly mistakes – and a time that was tight enough to exert its own influence.
It’s easy to look at seven rounds inside the time as an indicator of a soft clock, but it’s all relative: the horses and riders who caught the time easily were up on the clock early on and could then sustain the rhythm and balance over the variable terrain; those who found themselves playing catch-up were more susceptible to losing their stride pattern and having to take risks or long routes along the way. That, plus the extraordinarily tightly-packed scores after the first phase – overnight leaders Ros Canter and Lordships Graffalo very much excepted – created a ripple effect throughout the day that enacted a seismic shift across the board.
“I was watching the Formula One Monaco Grand Prix last week, and I thought, ‘I could drive around that track like Kimi Antonelli [at a normal pace],” says Eric. “But I couldn’t do it at 215mph. When you add the speed into it, it amplifies [the intensity of the track].”
If you had to watch one ride to see in perfect clarity how rhythm wins out over haste and hustle, you don’t need to go much further than first-phase leaders Ros Canter and Lordships Graffalo, who added neither time nor jumping penalties to retain their lead and further solidify their bid to hold onto the Badminton title for the second year in a row.
Although Ros hasn’t had, perhaps, the most traditional lead-in to a major event – she had her second child, Seneh, at the tail end of January, and is still breast-feeding – such is the partnership she’s built with ‘Walter’, and so solid is the integrity of her foundations, that from the first fence to the final one, neither horse nor rider looked like they’d missed a day of training.
Though five-star cross-country riding can sometimes be inherently scrappy – it’s a test, after all, of the ability to adapt when things don’t go wholly to plan – there was never a moment in which Ros looked like she needed to over-adjust or make a sea change en route to a fence.
“I’m just very privileged to ride a horse like Walter, because he actually gives me time to set up, even for the normal fences,” says Ros. “There was never a moment where I’m really behind, so I’m able to give him the best version of myself, because he allows me to.”
But it’s easy to look at a round like theirs and see the harmony, the communication, and the framework of sensible training that’s helped the partnership get to that point. What it doesn’t necessarily communicate quite so readily is how much is going on inside a rider’s head, not just in the moments before they’re counted out of the start box, but in each of those achingly long eleven-and-a-half minutes on course.
“There’s a lot of pressure going around on a horse like that. Even coming to the final fence, I was like, ‘please don’t mess it, please don’t mess it up!’ But he’s just an absolute legend, isn’t he? He’s just the most amazing cross-country horse in the way he looks for his fences, but he lets me ride how I need to ride, and he gives himself every chance to clear the jumps.”
It never, she says, “feels [as easy as it looks] while you’re out there. I think there’s pressure not only around riding Walter, because of what he does and what he can do – but I actually haven’t been fast yet properly this year, other than a random intermediate where I still didn’t make the time. So there was pressure from that side today as well. Physically, I’m not up to where I was, but I was very confident that it wasn’t going to be a massive physical battle for me out there, because he makes my job so easy. But mentally, it was a lot of pressure.”
And, of course, “it’s been busy this week. It’s been really busy, having a baby and breastfeeding and all that, too. It was a question to myself: could I do it without having those moments to myself that I normally get? So today, I just woke up and I thought, ‘you know what? You just have to try and believe that even if you don’t put quite so much time into the things you normally do, that you can still do it, that you’ve still got it.’ And he just helped me do that the whole time.”
A rider’s preparation for a cross-country round of this magnitude is relentless in its attention to detail: every moment is accounted for, every stride considered, every practice fence calculated. We see that in action, in all its various forms, throughout the day – the grooms with a lead rope clipped on until the split second their charge needs to leave the box; Emma Thomas sprinting behind Icarus as he’s ponied, riderless, into the arena alongside a hunt horse and only springing aboard the very moment she’s essential to the equation; the ones who hang back as long as possible, keeping away from the intoxicating buzz of it all until they know any further hesitation will risk a penalty.
And so it’s a particularly tricky thing when a hold on course necessitates a red light at the start, and all the work that’s been put in to create a peak of both energy and agreeability begins to unravel. That’s what happened to Ros today, and those spare minutes spent waiting, not knowing how long the wait might go on for, probably felt like the longest of her day.
Once again, though, they became a testament to her horse’s unmatched brain.
“I just thought, ‘well, that’s a bit annoying’ to start with,” says Ros. “And then they said, ‘oh, it’s going to be a bit longer’. But Walter just kind of settled down and wandered around. I was just a little bit concerned that he’d settle down too much, because he’s so comfortable with crowds and things like that, and he was just quite happy. He’d have wandered around there all day — but actually, I picked up canter and gave him a little niggle with my leg, and he responded by pricking his ears. And I thought, ‘no, it’s absolutely fine. He’s not heating up, so we’ll just go with it.’”
With that faultless clear under their belts, Ros and Walter are one enormous step closer to a third Badminton title, which would be a fifth five-star title – they also won Burghley in 2024 and 2025. It’s not a bad CV for a horse who’s only fourteen this season, and it’s also a chance to make some eventing history: no horse has ever yet won Badminton three times. They head into tomorrow morning’s final horse inspection with a 6.6 penalty lead – but Ros remains pragmatic and won’t be moved to buy into the concept of sure things.
“There’s a long way to go before we get to that point,” she says. “The priority at the moment is Walter this evening. We’ll try and look back and enjoy the day today, and then it’s all about getting my head back into gear ready for tomorrow. Anything can happen; I’m a human, Walter’s a horse, and at the moment, I just get to be continually grateful to be the person who gets riding.”
Sitting those 6.6 time penalties behind her is Harry Meade, who tackled Eric’s track three times today, with three very different rounds. The first, aboard pathfinder Et Hop du Matz, was a sensible, reasonably steady fact-finding mission that accrued 4.4 time penalties, moving them from 40th place after dressage to 22nd after cross-country – “it’s his first Badminton, and he smiled the whole way around,” he says – and the third, near the end of the day’s sport, delivered one of the great shocks of the day when Harry picked up his first ever non-completion in 18 starts at this event.
That came with Cavalier Crystal, the three-time Burghley podium finisher, who’d been fourth here in 2025 and was, arguably, the strongest competitive shout of his three enviable entries. But at the tail end of an exceptional round, she jumped over the small ditch at the first element of fence 22AB, Mike Weaver’s Farm Yard, and stepped on her overreach boot. Had it happened anywhere else, there might well have been space for the catty mare to find her footing and pat the ground to get herself out of the complex, but the angled rail at 22B came up so shortly thereafter that even with her best effort to get cleanly to the other side, the frangible device was activated and Harry was thrown from the tack.
“She’s my most experienced horse, and she was sensational,” says Harry. “She basically pulled herself over that fence, and it’s really sad, because she’s an amazing horse who was desperately trying to do the job. That was my eighteenth ride around here, and I’ve had seventeen amazing rides – but ironically, that was probably the best of them all [until that point]. But that’s the sport – it keeps us all very grounded.”
It’s Harry’s second ride of the day, the 2024 Bramham CCI4*-L champion Annaghmore Valoner, who becomes his best hope for the title this week after finishing nine seconds inside the time to climb from first-phase 11th to overnight second.
“She was easy-peasy – and I love her,” says Harry, who inherited the ride from Sam Griffiths in 2022. “I’ve always had a real soft spot for her. I said to somebody the other day – maybe this sounds really weird – but she’s the only horse that I am happy to inhale her exhale. I wouldn’t even say that about my wife! That’s how much I love this horse.”
That soft spot has allowed Harry to see through the mare’s complicated interiority to the brave, bold event horse underneath.
“She’s always been a highly-strung, nervous, insecure, lacking confidence, slightly erratic horse. We’ve done plenty of lobbing around, working on relaxed breathing, but now she’s done two five-stars already and been fourth twice at Burghley. She jumped around this very, very easily – it was just a shame the time wasn’t 30 seconds tighter!”
One of the rounds of the day must be that of Sarah Bullimore and her ten-year-old homebred Corimiro, who made his five-star debut at Pau in October with a fifth-place finish, and looked today as though he’d had ten times that amount of experience at the level. He, like the more experienced horses ahead of him, looked unhurried, unruffled, and rhythmical all the way around, adding nothing to his scorecard to move from 19thplace to overnight third, just 1.8 time penalties behind Harry and Annaghmore Valoner.
“He’s phenomenal,” says Sarah, who bred the gelding from her former Europeans team ride Lilly Corinne, but nearly lost him as a newborn to dummy foal syndrome. “He’s the reason I’m still doing this and the reason I get out of bed in the morning. He’s just a pleasure – every phase is a pleasure. He’s a pleasure to take out hacking – everything he does, he just wants to go and do a good job, and wants to get on with it. He’s always saying, ‘come on, let’s, let’s do the next thing!’ He’s got a great brain.”
Among his attributes, she says, are “such scope and such range, and just power. I knew maybe find he’d find a couple of distances a bit short. He’s always looking to go between the flags.”
That inclination helped them at the double of hooded corners at 28AB, when he slipped behind and Sarah made a quick decision to do an uncharacteristic addition.
“We hadn’t planned to put the extra stride in at the corners at the end, but with the big slip in the middle, [it was the right move],” she says. “But bless him, he just picked up and went, ‘okay, another one, fine!’ That was literally our only sort of sticky moment, and it wasn’t his fault. It was just quite greasy on the turn, and I hadn’t thought about it.”
British Open Champions Katie Magee and Treworra also romped home clear inside the time, moving themselves up the order from 26th to 4th – “he’s got such range and scope, hasn’t he?” she beamed – while Ireland’s Lucy Latta and RCA Patron Saint, second here in 2024, added just 2 time penalties to make a leap from 18th to fifth, equal in score with sixth-placed Tim Price and Falco, but ahead on the leaderboard because they finished closer to the 11:30 optimum time.
“He’s incredible, and I’m so lucky to be sat on him,” says Lucy. “He really lives for days like this – he’s a pleasure. But I’m actually a little bit frustrated with myself that I was five seconds over, because he had the legs for it today. He felt incredible underneath me, I just didn’t quite meet a little bit of time.”
Though it’s a first Badminton for Tim Price’s Falco, it’s not a first five-star: he was second at Maryland in 2024 and won Pau in 2021 – and he was sixth at the Paris Olympics two years ago and a double bronze medallist at the 2022 World Championships, to boot. But he’s also been what Tim wryly refers to as a “fake event horse” – he’s always been a preternaturally good jumper, but has had to learn how to be a cross-country horse.
Today, the seventeen-year-old, who’s owned by London 2012 course designer Sue Benson, proved that that learning is well-cemented – and heads into Sunday in overnight sixth place.
“He’s been quite a good four-and-a-half-star horse around some Paus and some other things,” laughs Tim, “but he was fantastic out there. He jumped super, and he looked after me a couple of times, which is what you want them to do. And he’s pulled up really well, touch wood.”
Though he’s never a horse that gives the fences much air, Will Rawlin’s Ballycoog Breaker Boy demonstrated today that an unconventional approach doesn’t necessarily engender an ineffective one. The lanky duo put 5.6 time penalties on the board, and will head into tomorrow morning’s final horse inspection in the same seventh position they occupied after dressage.
“He pulls it out of the bag for me – he’s such a champ,” says Will, who’s well-supported here by members of his microsyndicate-style WRE Experience. “I’m so lucky to be riding a horse like him. He really just performs on the stage like this – he loves the big stage, and he loves the big tracks. He’s not the biggest jumper over the fences, and it doesn’t get pretty when it gets to the end, when he gets tired, but he will always pick up and get down and carry on galloping.”
Will’s handful of time penalties were accrued in the final few fences on the course, when that bit of leg-weariness began to kick in, and Will made the sensible call to steady up and help his horse in the air.
“It’s a shame, because we were really on our minute markers – which I was actually quite shocked and surprised about, because I didn’t really look at my time much, but I just kept on talking to him, plugging away,” says Will. “I said, ‘come on, keep going. We’ve got this’. And he kept on going. Over the last three fences he really had to make an effort to jump, but I always knew he was going to get over the fences. Probably from a spectator point of view, they all thought it was a bit hairy. But I’ve got so much trust in him and he’s got so much trust in me, and we’ve got such good partnership that we just support each other wherever we are on the course.”
Belgian five-star champions Lara de Liedekerke-Meier and Hooney d’Arville – another homebred in our line-up – slip a scant handful of places from third to eighth after adding 6.4 time penalties on course, but a delighted Lara was delighted with another classy Badminton clear after a little hiccup early on.
“We had a scary moment at fence two – I had a forward shot, and she drifted to the left, and she took out the decor on the side; a big barrel,” she explains.
But no harm was done, and the pair made light work of the rest of the course – though, like Will, Lara opted to preserve her horse over the final fences rather than chasing down the time.
“I thought I rode my horse and not the results, which was the biggest achievement for me to happen today,” says Lara. “And she did well; she felt happy, so I’m happy.”
The course, she says, “was turning more than I would have expected. I felt a bit like I was in the Monaco Grand Prix. Then you have some long stretches, but you don’t know how much you want to keep in the tank, but everything came really in front of me and I think we did a pretty good job to achieve what we wanted to today.”
Tom Jackson was double-handed today, and while his second ride, the former Nicola Wilson mount Hawk Eye, had an educational completion after a similar stumble to Harry Meade’s Cavalier Crystal, his five-star debutant United 36 started his day – and ours – with an impressive, quick clear.
“It’s just quite unbelievable,” says Tom. “He’s just a ten-year-old, and this time last year he hadn’t even done a four-star long. He just ate that up and made it feel like he’d been doing it for however many years before. I’m delighted with him.”
The pair will go into tomorrow’s finale in ninth place, up from 20th after adding just 3.2 time penalties.
Aaron Millar rounds out the top ten overnight with another excellent climb, this time from 36th with the smart Friendship VDL. The pair cruised around without any extracurricular activities and added just 0.4 time penalties, stopping the clock on 11:31.
“I owe it all to the horse,” says Aaron of the . “It’s been a little bit of a worry, because he’s only done two Open Intermediates early on in the season before he came here, but I’ve always believed in the horse. I know he’s a good horse.”
It’s a welcome return to the top level for the pair, who jumped clear around Burghley in 2024 and then had an abortive 2025, withdrawing after dressage here and then before the dressage at Burghley.
Those incredible climbs into the top ten were also made possible by a number of surprise mistakes by well-placed combinations: dressage runners-up Tiana Coudray and Cancaras Girl dropped to 45th after a shock refusal at the house atop the bank at 18AB, which caused several problems throughout the day, and then two frangible activations later on; Caroline Powell and her 2024 winner Greenacres Special Cavalier also stopped here and then retired, stopping at the neighbouring ice cream van for a treat before hacking back to the stables; Brazil’s Marcio Carvalho Jorge and his first-timer Royal Encounter slipped from 6th to 27th after a clear round with 15.2 time penalties when the horse tired late on course and Marcio executed some clever – but very long – long routes; Wills Oakden and Keep It Cooley dropped from 8th to 43rd after some green mistakes; Emily King and Valmy Biats swapped 11th for 44th when adding 40 jumping penalties for circling between fences at Sustainability Bay and between the parallels at 30ABC. Bubby Upton, too, moved out of the top ten, from 9th to 24th, when adding 12 time penalties in a measured round with Cola.
The US contingent had a mixed bag of a day: alongside those heartbreaking penalties for Tiana and Cancaras Girl, there was a retirement for Grace Taylor and Game Changer in the midst of a punchy round; a frightening fall for Cassie Sanger and Redfield Fyre at Sustainability Bay, after which both are thankfully totally okay; while early-goers Cosby Green and Jos Ufo de Quidam had a happier outing with 13.6 time penalties and a climb from 35th to 29th.
Next on the agenda? An evening of icing, hand-walking, and polo mints for the horses who tackled today’s track; a pint for the rest of us; and the countdown to tomorrow morning’s final horse inspection at 8.30 a.m. (3.30 a.m. EST), for which 45 horses and riders are currently eligible. We’ll join you then with all the news you need to know. Until then – Go Eventing!
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