Tracy Placed at Badminton “Grassroots”

Bedfordshire Police officer Tracey Day was delighted to get a second place at the world-famous Badminton equestrian event last week.

Tracey, who is a local policing Inspector based from force HQ in Kempston, was competing in the Badminton Grassroots event on her horse Carello. The Grassroots competition is held before the main professional Badminton event, at which top riders who competed for Olympic glory last summer were riding.

The Grassroots event goes over the same course and itself requires an incredibly high standard of horsemanship to qualify for.

Tracey came second in her class, the BE 90, which is a very challenging test of horse and rider over three disciplines and two days.

The first, a dressage test, a sequence of compulsory movements judged by an accredited judge on the balance, rhythm, suppleness and obedience of horse and the harmony between the horse and rider. Each movement is marked out of ten for good marks and then converted into penalty marks.

The second discipline, show jumping, involves one round of jumping over a course of jumps with a maximum time limit, exceeding the time limit or knocking jumps down or refusing jumps incurs penalty points.

And the final discipline, the cross country test, which involves a course of natural obstacles over the countryside to be jumped inside an optimum time limit, this will include ditches, water jumps, banks and drop fences. Again, penalties are awarded if you are over the time, fall off or have refusals at any fence.

Tracey said: “It’s unbelievable to have done so well, I’m absolutely over the moon to have achieved a second place. It places Carello and myself in the top 4 per cent of the whole country at this level.

“To have got this far is an achievement in itself and in a class of 65 I was in sixth place after the dressage; then I had to complete the show jumping round and a tough cross country course. It’s not just the height of the obstacles, it’s the technical difficulty of it. I finished on my dressage score of 29.8 penalties, only 1.3 penalties behind the winner.

She continued: “Eventing like all other major sports is hard work and you have to be dedicated to compete but it is well worth the time and effort. It was nice to be able to do well on Thursday and then relax and watch the main event over the weekend.”