Millbrook Horse Trials and Neville's Comeback

Jessica Mongeau was kind enough to send this photo of Neville to Eventing Nation. Check out more of her photos here, and a shout out to Jessica's blog as well.

Millbrook Horse Trials turned on superb weather for a very successful horse trials this year. It was good to ride a fantastic group of horses throughout the levels - they all competed beyond my expectations. I was thrilled with my group of up and coming horses moving up a level for the first time: New Cadet, Crackerjack, Partyboy, and Cold Harbor. It was also a great feeling riding a few of the old faithfuls around the testing advanced track.

• Remington, owned by Densey Juvonen, 2nd Advanced A
• Neville Bardos, owned by the Neville Bardos Syndicate, 4th, Advanced A
• Ying Yang Yo, owned by Faye and Eliza Woolfe, 6th, Advanced B
• Cold Harbor, Dana and Manny Diemer, 11th Advanced B
• Crackerjack, owned by Colin Davidson, 13th Open Intermediate A
• Partyboy, owned by Fernanda Kellogg and Nick Myers, 10th Open Preliminary A
• Steady Eddie, Gretchen & George Wintersteen, Denise Lahey & Pierre Colin, 6th OP B
• Quinn Himself, owned by Bonnie Stedt, 3rd ON A
• New Cadet, owned by Anne Hennessey, 9th, ON B

Neville felt like his lungs held up to the Millbrook terrain in his first serious test since the Memorial Day barn fire. It looks like we're still on track for Burghley in a few weeks as he looks happy and feels healthy and keeps checking all the boxes as he makes a remarkable recovery from a close call two months ago. At the moment he feels fantastic and is showing true fighting spirit and thus far is giving me no indication that we should not continue towards our goal of the 2011 Burghley CCI4*. Obviously part of being a good horseman is listening to your animal, and if there is any sign that he is not 100% or shows any discomfort I'll quickly put the brakes on that plan but at the moment he's riding right.

Next week we're very much looking forward to getting the young horses out at Waredaca Horse Trials in Maryland. It's one of those summers where too much eventing is not nearly enough.

-Boyd