PrintROLEX FEI WORLD CUP™ JUMPING 2009/2010
Bordeaux (Fra), 6 February 2010
Germany's Marcus Ehning has won a few Rolex watches in his time, but he has rarely had to work harder for one of the exquisite time-pieces than he did tonight when winning the tenth qualifying leg of the 2009/2010 Rolex FEI World Cup™ Jumping series at Bordeaux in France. At the end of the toughest competition of the series to date, where the course proved too much for the vast majority, Ehning went into a two-way jump-off against fellow-countryman Philipp Weishaupt. And despite all his enormous experience, the man who was first to wear the new green and gold armband as leading rider in the Rolex World Rankings when it was first introduced last December, had to ride for his life to win by the miniscule margin of one-hundredth of a second with Leconte.
CHALLENGING ENOUGH
Course designer Frank Rothenberger thought he had built a challenging enough track at Leipzig two weeks ago, but it didn't turn out that way when 16 horse-and-rider combinations went through to the jump-off won by Ireland's Jessica Kuerten. So this time around he was determined there should be no more than the ideal seven or eight in the second-round decider. However once again it didn't work out the way he expected.
This was the toughest of tracks, and although the eventual winner described it as "very fair" he was the only one of the eight riders from the top-eleven on the latest Rolex Rankings list to find his way home without incident. Switzerland's Pius Schwizer came into the ring wearing the coveted No. 1 armband after taking over at the top of the new rankings which were published two days ago, but it was a measure of the toughness of this course that Ulysse, that horse that took him to team gold at last summer's European Championships in Windsor, Great Britain returned an eight-fault result.
TRICKIEST
The first of their two fences down was the trickiest on the 13-fence track, a massive triple bar which proved the undoing of many as the horses struggled to find the power to reach the back bar after a right-hand turn off the top of the arena. The treble, at fence four and therefore a big test early on, also proved a major challenge and many horses arrived down the final line looking a little bewildered and leaving a lot of timber on the ground behind them.
