Speed has a Quality of Its own

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Fast is fast whether it's fast and smooth or just fast and not so pretty. Some of the smoothest drives in the hazards today weren't near the top of the leader board at day's end. At the risk of repeating myself; fastest wins whether pretty or not. This does not mean the fastest drivers jerked their ponies around, they didn't. The best of the bunch told their ponies well in advance what to do, where to go and at what speed. It's just that the leaders often looked more like Ricochet Rabbit than like a dressage pony.

We don't have the four-in-hand scores as we post this so we'll add them later. We can tell you that Laurie Astegiano was driving a fabulous marathon with some very fast times – we'll see how they hold up at the end of the day. For our Singles, Susy Stafford was 11^th (82.11 points) while individual competitor Sherri Dolan was 25^th. We need to see if Sherri had penalty points on course as she had very competitive times in the hazards we watched. Several competitors had course time penalties as they finished much too early. For example, Susan Denny of Great Britain had over 26 penalty points, a quarter of her Marathon score, in penalty points for being too early to end of E. Unfortunately, Sara Schmitt eliminated in Hazard 2 by missing gate D. Otherwise, she had a very good marathon by placing well in all other hazards.

After dressage and marathon, Susy Stafford stands in second place going into Cones tomorrow while Sherri Dolan is in 22^nd place.

Out Pair Team members placed 7^th (Randy Cadwell on a score of 80.16) and 16^th (Tracey Morgan with a score of 86.75) while individual competitor Katie Whaley was 25^th on a score of 95.43. Through two phases, Tracey Morgan is 9^th while Randy Cadwell and Katie Whaley are 24^th and 25^th, respectively.