Three days of eventing, three grooming jobs

Dressage, cross-country, showjumping: three days, three surfaces, one horse. Why eventing grooming is logistics, and what counts on the night before the trot-up.

No other discipline asks a horse for three such different things on three days. On the first it should look as if it lives in the arena. On the second it goes through water and sand. On the third morning it stands in front of a panel that decides whether it carries on. Grooming here is not a finish. It is part of the plan.

In eventing you do not groom for the photograph. You groom for tomorrow.

Day one and day two want opposite things

For the dressage you plait, wash, brush and keep the horse quiet. For the cross-country none of that counts. The plaits can stay or come out, the legs go into boots, and a quarter mark would be history after three hundred metres. If you do not think that through the evening before the dressage, you plait twice.

• Pack the night before, sorted by day, not by type of kit.
• Keep two buckets and two sponges apart. One is for the head.
• Enough towels. There are never enough towels.
• Water is the most important line on the list, and more of it than you think.
• A cooler that is genuinely dry, and a second one in reserve.

The horse after the cross-country

This is where the whole competition is decided, and it looks the least like grooming. Dismount, boots and saddle off, cold water over the neck, shoulder and the big muscles, scrape it off, then keep walking. Scrape and walk, again and again: water lying warm on a horse has stopped cooling it. The horse does not get put away until breathing and temperature have come back.

Sand and water stay in the coat

A cross-country course settles in. Sand in the saddle area, grass on the legs, dried sweat at the girth and under the bridle. In the evening this is not about looking good. It is about nothing rubbing when the horse is tacked up again in the morning. So: the places under the kit clean, the pasterns dry, the rest can wait until tomorrow.

The trot-up the next morning

You present in hand, in walk and in trot, on hard and level ground, and the horse should move freely beside you rather than hang on the rope. Nothing about that is practised the night before, it is walked: a few minutes in hand in the evening and again before you go in, so the muscles do not come cold out of the stable. What really counts that night is not the brush. It is whether the horse has eaten, drunk and lain down.

On the third morning nobody is looking at how the horse looks. Everybody is looking at how it moves.