David Doel’s Mars Badminton ride, Ferro Point, is back competing at the top level after recovering from a tendon injury she sustained at Burghley in 2023.

Consequently the 16-year-old mare arrived here light on competition runs due to David and her owner, Christine Lees, being cautious about the ground she runs on.

“It’s one of the tricky ones — she’s a slightly older horse and she’s come back from injury. Her owner loves the five-stars and didn’t really want to go back to Pau, so we targeted Badminton,” said David, who owns the ice-cream company Lacock Dairy.

“She missed the 2024 season and ran around a few four-stars last year, but then the ground got a bit firm for her and she didn’t go cross-country again. We put her away and said we’ll bring her out a little bit earlier [this year] to give her a longer, slower build up to this week.

“She’s not done as much galloping as she would have done in the past, but she’s a real blood little mare, and we’re here to have a nice time. If she comes back with 20 time-faults, it’s really not going to be the end of the world. We’re just grateful that she’s still going.”

‘She’s like a sewing machine’

David has been campaigning this mare for 10 years and they have three five-star completions under their belts — one at Luhmuhlen in 2023, where they finished 13th, and two at Pau in 2022 and 2020.

Although there were a few tricky moments in the canter work, David said he is “chuffed” with the work the mare produced in the dressage test at Badminton, considering that this is the first time she has been in an environment of this scale for nearly three years.

“She’s like a little sewing machine; she’s not really built to move and to do dressage and when I picked up canter she just shoved her head in the air,” she said.

“There wasn’t a lot else I could really do for about the first five or six movements in canter, and then she settled back down again.

“But you know, they’re horses and they’ve got their own brains. We don’t always know what they’re thinking. Yes, it’s a bit of a bugger, but she’s still in the competition and she loves her jumping.

“She’ll be looking forward to going out there and going galloping round on Saturday instead.”

Main image by Tim Wilkinson