I just finished watching and avoided internet so as not to spoil the ending. I’ve read this whole thread, and my thoughts are…
- Astier Nicholas is hot. And smart. And a good sympathetic rider.
- Yes, that appeared to be a lot of blood in the mouth of the French horse.
- Elisa Wallace's finish was embarrassing. She would have been praised for pulling up a few from home and putting her horse's interests first. Instead she smacked him with the whip to get him home. The announcers were talking about how it's never a nice sight to watch a tired horse and that thankfully it's rarely seen these days, i.e., most people pull up instead of riding an exhausted horse. And for those defending her saying she only has this one horse at that level and he's syndicated, etc., that should not matter. Why should a horse who happens to be a rider's only 4* horse be ridden into the ground? If a rider only has one 4* horse, to me that's even MORE of a reason to not ride it to a fall. Save your horse for another day!!
- Of course MJ and Sam were amazing.
- I was rooting for AN since he's never won and has made a great comeback from his injury. How nice would it be if he could win.
- There were a lot of fabulous rides by the "unknown" riders. Alexander Bragg's ride was fabulous. And he's not bad to look at, either. Austin O'Conner's was great. There was a young British woman who apparently was squealing with glee during her ride. She was ecstatic afterwards. I think another good one was Tom Jackson if I remember correctly. I believe he had a runout or something silly like that but the rest was great as was his horse.
- So sad for Jonty Evans. Would have loved to have seen him on the top. I think he was 45 secs over with his runout and somewhat slow recovery. He would have been right up there without that. His horse was lovely.
- I didn't like seeing the very early retirement of HSB after one mistake. If you go all the way across the pond, at least try to go a little further and gain some experience for the horse. I can understand an established rider with an established horse retiring early if a top placement is out of the question, but as the announcers were saying, sometimes the horses just need the miles, and getting round a course can make for invaluable experience even if you end up at the bottom of the leaderboard.
- As someone who had a horse who had no qualms about stepping on a downed rider, I was impressed that the horse whose rider fell at the log at the water stopped right before her!
- Yes, the commentators said that Burton is a very "dominant" rider, and that he didn't tell his horse to go over the fence he stopped at.
Lastly a question – do our 4* riders condition their horses to run and jump for 11 minutes? It seems like they should be conditioned to run and jump for about 14 minutes so they're not out of gas at the end, and if they have to take long routes, etc., and are out there for an extra 2 minutes, they're not completely out of gas before minute 13. I saw so many other horses who had well over a minute or sometimes 2 minutes in time penalties, and they were flying over the finish line with more in the tank….
