No surprise, but the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair in Toronto has been cancelled for 2020.
The horse show was only a matter of time, after our national governing body announced recently that no points would be awarded this season, so the qualifying aspect was gone.
Sad but necessary…
(Official announcement on Facebook - it doesn’t appear the website is updated yet).
Adding article that includes a link to the Royal’s video: https://horsesport.com/horse-news/20…jMzgkRNQWVM_PU
Very sad to hear this but I’m sure it is not unexpected. Let’s hope next year we can get back to some kind of “normal.”
Very sad news. That horse show is such a special event.
Bolding is mine.
I know many will disagree, but I wish this had been done by USEF (and other associations like AQHA). The potential downside, I suppose, being that people would find ways to show anyway, but then wouldn’t be regulated by USEF guidelines. Though, I think we’ve seen that even now, shows/exhibitors are treating the existing guidelines with varying degrees of sincerity…
But what about my apple dumpling 😩
In all reality, it’s a very wise and necessary move, but still sad none the less. Looking forward to the light at the end of the COVID tunnel!
It appears Equestrian Canada is still sanctioning shows, just that competitors won’t receive points. That means the shows need to follow guidelines, and EC has put out a big guide of things that need to be followed due to COVID-19. Our first event (eventing) runs next weekend and I’ll be volunteering so I’ll get to see first-hand how it goes (although I scribe dressage, so might not get the whole picture). They are taking it very seriously, have their EC and FEI COVID plans approved, are limiting people on property, etc. I myself am being careful and after reading the plan, am comfortable volunteering at this event. I also feel that competitors up here will tend to follow the rules, but we’ll see.
Understandable, and other years I wouldn’t have really given it a second thought. But this was seriously awful timing, we bought a weanling back in 2017 with the dream of showing her in the Cup classes at the Royal this year. It’s been on our bucket list for over a decade. She’s really lovely and it would have been a dream come true for us.
Anyway, the next dream will be to get her going and hopefully breed her at some point. Taking a homebred to the Cup classes would be even more special. I’ll just be waiting another decade…sigh
Stay safe everyone.
I know EC has reinstated green years, etc - did they mention anything about the Cup classes? There was a video update I think last week, but I didn’t watch it. They were supposed to have addressed these types of issues (junior years, green status, etc).
I haven’t seen anything about the Cup classes. I imagine CSHA will release a statement at some point. I can’t see them running a 3/4 yo Cup class in 2021, too many horses and too many time constraints at the Royal.
So sorry. That absolutely stinks, regardless of the circumstances.
I feel your pain, @GoodTimes, we had identical plans this year! I’m disappointed but just looking at it as an opportunity to grow and look forward to something else. Even if they do offer a 3/4 year old Cup class next year, I don’t even know that I’d attend. We would almost have an unfair advantage having another year to develop and desensitize our horses (which isn’t a bad thing for us), but there might be double the number of competitors at the qualifiers and… it all just seems more stressful to me. Looking forward to showing in 2021, hope to do our local Trillium circuit and bring her to a couple of A shows in the baby greens. Hopefully we’ll see you around!
Yes it does sound like we have identical plans!
I was envisioning separate classes for 3yo and 4yo, so there wouldn’t be that extra year advantage @kwpn_01 mentions. Not sure if they’ll do it, but it could be done.
I would certainly be interested if they decided to do something like that. But I don’t see RAWF making the time, it takes over an hour to get through the regular Cup classes. And that’s 20 more young horses who potentially need time to be lunged and ridden beforehand. If they run it a different day maybe?
The alternative is that they run the final somewhere else, like they do with the qualifiers. But that would be bittersweet. A big part of the draw of the Cups is being at RAWF and in the Coliseum.
I think it may be difficult to run the classes in 2020 under the current guidelines as well. Showing babies often requires a couple helpers, which makes physical distancing difficult.
I’m sad. I will miss my road trip to RAWF this year. But I also admit that I wouldn’t have gone this year if it had run.
Did you answer the survey that they had out? I did, and as I was going through the questions it was like “nope, nope, I don’t think so, probably not, that’s not going to happen”…I’ve been working at one of the vendor booths for the past few years, and just can’t imagine how the Royal would enforce any sort of social distancing. You know what the shopping area gets like! They’d have to cut down admission to about a 1/10th to have any chance, and then not sure that would be feasible for them to bother running, plus the vendors renting booth space with less traffic.
@SolarFlare No, I never saw a survey. But just thinking about the crowds is a social distancing nightmare!
The Royal is more than just EC classes. All the heavy horses and hackneys coming from all over Canada and the US to show, then there’s all the farm livestock, topped with thousands of people from Toronto and tourists all crammed into a building complex with crappy ventilation. It would be a train wreck waiting to happen sadly.
I haven’t been in years, but this makes me sad.
Plus add in the unknowns about whether the boarder will even be open? And if it is, there would probably still be the mandatory 2 week quarantine! Sadly, it just isn’t feasible this year…hopefully next year we will see it return (and Spruce!)
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