When Italian course designer, Pier Francesco Bazzocchi, was asked to create the tracks for the FEI European Pony Jumping Championships at Arezzo this summer he wondered how they would cope with an arena that sometimes creates problems for horses who travel to the hugely popular Toscana Tour staged at this lovely venue in the springtime every year.

His question was answered today however, when he discovered that, unlike their bigger counterparts, the smaller members of the equine family had no worries at all about performing in the Boccaccio Arena. “Horses tend to be very spooky the first time they come into this ring. It is a very big grass arena, 180m by 150m, and there are many natural fences. Also the ground is undulating, and the combination of all these challenges often results in spooky behaviour for first-timers” he explained. However he was in for a big surprise when the ponies made nothing of it today. “They didn’t look at anything, they just got on with their job and they weren’t afraid at all! I thought it was amazing, the ponies are so brilliant, and so brave!” he added. That doesn’t mean, however, that the competitors will be facing an easy task in this weeks Jumping Championship. They will be tested over fences with a maximum height of 1.40m and an open water jump that is 3.50m wide. For safety reasons, and to ensure that ponies get plenty of height over the water, he is using a take-off board at the front of the fence and a suspended pole at the half-way point of the obstacle. He will increase the degree of difficulty day by day. “In the first class tomorrow (Thursday) there will be no triple combination but I will build three doubles - a vertical to vertical, an oxer to oxer and a triple bar to vertical. The oxer to oxer will have a two-stride distance inside, the others will be built on a one-stride distance” he explained. The triple combination, consisting of two oxers and a vertical, will be introduced for Friday’s Nations Cup which will decide the Team medals. Working under the watchful eye of FEI Jumping Technical Delegate, The Netherlands’ Rob Jansen, Bazzocchi says “our joint aim is to have a good sporting competition while giving experience to young riders and their ponies while taking into account that some ponies are very big and others small and that some of the riders are very experienced and others are young and will be having their very first Championship experience”. “I will build balanced courses that don’t require huge effort for the ponies, but in which the distances will be critical. Many ponies have a different stride-pattern to horses. Some of them are very long-striding but others have quite a short stride and it is essential to give them all a fair chance by creating lines that will suit them both. Some riders are going to have to ride forward all the way around the track, others are going to have to opt for more holding strides, and it is the responsibility of each rider to know his pony’s strengths and weaknesses in order to ride the courses successfully”, he points out. “That’s the real challenge of the courses I will build this week - if you want to be successful then the distances between the fences must be very accurately ridden” he says.