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Saturday was the individual championship tests. My time was 12:26, I decided to give him the same amount of warm-up time as yesterday, unfortunately they were  running late which meant we had longer than we had planned. We could have done with going in ten minutes earlier – but there wasn’t anything I could do about that! Eddie felt a little tense going into the main arena and throughout the test, but I did my best to reassure him. The test started off really well and as the marks were going we were getting 7’s and 8’s and one or two 9’s. Unfortunately, I was just riding ½ 20 metre circle when something spooked Eddie, this meant that I lost my balance and fell onto his neck and I couldn’t manage to sit myself back up again. Luckily the judge at C was Chris Porterfield who is a British judge who I know well, so she came over as did Karen, to help me sit back up. Eddie was a star! So many people came up to me afterwards and said how lucky I am to have such a good horse as he just stopped dead and didn’t move a muscle until Karen got there to rescue me – he certainly looks after me!!

After I had  got back up, the judges had to have a discussion over what they should do as Karen had to come and help me and you are not allowed ‘outside assistance’. Anyway, they let me carry on and I finished with a score of 72.8% which meant I had won the class. However, afterwards we were a bit uncertain as to what would  happen – we didn’t know whether there would be any complaints from the second placed team, Italy. It had crossed my mind that I should pull out, but I asked advice from the team management, but this was an alien situation to everyone and so nobody knew what to do. Anyway, after a lot of discussion I decided that it was the right thing to do for both myself and Great Britain as a team to stand down from the competition – at the end of the day I knew that I had the winning score, and it was the right thing to do.