Tina Cook comments on her dressage with Miners Frolic

Fourth to ride for the Brits, Kristina Cook and Miner’s Frolic were foot perfect in their dressage test to score 42.0 penalties, despite having to ride through the worst downpour of the day that included thunder and lightning around the stands at Greenwich Park.

A philosophical Kristina commented;

I’m used to riding him in the rain; unfortunately, I don’t have an arena at home and I’ve ridden in some very wet days on the South Downs. The horse is used to the wind and the rain coming across - that side of it he was great with - but the noises as the judges roof blew up and down when he was doing his extended trot, I really hoped that he wasn’t going to spook. The crowd, bless them, they were getting wet and were all muttering an chattering but I’m just really pleased and proud of the horse that he kept a lid on it and kept really focussed and tried his best. I’m really pleased from that point of view, we would have loved to have the sun shining down on us but that’s England for you!

 42 I’m pleased with, I would have loved it to be a couple of marks better but we didn’t make any mistakes. He has a really fabulous brain that wants to please, he seems to cope with these atmospheres which is quite surprising as he’s quite a sensitive horse but he wants to try his best and he did by ignoring everything else that was going on around him. It wasn’t ideal, it wasn’t perfect but I’m pleased with what he did. I’ve been eventing for 20 odd years and you do get this thrown at you. We can’t stop the competition and say, actually, I don’t want to do it now. At an Olympic Games you hope you’re not going to have thunder and lightning and rain thrown at you but I have and you have to deal with it. 

It’s an Olympic Games, the course is going to be very testing, very exciting for everybody. A lot of it is going to come down to time and we just hope it doesn’t rain too much as it will be very slippery round those corners, the horses do have studs in their shoes but you may have to steady and therefore time faults will stack up. The time is gettable but less so if we get rain as you may have to be cautious but it’s going to be fast and furious.