William Fox-Pitt comments on his dressage test with Lionheart

A personal best dressage score from William Fox-Pitt on his young horse Lionheart was enough to keep the British team in third place going into the Equestrian eventing cross country phase tomorrow. The world number one scored 44.10 penalties to leave GB 7.9 penalties shy of Germany who lead and 4.9 behind Australia in second.

Commenting on his test William said.

"At 10 yrs old Lion is a lot younger than some of the other company, this is his first championship and he’s not a great big moving warmblood horse, so hopefully he’s going to come into his own the next two days and that’s why’s he’s here. He was never selected for this phase; he’s produced a PB today, Tracie Robinson [eventing dressage coach] has been working really hard with us and he’s going so much better. He’s in the toughest company in the world and not far off the lead so we’re certainly hoping things go our way tomorrow and it’s not going to be a dressage competition.

All the horses have gone very well, certainly Yogi is thrilled, they’ve all done a good a test as we could have hoped and you can’t expect for more. You can wish the judges had given a few more marks - particularly to Nicola who I think was very harshly marked but that’s the game, that’s part of the deal. I hope that the next couple of days are going to be demanding and I hope we’re going to answer the questions.

I rode the [cross country course] at the test event, it was reasonably tough then, this one is twice as long and it’s going to be a be a big, testing track. There could be a cumulative effect - with the horses going very fast towards the end you’ve got to hope that they stay sharp and with a couple of very steep hills, we don’t know how tight the time will ride. That’s what three day eventing is all about though. If they all skip round clear inside the time I’ll be very disappointed.

There are a lot of very good horses here; it’s very exciting that the marks are close to get there. Let’s hope we can go really well tomorrow.