Laura gives her reaction to her Grand Prix test with Alf

Laura Bechtolsheimer scores 76.839% to sit in second place on the leaderboard behind team mate Carl Hester at the halfway stage of the grand prix competition.

Laura commented on the first taste of her London 2012 experience; "Amazing, the crowd are very very supportive and it’s unbelievable to ride in front of a home crowd like that - I felt very much carried by that  the whole way through. I felt Alf put in a really solid performance as usual, I had one little mistake at the end of the extended canter - I copied my team mate Carl Hester we seemed to have made exactly the same mistake.

"In parts he got a little bit strong but I was always able to bring him back, he never got away from me. He concentrated and focussed the whole way through the test and I’m pretty gutted for my team that the mark didn’t reflect what we thought it would be.

"It’s by far my lowest score in many years; I wasn’t expecting that and felt like I had a good ride. I felt Alf dealt with the atmosphere well, I had to keep reminding him to stay with me, but he did and that we did some great work.

"When we first came out it was on 71 and they thought there was a score missing, then it came out at 76 my support team still felt it was a mistake. I was pretty disappointed especially for my team. I thought I’d get a good 80 score like he usually does. I thought we would have done enough but it’s hard to say at the moment because it’s so early in the competition, you don’t know how hard it will be for the others to get the big scores, maybe it will be just as hard for them.

"I need to watch the video to see how it looked compared to how it felt, we’ll wait and see what happens with the rest of the competition, tomorrow a lot of the stronger combinations are to come and we’ll see if it stays that way, if a few of them go well ahead then we’re going to have to think hard about how we change our performance.

"Some days [the draw] turns out to be a great advantage, other times a disadvantage, at the end of the day it’s one of those things you can’t control as a rider and you just have to focus on your performance and give your best in the ring and forget about the rest of that stuff as its really not something you can influence."