No place like home as Pessoa expects Irish to thrive at the RDS

There is no place like home when it comes to winning for Irish show jumpers so we can expect fireworks from the off as the Stena Line Dublin Horse Show gets underway today at the RDS, writes Mike Dunne

The opening day feature event is the Sport Ireland Classic, which has a prize fund of €24,700. The first two international events — The Speed Stakes and The Minerva Stakes — come earlier in the day and there is also the first round of the competition for 7&8 year-old horses.

Irish riders have been winning on the international circuit all year long and they come do Dublin ready to do well in front of their home crowd and I’m sure we’ll pick up a couple of wins this week,” said Ireland’s show jumping team manager Rodrigo Pessoa.

Of course they will have to battle for everything with top riders from other countries. It is true that a chunk of the world’s highest-ranked riders will be engaged at a Dutch round of the Global Champions League this week, but the RDS will have its share including Switzerland’s Steve Guerdat and French rider Kevin Staut.

Also competing will be Italy’s Lorenzo De Luca who wasn’t in Dublin last year but was outstanding in 2016. He was part of the Italian team which won the Aga Khan Trophy after a jump-off with Ireland, netted a number of individual events, and crowed the week by winning the Grand Prix, denying Ireland’s Shane Breen for the top prize.

Last year it was Denis Lynch who just missed out on a home win in the Grand Prix, the Tipperary rider just failing to catch Switzerland’s Werner Muff in the jump-off. Muff is in Dublin again though he will be defending his title without last year’s mount Daimler.

Pessoa’s big task this week will be to conjure a home win on Friday in the Longines FEI Nations Cup for the Aga Khan Trophy. Seven teams will do battle with the Irish and Pessoa told the Irish Examiner he feels his team are capable of delivering but doesn’t expect an easy ride.

The nations cup is never a giveaway,” he said. “The level of all those countries is very good, so we’ll face strong opposition.

The manager would love to win what he has described as “the beautiful trophy” but, like last year when the European Championships were looming, he has to keep an eye on a bigger target. “The Aga Khan, for us being the home cup, is very important, but our priority is still qualification for the Olympic Games, so we are sparing a bit, but we have four good horses for the Aga Khan and we’ll be strong contenders,” he said. The quest for an Olympic spot will come at the World Equestrian Games (WEG) in America in September, at which qualification can be secured.

Yesterday Pessoa announced his provisional list of riders for that September date and five of them — Paul O’Shea, Cameron Hanley, Mark McAuley, Billy Twomey and Shane Sweetnam — are in the Aga Khan squad for Friday. Also included on the WEG list are Cian O’Connor, Denis Lynch, Daniel Coyle, and Darragh Kenny. The one absentee from the team which won European gold last year is Bertram Allen. Pessoa will name his final squad of five early next week.

It wasn’t just the show jumping squad that was in focus at a press conference at the RDS yesterday.

The other equestrian disciplines of eventing, reining, dressage and endurance were represented as they looked forward to the aforementioned World Equestrian Games.

It’s interesting in the week that’s in it to get a snapshot of where Irish show jumpers stand internationally as far as the world rankings can tell us. The latest figures show Ireland with five riders inside the top 30, though none inside the top twenty. Denis Lynch takes over from Shane Sweetnam as Ireland’s highest-ranked rider, moving up five slots to number 23, one place ahead of Bertram Allen who climbs three places.

Sweetnam drops one to 27th, while Darragh Kenny makes a significant leap from 44th to 29th. Daniel Coyle completes the Irish quintet in the top thirty, moving up two notches from 32nd in the previous month’s standings.

Shane Breen is the only other Irish rider inside the top 50, moving up one place to 38th. Richie Moloney, Cameron Hanley, Conor Swail, Mark McAuley, Paul O’Shea, and Cian O’Connor contribute to Ireland’s total presence of 12 riders inside the world’s top 100.