The last event of the season and the pair were keen to finish with a flourish. The venue was the tried and tested Burnham Market course and after the challenge of Purston Manor, it should have been a doddle...

An early start meant leaving the Lincolnshire lowlands even before the worms were up. Oscar could sense the excitement and he was raring to get in to the dressage ring. To the untrained the eye the test looked good and even Richard managed a smile afterwards, but what would the judge think? Well, not many words of wisdom about Oscar, although Richard was praised for his 'clever riding' and the score? Again their best yet, 32.5, a great start to the day.

No time to check out how the opposition were doing as the SJ ring beckoned, a quick warm up and they were in. Richard was a little tense after the disappointment of not going clear at Purston and maybe Oscar could sense this, but he was straight into his stride and cleared the 1st 5 fences with ease. The 6th was the sickner, Richard thought Oscar was taking off and readied himself for the leap, but Oscar decided to put in another stride before launch. This left Richard slightly off balance and Oscar with a tough job, but he tried his best and came close to clearing the fence, in fact he may have even caught his belly with his studs. Whatever happened the result was the same; a pole came crashing to the ground. The pair recovered their composure and went on to clear the rest of the course. Richard was gutted and he knew that this mistake would be costly.

A look at the scoreboard now showed that the pair, at the time, had the 2nd best dressage test result and that even with the 4 penalty points from SJ they were still in with a shout. The 19 fences of the 2145m XC course were calling...

As ever the pair relished the course and both really enjoyed themselves, the optimum time was 4.46, the pair surprisingly finished slightly over this, in a time of 4.50. This gave them 1.6 penalties. Very strange! A check of the scoreboard shed some light onto this mystery; the average time was more like 5minutes and no one had yet finished under time, in fact Oscar and Richard were the fastest by far. All the dressage results were now in and the pair were 3rd and due to their speedy XC they had moved up into 1st place! It was now a case of waiting to see how everyone else faired on the XC and for some SJ results to come in - very tense. Well the pair stayed in top spot for over an hour with only the last 6 riders to go, fingers were now nail-less! Only 1 of the final riders had a better dressage test, but several had gone clear at SJ, this was going to be very close. Inevitably as the scores came in, more of the 6 were clear at SJ and then the commentator announced, 'we now have a new leader in Section C'. Hearts sank. 2 more riders came in clear and only slightly over time to push Oscar and Richard into 4th place. The fallen SJ had cost the pair 1st place. However, this was a good result and again Oscar had improved and remember he is only a baby. Next season the pair will move onwards and upwards building on a brilliant 1st season - make sure that you are part of the continuing success of Spotless Vision Eventing.