February Diary

A typically contrasting month of British weather, with snow and ice everywhere at the start and near spring sunshine at the end! The ground as we start March has dried up well, so portable fences were taken out of the yards and positioned near to their final locations without any damage being done.
The cross country track will soon start getting detailed attention as the time for fertiliser, vertidraining and mowing approaches, but in February the plan is simply to protect it against overgrazing by the sheep and have it well marked in the Deer Park so that no one drives or rides on it!
The last week in February saw a plethora of meetings – all routine but unusually packed into a few days. First our Traffic Meeting, when all the agencies and contractors get to know each other again, the current year’s passes are explained and a few modifications made to the traffic plan. Then the Vets Meeting – a short session on the new FEI Veterinary Regulations, which come into force in April; and then a fascinating day lead by Jim Green from Hampshire Fire and Rescue who gave us a presentation on rescuing horses safely when they are stuck in ditches, rivers, peat bogs or cattle grids; and then showed us all his (not very high tech) kit which enables horses to be turned over, moved etc in safety. His strong messages – saving horses must not imperil human safety while, as so often, calm professionalism is needed from the rescuers. Unfortunately our usual website photographer Tim Nicholls who lives in Badminton village had a nasty bout of gastric flu while the event director had left his camera at home!
Finally that week the Medical get together – a reminder when taken with the other meetings of how lucky we are to have the voluntary support of such exceptionally well qualified and motivated professionals. A quiet year in 2009 is no reason not to prepare thoroughly for 2010 and one small change welcomed was the move of the helicopter landing site away from the horse’s route to the Start!

The Tented Village is now fully planned on paper and Site Manager Harry Verney has started ‘pegging out’. Hundreds of pegs mark the corners of every tent, accurate to less than a foot (or 30 cm) and the different colours are understood (we hope!) by the tentage contractors, electrical contractors, plumber, telephone engineer and all the others who need to know. Danco our tentage supplier will start on site in the middle of March, about the same time as Arena Seating will commence work on the Grandstands.
Rather to the Event Director’s discomfort, we launched our presence on Facebook and Twitter – he may eventually get used to it and no longer has the excuse that his iphone reception is not good enough – a switch to Vodafone and a SureSignal booster in the office means he is no longer out of touch!

With his hat on as Course Designer, he attended an excellent seminar run by British Eventing to discuss modern trends in course design, the use of safety features such as the pins, risk management on the cross country and where course design should head. Partly as a result and also because of international discussions, we may expect to see a return to some at least of the features of fences from the past – for example true upright gates or rails & ‘open’ corners – features that made a rider take care with his line and speed. There is a consensus that some course building features introduced in the name of safety in recent years have actually made the sport more dangerous as, from Grassroots to International level, we have let riders ‘get away with’ bad riding. Naturally we must continue the attempt to reduce the number of falls, especially rotational horse falls and this is where Badminton will try to marry the old, eg vertical rails, with the new, eg frangible pins.

A big task at the very end of the month was to do the jigsaw that is the deployment of Fence Judges and Stewards. The late John Hills was the master of this, so this year his successor Sam Trounson spent 2 hours with the Director and Assistant Director trying to ensure that no one judges the same fence as in recent years, that the team of judges and stewards at a fence are compatible, that all the crossing points will have enough personnel, that radio operators and fence scorers are allocated to the right spot. Here again, it brings it home how dependent we are on expert volunteers!


Now there is much to look forward to as we really count down to the event which starts in just under 8 weeks time. Entries close on 12th March, the Technical Delegates visit on 17th, course building resumes in earnest and the tents will start to arise – roll on April!

Dawn breaks on a perfect day for our Badminton Photoshoot.

We were so lucky to have brilliant sunshine for our Photoshoot on Friday.  The professional team of Joules were in action shooting  Badminton The Collection – official Badminton Merchandise which will go on sale in the Spring (keep watching website for details!).  They were completely blown away by the magnificence of the Stables here and Brian Higham, the Stud Groom at Badminton for the last 50 years, very kindly gave them access to his sacred Tack Room.  In addition, Joules were using the location to shoot some clothing for their next year’s catalogue.  The team were also  lucky enough to borrow a handsome black Labrador from the Event Director, Hugh Thomas!

JANUARY DIARY

The main story of January at Badminton as everywhere else was of course the weather! On two or three days the village was pretty well cut off and we couldn’t get in to the office and to add to our woes this coincided with the opening of the Box Office and lots of teething troubles with our new ticketing system. As I write at the end of the month things seem to be going more smoothly but we are very grateful for the cheerful acceptance of the difficulties our customers experienced.

The heavy frosts actually made one aspect of the coursebuilding easier when we transported some huge tree trunks across the frozen ground, doing no damage in the process. Alan Willis and his team have now finished the preparation of all the fixed fences and will go off to other courses for February – then in early March will return to start putting out the portables, pinning the frangibles and building up to the event.

Finalising plans with all our contractors has continued, with some quite exciting changes afoot. In particular we are really enthused about our new waste disposal arrangements – not normally the most exciting of topics – with locally based M.J. Church taking on the contract with a mission to recycle the vast majority of our waste. The recycling ‘pods’ will be highly visible and we fully expect our eco-conscious visitors to put their rubbish in the right containers.

Just before Christmas we had the very bad news, as it then seemed, that our regular final day military band, the Band of H.M. Royal Marines, Commandos, could not come in 2010 – the, so far, only major casualty of our date change. They have been good friends to Badminton and much appreciated by the main arena audience for well over 20 years. Happily now we are going to be entertained by The Light Cavalry Band,  which while based at Bovington in Dorset has wide connections locally to Badminton as the band of the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars was amalgamated into it in 2006.

By the end of the month the tradestand layout should have been finalised. It is quite a tricky jigsaw puzzle and this year we have seen very few exhibitors drop out. A few stands reduce in size, others enlarge and some want to move to another avenue – not always possible! We will have a few new faces but not very many as a percentage of the total. Occasionally other changes we make have a knock on effect – for example this year we are expanding Relish’s Deli next to the Scoreboard into a much bigger Wine Bar with plenty of seating, so the British Horse Society stand has had to move ... and so it goes on.

Our catering offering will change in other exciting ways, to include a new pub and a Badminton party – watch out for an announcement soon!

The basic administration of the event has to be put to bed very soon now, so all the ‘briefs’ – the written instructions for every official or activity – have to be updated, with all of us trying to remember to put ‘Sunday’ instead of ‘Saturday’ everywhere. We are quite certain that something with the wrong day of the week will leave the office this year.

The highlight of the last month for the Event Director has been to survive a formal VAT Inspection unscathed! While these are only routine and while the inspector himself was absolutely charming, no business looks forward to these and we can hardly believe that we have not made any major errors over the past two or three years. It calls for a glass of champagne – but not of course claiming back the VAT on it!

December Diary

After what seemed a successful event in 2009, the summer and autumn have been busier than usual, with a lot going on ‘behind the scenes’.

There is to be a major change in our television arrangements – though this will hopefully be invisible to our viewers! In common with most other sporting events, the BBC will no longer be producing the coverage of Badminton themselves, so we have been through the time consuming but fascinating tendering process to employ our own production team to make the programmes for the BBC, who have guaranteed us coverage for another three years – which will take us to our 66th continuous appearance on the channel. The successful candidate was a team led by Chris Lewis, who is now a freelance but produced here for the BBC for four years. At the same time we looked at all our TV related investments and will be bringing more extensive web coverage in conjunction with Horse & Country TV plus improved ‘Big Screens’ on site, all of which for the first time will be in operation throughout the event (except for the main arena screen during the show jumping).

The new Mitsubishi Motors Grassroots Championships have inevitably involved a lot of planning and we need to be very careful that they are integrated into the main event but do not jeopardise it in any way. The organisation of the contractors and infrastructure for this event is being done from the main Horse Trials office, but we have been very lucky to recruit Ollie Bush to coordinate officials and help the competitors. There is an update on preparations on the Grassroots website

Every year seems to bring another IT challenge – or opportunity as our IT consultants always call it! This time we have gone in for what seems a very high tech solution to data management, whereby all our material is now hosted on remote servers by our partners Proximitum – this solves all the back up problems and also means any of us can access everything from anywhere in the world, provided we can get an internet connection. It is already proving useful – for instance we can share Grassroots folders with Ollie at her home in Devon!

With Proximitum we are also changing our ticketing service provider. They are building a new bespoke system for uswhich should be much easier for us to manage than the generic solution we have previously used and it will enable customers to book directly on the web their preferred seats, caravan sites etc – subject to our being able to change it when, for example, they leave individual grandstand seats in a row, which we would find very difficult to sell. Our Box Office Manager, Carol Alexander, is retiring after the 2010 event and she was probably looking forward to a quiet run up – no chance with all the preparation for the new system! Her stress levels must be quite high as she has also moved house this autumn.

Our charity of the year has been announced as World Horse Welfare, which is also the official welfare partner of the FEI (International Equestrian Federation). Many people will no doubt have seen in the press our objection to the hastily proposed and voted changes to the internationally permitted drug rules for horses – we very much hope these will not in the end go through and are delighted at the sensible attitude adopted by the FEI President and Bureau in view of the widespread disquiet – as I write the proposals have definitely been postponed to April 2010 but seem quite likely to be put off until the FEI General Assembly in autumn 2010, which is an excellent idea, allowing time for rational debate and consideration.

The actual competition is of course at the forefront of our planning, though in the autumn each year it is all too easy to forget the course, the horses and the riders! Work has continued on the going, which I suspect will be like the Forth Bridge painting – as soon as we think we have finished we will have to start again. However, the recent heavy rain has shown how much the course drainage has improved and when the Technical Delegates visited in November they were more than happy. Giuseppe della Chiesa from Italy will be the TD for the 3rd occasion, with Adrian Ditcham as his assistant – this gives us a terrific source of advice on everything related to the event. It gives us particular pleasure at Badminton that Giuseppe has just been elected to be Chairman of the FEI Eventing Committee, succeeding Wayne Roycroft.



Our Ground Jury (Judges) for 2010 will be a distinguished trio. President of the Jury for the first time at a 4 star event will be Nick Burton, who was of course a British Team rider himself, at the European Championships, and is now heavily involved in the Dressage world, training and judging at the highest level; Christoph Hess has judged here several times and is, with Chris Bartle, the author of the three day event dressage tests; while the newcomer to Badminton is Nicoli Fife from New Zealand, who judged in Lexington in 2009. All three have the true expertise to do the dressage judging justice but also the experience to keep an eye on all aspects of the event.

In addition to losing Carol after the 2010 event we will also be saying goodbye, in an official capacity, to Brian Higham, our Stable Manager. Brian has worked for the Duke of Beaufort for over 50 years, starting originally as a 2nd horseman but being Stud Groom at Badminton for a very long time.  We were thrilled to hear in early December that Brian has been awarded a British Equestrian Federation Medal of Honour, the highest accolade the Federation can bestow, for outstanding services to equestrian sport.
Our tradestand applications closed early in December and we seem to have as many as ever – now we have to sort out exactly what space is available for new exhibitors, with a view to inviting any that can be fitted in during January, to give them time to prepare for their stand here. It won’t be long now before the Box Office is open and the coursebuilding is in full flow – then we will really know that we are on the run up to another year’s Badminton