All Dressed Up And Nowhere To Go.

27th October.

With a team of six horses to go to Adelaide and Melbourne Royal Shows and 17 to take on the Wimmera run, Francesca Christie from Tynong North in Victoria was set for a big and its not unreasonable to expect, successful season. Supported by loyal clients, Francesca’s career is blooming. Who could forget her amazing performance at the VAS Ltd show at Werribee at the beginning of the year where she claimed the Galloway, Small Hack and Large Hack trifector.

“We have a whole lot of horses ready and nowhere to go. I am continuing to work all the horses as I normally would, as they are athletes and it takes so much work to get them to a certain strength and level of work. If there was a show tomorrow, we’d be ready. They are all continuing their training but of course by now they would have done Adelaide, Melbourne and the Wimmera.

“I’m lucky enough to have extremely good clients who will stand by me, but if this epidemic continues for a long time we will see very adverse affects. Above the training fee I am paid to ride the horses at shows, and of course when there are no shows, that doesn’t happen. We always have young horses coming along at the shows and their performances add to their value, and we always generate sales from the shows. The consequences don’t impact so much at the moment, but it is going to get difficult over the next few months if things don’t begin to open up. EI combined with the drought, with its consequential extra costs, will see a lot of people badly affected. How it affects us will depend on how long this goes on for. There are stories that we won’t be see showing until Brisbane next year, and if that is the case the affects will be enormous. This (showing) is my whole and sole source of income and like everybody else I have financial commitments.

“At the moment, people are worried about an outbreak of EI in Victoria. With the horses I have here I am not prepared to take risks with them until the situation settles down a bit more and we have a clearer idea of what is going to happen, and we wont have that until after the Melbourne Cup. So for the time being, I will not take them off the property. I have experienced EI at Santa Anita in America and because it was a few days before EI was diagnosed there and the horses were worked as normal, the consequences were disastrous, with a high mortality rate. Also, it’s nice to go to a show for a few days, but there is nothing worse than being stuck there, if there were a shut down. I was stuck at Melbourne Show a few years ago when there was a virus scare in Queensland and once everyone has gone, it’s a boring place to be.

“I am very, very lucky at the moment as I have such a tremendous group of young riders here. Adam Oliver has come down from Queensland, as there is no work for him at the moment up there. He has done an incredible job as a young professional and is very keen to learn. Phillip Bobic is here, my daughter Courtney and Olivia and Sarah O’Connor and Rachael Triffet are spending a lot of time here. (Olivia was recently named Horseland Victorian Showing Young Rider of the Year). So we are doing a lot of work with the young horses and the young riders, and we would not have had so much time for that if we were going to shows. There are some plusses to all this. I love the idea of them wanting to learn and helping them go forward. After all they are the future of our sport.

“The workload is still the same here and with 19 horses we could have our own show. Often though, going to the shows is a bit of a rest from the constant work at home. I do love taking the babies on the Wimmera and getting them going. It’s a lot of fun and you catch up with a lot of people, and at the end of the day you can sit down with a glass of wine and have a laugh. It’s also getting a big job done, getting all the horses qualified (for the Royals). At the beginning of all this I was a bit mopey about missing all that, but now we are just concentrating on educating all the horses”.