Four YRA family members started at the prestigious GP: Bertram, Pieter, Susan and Mikey.
While Pieter and Bertram decided to withdraw their grey horses after few jumps, Susan and Mikey brilliantly performed and accomplished one of the best results in front of their home crowd. Susan cleared the first round with a perfect rhythm respecting the short time allowed; Mikey had been incredible over the jumps, just finishing the round slightly over the limit of 81 seconds, result which couldn’t allow to perform in the jump off and placed him on 8th spot.
From RDS press release:
- A star-studded podium saw Breen stand on the winners perch with former World No.1 Scott Brash (GBR) beside him as runner-up, while 2016 Dublin Grand Prix winner Lorenzo De Luca (ITA) finished third.
It was a fantastic finish to this years Dublin Horse Show for Irish riders, with 20-year-old Susan Fitzpatrick from Kilkenny taking a superb fourth place finish in the Grand Prix with the Sharon Fitzpatrick-owned Fellow Castlefield. They were the first of seven combinations who would jump clear in the first round and went on to post the fastest time of the jump-off (33.23) with one fence down. Sligo’s Richard Howley also made it through to the second round with Chinook and would take an impressive fifth place finish with 4 faults in 33.29. Britain’s Ben Maher (Tic Tac) and Swiss World No.1 Steve Guerdat (Venard De Cerisy) finished in a share of sixth place, while Ireland’s Michael Pender finished eighth with HHS Burnchurch after picking up just a time fault in the first round.
Horse Sport Ireland CEO Ronan Murphy commented:
“Huge congratulations to Shane Breen on a fantastic performance to win the Grand Prix of Ireland, and to Susan Fitzpatrick, Richard Howley and Michael Pender who all finished in the top 10. it shows the excellent depth of talent in our High Performance jumping athletes and I also would like to congratulate Mark McAuley on being crowned Leading International Rider,” he said.-