Find Out How Will Furlong is Preparing for the New Eventing Season.

2017 is alive and kicking! 2016 proved to be an extremely successful year for me and my team; with another 3 international wins at Houghton, Hartpury and Aldon, alongside many national wins as well. I’m very excited to have been re-selected onto the World Class Podium Potential Programme – which will hopefully put me on the right track to help achieve my dreams of representing and winning medals for Team GB on the senior stage. As always with horses, things weren’t plain sailing! We had the disappointment of the YR Europeans with Livingstone II picking up a foot abscess after dressage amongst other little annoyances. Horses are great levellers – which apparently is why it’s such a special sport. All the horses have wintered really well and have been looking amazing despite the pretty miserable recent weather. I’m not really a huge fan of ‘holidays’ for horses, so they have been kept ticking over gently whilst doing their strengthening work walking through the water at the beach. It’s important they get their ‘down-time’ in order to refresh but equally with spending all that time, effort and money into getting them into shape, it seems rather a waste to completely let them all down. They all feel great for it and we had two winners at our first outing of 2017 at Felbridge Combined Training. Annmichelle Norris’ Adele 97 has developed a huge amount over the winter with help from my physio Steph Brighton and has come out on winning form, whilst Collien P 2 has kept up her impressive form from last year! There will be many more training outings before we start on the second weekend of March at Poplar Park. It’s my first year out of Young Riders and in the ‘big-wide world’ of seniors and I’m very excited for that challenge. Many people in the past have said how hard the transition is but I believe that it’s my responsibility to try and stand out from the crowd and be noticed. Obviously I’m not aiming for Senior Europeans this year but I’m hoping to be selected to represent Great Britain within a Nations Cup squad. This will be a good stepping stone along the way to hopefully be in the selection process come Tokyo 2020. It seems an awful long away now, but it’ll come around much faster than we all think! Will.