National Vaulters Heading to Scone

SCONE has been announced as the venue for this year’s National Championships for Equestrian Vaulting Australia, to be held from Friday, September 27 until Wednesday, October 2.

Robyn Boyle, coach of the Scone Equestrian Vaulting Team said it was a great opportunity for Scone and this weekend they had the chance to test out the local arena with a vaulting competition.

“We had competitors from the local area in the Hunter Valley, Fassifern in Queensland, the central west and Bathurst and people from the Hawkesbury,” said Robyn Boyle.

“We’ve got quite a successful club running here we’ve got some really good junior vaulters and two that are currently leading the state point score in preliminary and pre-novice classes, Sarah Clarke and Gracey Bates,” she said.

“We only had 41 competitors, we had to postpone it from when we were expecting the rain during the Horse Festival in May and it fell on the last weekend of the school holidays and we have a lot of junior competitors and also junior world’s is about to start over in ‎Ermelo (in the Netherlands) and we’ve got some vaulters over their with their support crew,” she said.

“But it was a great local test event,” Robyn Boyle said.

The new arena at White Park is a great venue, but Robyn said there are still some things to iron out for the National Championships.

Frank – Scone Horse Festival horse of the year, with Robyn Boyle, Lily Tamai, Nicola Barlow and Tulley.

“We are looking for sponsors to help with a generator for the weekend, as we’ll have campers on the grounds for the week travelling from Western Australia, Queensland, Victoria, we will need electricity,” she said.

“We are going to apply for donations in kind over the week they are there, so if anybody wants to donate the generator, we’d love to hear from them,” she said.

“The venue has a lot of promise and it is fantastic that we have it, our only concern is if it is an extremely windy day there is a wind tunnel and nothing to buffer it and the railway line with heavy trains that all toot when they get close,” she said.

“When you have vaulters at a CVI or in open competition three star events and they are doing extremely hard gymnastic moves on the horses, if the horse gets distracted then their platforms become a bit unstable, so the judges and the chair of EAVC (Equestrian Australia Vaulting Committee) were here this weekend and they were the two big issues were the train line and the wind if it got windy,” Robyn Boyle said.