|
Hello, you’all! We’re back in the World Cup Final business again, on schedule, and it feels good. You never know whether the FEI will award you a major event like this, one of the Big Three, along with the Olympics and the World Games, because there’s strong competition out there from capable event organizers worldwide. The 2009 events will be our fifth Final in jumping and third in dressage, on the every-other-year basis we shoot for as ideal for Las Vegas and for the sport, with Rolex once again as the highly esteemed jumping title sponsor.
Our goal, of course, is that once again both the jumping and the dressage will be the best ever. I think, if I were you, I’d get my tickets early when the sale begins, because we’re counting again on a full house each and every day and night!
Event Director Tim Keener and I, as a member of the Organizing Committee, will head for Gothenburg, Sweden on April 23 for the 2008 Rolex FEI Jumping Final, to pay our respects and for meetings with the FEI World Cup officials, as well as the Press, the riders, and anybody else we run across. It’s a busy week.
What we expect to see is a genuinely first class event. This will be the 12th Final at Gothenburg, the home town of Volvo, the original Title Sponsor of the event, and they know how to produce a horse show. I’m a fortunate sports writer and World Cup Finals organizer who will have attended and taken part in 11 of those Finals in Southwest Sweden, having missed only the original. Not only was this as a reporter, I’ll have you know, but I had a horse of my own in a Final here in the Eighties, Zulu, my favorite jumping horse ever. By now I’ve had a horse in three Finals and, whadda you know, haven’t won one yet!
With a sort of nostalgia, I counted out the 25 straight World Cup jumping finals that I’ve made, missing only the originals in Gothenburg in 1979 and Baltimore in 1980, then Kuala Lumper in 2006, when I attended the Dressage Finals in Amsterdam instead. Holy Moley, it doesn’t seem possible!
What it does show is that the FEI World Cups are terrific events worth attending. We do think that the best yet are here in Sin City, and there are apparently a lot of people who agree, but it’s always encouraging to observe that nobody around here takes this for granted. Once again we’ve sentenced ourselves to two years of hard labor to make a winner of the Rolex FEI World Cup Finals at Las Vegas! See you there? Say hello when you come, will you?
John Q.
|
