Mayo showjumper to embark on France adventure for international tournament

IT is an adventure of a lifetime for a Mayo equestrian. Westport’s Louise Moran will head to France in July to represent Ireland at the World Club Tournament - an international equestrian competition.

"I'm excited,” Louise told The Mayo News. “I was asked by my club secretary to put my name forward. It's the AIRC, so the Association of Irish Riding Clubs, they decide who goes or what team goes. So we basically just put together a proposal. 

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Our club has been really good at qualifying for different things over the years. Like they've done the RDS team show jumping events.”

Louise is a member of is the Thomastown and District Riding Club, that's based in Kildare, one of the biggest in the southeast. 
However it all kicked off for her in Westport.

While still at Sacred Heart School, she bought her first horse ‘Murphy’ when she was 16, together with her sister Cathy. First they shared the horse, then a second one followed and they would go off to Claremorris on weekends, doing a bit of show jumping.

Louise kept at the sport, as a hobby, as an amateur, and now lives in Waterford and has been chosen to represent Ireland. 

Only downer: She won't be able to bring over her own horse to France for the competition. “Ideally, I'd have loved to have brought my own horse, but with the length of the travel, it's too difficult. Brexit has kind of screwed it up a bit, because now you can't really travel through the UK because it's all different paperwork.”

And then there is the ferry from Dublin to Cherbourg in Normandy but that takes 18 hours alone, and then there is a six-hour drive to Federal Equestrian Centre 140 kilometres south of Paris.

“It's very intense on the horses, and they don't tend to do well on that long ferry. So if Brexit hadn't happened, we probably would be bringing our own horses, because we would have driven through England, and it would have been an easier journey for them.”

And there is also the weather in central France to be taken into consideration. It's going to be more than 30 degrees heat down there in July. The Irish horses wouldn't be conditioned to that sort of weather.

They would not be able to perform in the way they would at home. So Louise and her team mates have decided to rent horses from local stables.

“It's part of the challenge as well, you know, it's something different. This tournament isn't something that we're going to get to do again, probably. I don't know if a team has ever gone twice. We weren't going to turn this opportunity down.”

Louise explains, that they've been lucky enough to speak to people who had rented horses off the same place that they're renting off now.

“They said the horses were fantastic. We'll have two days before the competition to get used to them. We can build a bit of a rapport that way. It's not like we're just turning up on the day and sitting on a horse we've never sat on. I suppose the one good thing is that the horses are acclimatised to the conditions there, so it won't be out of the box for them either.”

One might argue, it's a special challenge for Irish riders, not just for the horses to perform in the heat. “We'll have nice light jackets and strip them off when we're finished," assures Louise.

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