Equestrian: Ellerslie outing successful rehearsal for Athens

By EUGENE BINGHAM

Olympic equestrian rider Louisa Hill and her mount Gabana are ready to take on Athens after a successful day at the races, a brutish world to a rarefied dressage horse.

Ellerslie racecourse is usually the last place you would expect to find a dressage horse, but Hill was looking for ways to expose Gabana to the kind of atmosphere they will meet when they trot out in the Olympic arena in about eight weeks.

"You have to keep the horses' attention in that atmosphere, keeping them focused on you and not everything around you."

So Hill took Gabana along to the Great Northern carnival this month and put on a dressage display.

"She handled it really well although all the racehorses were looking at her doing piaffe thinking, 'Oh, my God - what is that?' And she was looking at them with their jockeys in their brightly coloured silks going, 'Oh my God - what's that?"'

Piaffe, for the uninitiated, is a beautiful, cadenced trot on the spot.

For the next six weeks, the Clevedon rider will be in Germany working with a top instructor Norbert van Laak to fine-tune what she has learned with regular trainer Clemens Dierks.

Hill and Gabana will be New Zealand's sole dressage representatives, and only the second ever at the Olympics, following in the hoof-prints of Kallista Field at Sydney.

She is aiming to top her score of 66.25 per cent, achieved in a Grand Prix test in October.

"I really want to do justice to what the horse can do and what I can do. It's a long way to go and a lot of preparing to go for five minutes and there's a lot that can go wrong in that five minutes. It's quite a demanding test where movements happen very quickly."

Hill said she had been encouraged by the support she had received. However she was still getting used to the attention from strangers who have come to know her through the TVNZ programme Road to Athens through which viewers have learned about her battle with cancer as well as the effort and resources required to be an international rider.

Hill is the only confirmed member of the equestrian team so far. The three-day eventing and show-jumping competitors are due to be named in about a fortnight.