FOR some, you can keep your Nations Cup, Grand Prix, Puissance and speed stakes as they wait for Sunday’s working hunter horse section in Ring 2, where the prize is funded by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and delivered by Horse Sport Ireland.

All classes are open to stallions as well as mares and geldings and the morning session will start with the Traditional Irish Horses followed by the four-year-olds. At the end of a busy week for the pair, and depending on declarations, Britain’s Joli Smith and Terry Chalmers will probably take their lunch break after the lightweight five and six-year-olds’ class leaving themselves with the older lightweights and the five-year-olds and upwards middle/heavyweights in the afternoon.

Last year’s champion, Lady Perdita Blackwood’s Clandeboye, who came out of that final class under Louise Lyons, is an absentee but this section of the show has always been a target for last August’s reserve champion, Dermot Molloy’s Two Mile Nigel. That 2020 King Vinny chesnut will first contest the four and five-year-old performance Irish Draught class on Wednesday morning. Showing their current dominance in this division, Two Mile Nigel and Clandeboye finished champion and reserve in that order at Balmoral in May

She is being targeted at the five-year-old young event horse class but the 2024 supreme champion hunter, the Hurst Show Team’s home-bred Tattygare Me Me Me (by Arkan), could well turn out again on Sunday for the younger lightweight class.