THE Royal Dublin Society has announced that the Breeders’ Championship at the Dublin Horse Show is to be replaced by the ‘RDS Elite Show Jumping Foal Sale’. Following a successful tender process, the RDS will partner with Goffs to select, present and sell a collection of 16 of Ireland’s top show jumping-bred foals at the show. The RDS says that “This exciting development will promote the best of Irish sport horse breeding to a global audience and capitalise on the high-profile platform that the RDS Dublin Horse Show presents for Irish breeders to market their foals.”

The foal sale will replace the longstanding RDS Breeders’ Championship in the programme, and the RDS says this decision “was not taken lightly”. They went on to note that “The RDS has endeavoured to evolve the competition over the past two decades to attract more high-performance mares and foals with 5* pedigrees; this aim was not realised to a satisfactory level.”

Last year, Valerie Davis won the show jumping division of the championship, which boasted a full complement of eight mare and foal combinations, with her mare Becca Baby and Landino VDL colt foal Cloughroe Maximus. This win fulfilled a goal made four years earlier, after Becca Baby finished fifth in her working hunter class with Gwen Scott. Martin and Mary Murphy won the eventing equivalent with Castlegate Sweet Emotion and her unnamed colt foal by Sligo Candy Boy.

Although there were already a series of qualifiers in place to ensure a high standard within the class, Susan Finnerty did question its future in her report for The Irish Field last year. Having spoken to continental judges who would have preferred to assess the foals in this class moving loose, Susan Finnerty posed the question “Is the Breeders’ Championship becoming a hybrid competition, trying to blend Dublin tradition with its European counterparts?” She concluded that that was a question for another day.