SO far, everything is okay for us. The first two weeks were actually very nice for me because I have never been able to take a break that doesn’t affect my ranking and miss shows. So it was nice, but now we are starting to miss the horse shows again.

Here in Florida, we get to the farm in the morning, work the horses and then go home and stay at home, that is all we are doing. We are just trying to be careful and as smart as we can about it and try to manage it well. It is important to care about others around you too.

The horses are still in full work. They had two nice easy weeks after WEF finished and now we are doing a lot of gymnastics and a lot of fitness work to keep them going.

Nobody has a plan of what is going happen; we can’t predict when it will end so we have to keep going.

My horses are doing the same thing in Europe. We have 45 horses at the stable in Europe and 35 horses here in Florida. Some of my good horses that are here head back to Holland in the next few days.

I will leave here in a week and go back to Holland, where hopefully we can start doing things soon, but at the moment everything is very slow. We are lucky that the clients can still come to the barn and ride the horses and have lessons.

A guessing game

Nobody knows when horse shows will start. How do you deal with one country that is struggling very badly with the virus, you can’t let people cross the border to go to a show, so it is hard to know.

I think the smartest way to do it would be to just let some horse shows start in each country and let the people who live there go to those shows. It is the most realistic at this stage, just national shows with no FEI ranking points.

I think it’s not only going to be so hard for the organisers to run the international shows, but also for sponsors put up money. There probably won’t be shows until August, or maybe even September time, so it is going to be very difficult for the Superleague shows that remain to run as well.

Our business at Oakland is very much selling horses. That has completely slowed down in both the USA and in Holland. People aren’t doing anything. Everyone is always looking for a horse, that’s not a problem, but right now you can’t do anything so there is not much point.

Olympic Games

It was obviously very disappointed to hear that the Olympic Games were postponed. It was a huge plan of mine for this year. I planned the whole year around it but at the end of the day it doesn’t really effect my horses that much and it was the right thing to do. Balou du Reventon will be 15 next year so it’s not much of a downfall. He hasn’t jumped since Geneva in December and probably won’t jump again until September so it won’t matter too much.

Romeo and Classic Dream will both be a year older so it is only going to help them. I don’t think it will have a huge effect on my possibility of going to the Games. It is however a very difficult thing for people with older horses and other athletes like swimmers and runners who will be a year older.