LEGENDARY Brazilian show jumper Rodrigo Pessoa spoke of his passion for his new chef d’equipe role with Team Ireland and quickly hit the nail on the head during Wednesday’s visit to the National Sports Campus in Abbotstown when outlining a clear strategy path towards qualification for Tokyo 2020, starting with the upcoming European Championships and the 2018 World Equestrian Games.

Pessoa (45) said: “This is a new thing for me. I’m very excited about the months and years to come. The potential of riders and the quality of riders really made it a go for me and I know without them, a manager is not much. I’m really looking forward to this experience and I’m really passionate about it.”

Pessoa said he had “been there and done it”, and his ability to “handle this kind of stress and pressure” and be “an anchor for my team” were what had swung the job for him.

Sporting his new Team Ireland green jacket, Pessoa said: “This is really the experience I want to pass on to the Irish team. The situations we are going to go through, I have gone through already so I’ll be able to help the riders cope with that and many of them are very successful, they win, week in week out, but it feels like the communication part, that language of stress and pressure at the moment you have to deliver, maybe was lacking from the outside.

“So that’s going to be my job, to hold their hand in these difficult moments.”

Pessoa said his number one goal right now was to maintain Ireland’s position in the Division one FEI Nations Cup series.

“That is the number one goal because we need those shows next year to prepare for the World Equestrian Games, which is the big test for us for the qualification of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. La Baule is next week and is going to be our first points-scoring event, and we are going to take all these events very seriously. Dublin (Horse Show) is very important, it’s home turf, and the Aga Khan is a very prestigious trophy and I can’t tell you how important it would be to get our hands on it this year.

“The Europeans is a big rehearsal for us just two weeks after, so our main focus and it starts here, is that Dublin is important, but it is not the most important thing for us this year. We have the Europeans and our main horses will be geared towards that. We will field the best team we have and give it the best go at putting our hands on the cup.”

Speaking about Irish-breds, Pessoa said: “We did have a lot of luck with Irish horses. We were fortunate enough to have great horses. In the beginning of my career, I had Special Envoy, the horse that took me and put me on the map, that took me to my first WEG, to my first Olympic Games and my first big Grand Prix.

“In the last couple of years, it is a shame that they have disappeared a little bit from the radar but I really hope that the breeders and everybody that is involved here in Ireland really believes in this new project and the future of Team Ireland, we could really use Irish horses on the Irish team, it would be a really fantastic thing and a great showcase for the breeding industry here in the country.”

Describing last Friday’s Lummen Nations Cup performance, where Ireland finished sixth overall, as a “very positive event”, Pessoa said that his strategy would be to “mix and shuffle” young riders with older more experienced riders, and stated his wish to broaden out the available pool of talented horses and riders.

Dermott Lennon, uncharacteristically out of form at Lummen, later turned out to be suffering badly from sore ribs as a result of a recent fall. Pessoa said he took full responsibility for not calling up Anthony Condon instead.

Pessoa added: “We are going to have a training camp before the Europeans and they will all be there, rowing in the same direction. Training camps have been successful for us, for my team and for myself.

“It is just that we eat breakfast, lunch and dinner together, we spend four, five days together and we understand what we are there for. A lot of this is mental because they ride well, the horses are good but the last little piece of the puzzle is the mental and that’s where I have a pretty good knowledge how to be as successful with them as I was with myself and with my team. So we are looking forward to that but before that, we have two/three months of tough competition ahead of us.”