Grant Recipient Emma Stevens recently qualified as a Para Dressage Rider. Meet Emma and her beautiful home-bred competition horse, River, below. As you’ll see from her write up, Emma’s commitment and determination are already paying off.
Emma has agreed to be our Featured Bader Grant Recipient and we are proud and delighted to be able to support her.
Keeping competition horses is an expensive business. If you’d like to help Emma on her journey, you will find a link to her GoFundMe Page at the bottom of this post.
I’m a grade 2 para dressage rider who has Multiple Sclerosis. I’ve ridden all my life and I presented myself for classification for para dressage in July 2019. I compete at para dressage with my horse River who is a 15h TB x gelding whom I bred myself from my first pony, Fudge.
I applied for a Douglas Bader grant in December 2019 after I started competing at para dressage in summer 2019. I applied for the grant to assist me with purchasing adaptive equipment and to pay for the support I need to be able to attend the winter national championships in February 2020.
With the grant I purchased some looped reins which helps me hold the reins correctly and them not slip out my hand.
I attended the nationals in February 2020, both my horse’s and my first time at a national competition. We had qualified at both the bronze and silver levels. The build up to finals was marred with problems as River had punctured his sole on a hack between Xmas & New Year. We finished in 3rd place at the Bronze level and 4th at the Silver level.
2020 has been a tough year for everyone! I’ve managed to focus on my training, investing in additional coaching during the time competition was on hold. This paid off for us, resulting in us getting the scores to be selected to representing GB in October at an international 2* competition. I’m very excited to see where our journey takes us!
(Grant Recipient Emma Stevens, Para Dressage Rider)
