Success stories Sirius Chesnut the Dressage Diva

Written by Katy Ferrari.

Sirius Chesnut, now known as Declan at home, has been with me for five years now. When he arrived in May 2015, he couldn’t canter more than three strides on a 20m circle and not at all on the right leg. I spent the best part of a year retraining him and we went out to do our first Intro dressage test in April 2016 with an aim of arriving in one piece and staying in the arena. To my amazement we won with a score of 72%! From then on his dressage career was set and we spent most of the summer competing in lots of unaffiliated Intro and Prelim tests.

I saw an advert on Facebook looking for members to join an RoR Quest Team in early 2017. I joined the RoR Central Recycled Racers Dressage Team and it was here that we made friends for life. The team has been successful having qualified for the RoR Quest Regional Finals three times in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

We have been to the National Championships at Aintree in 2018 and 2019 gaining placings in most of our dressage classes. We went to Blenheim Palace Championships in 2018 and 2019. In November 2018 we won the Novice class at the BD Associated Thoroughbred Championships. In 2019 we were 4^th at the Elementary Trailblazers National Championships, we won the Novice My Quest Northern Regional Championships and placed 9^th at the My Quest National Championships. We were 3^rd and 5^th in the Elementary BD associated RoR and Thoroughbred championships in 2019.

In the last four years we have moved up through the levels to compete in our first Medium test this February, we are currently training at home at Advanced Medium and recently learnt flying changes. Our 2020 Championship plans have been put on hold due to Covid-19, but we hope 2021 will be fun competing at Medium level and maybe Advanced medium too.

Declan has proven to be a real superstar, we put in lots of hard work with our trainer Kate Cowell and at RoR Clinics with Tim Downes and Andrew Bennie. We hope to have many more fun years together.