THE 150th Balmoral Show didn’t produce much of a surprise on day one in the horse rings with Dessie Gibson winning the TopSpec youngstock championship with his Financial Reward yearling Legacy while Jane Bradbury claimed the Creightons’ hunter title on Daphne Tierney’s Bloomfield Waterfall.

The visit of Britain’s Princess Royal to the P&O Arena on Wednesday delayed the announcement of who won the yearling championship. However, Gibson and his Tom Newell-bred gelding were then photographed many more times than the locally-based producer would have anticipated before the day began as the Royal visitor chatted to him about Legacy.

DEDICATED

Apart from the dedicated few, most of the photographers had left the ring when it came to deciding on the young horse champion and, while Gibson had winning two and three-year-olds forward, he was right to stick with the yearling who took the title ahead of his stable-companion Action Man. This 2016 Harlequin du Carel gelding was shown by Shirley Hurst.

Earlier, a delighted Paula Howard saw her five-year-old Bienamado bay Dernahatten Out Of Touch win the broodmare championship.

The Jane Bradbury/Daphne Tierney partnership dominated the ridden hunter division in Horse Ring 1 from the early morning, winning two of the four-year-old classes and then the older mediumweight class with Bloomfield Waterfall. Shown here last year and at Dublin as a lightweight, the five-year-old Watermill Swatch gelding was the choice of many ringside judges for the supreme title and so it proved when he was called forward into that position in the Main Arena late on Wednesday afternoon.

(Balmoral 2018 coverage in next week’s issue).