THE 2022 Irish Pony Club/Audi Naas senior boys’ national champion, Jed Collins, is a very active member of the Ward Union Branch of the IPC and of Pentathlon Ireland.

He has formed a great partnership with his 15.2hh seven-year-old chesnut gelding Adams Apple, placing second in the junior Tetrathlon championship last year before going on to win the individual junior hunter trials championship.

While Collins was one of many to go clear in the cross-county phase at Punchestown last Sunday, he was one of very few to have done so the previous weekend at the British regional championships where he was on the third-placed Irish team and was fourth individually behind West Waterford’s William Verling.

Jed has had a very busy Pentathlon season, winning the Under 17 national championship and then representing Ireland in Lithuania, Portugal and Poland. While they have taken some time off to socialise this week at the Dublin Horse Show, Collins and fellow IPC/Pentathlon Ireland members Caolan Costello, Robert Cherry, Peter Galligan and Jamie Hargaden are training hard ahead of the Youth World Championships in Italy next month while their parents are being kept busying ferrying them around!

Collins finds that the four or five phase Tetrathlon/Pentathlon competitions really suit him as it’s always all to play for right up to the end, which adds to the excitement for competitors and spectators alike. In fact, while the ride phase on Sunday wasn’t very influential, it did prove to be in the senior boys’ championship as William Verling lost out on the title when losing 60 points across the country.

Jed’s strongest phase after cross-country is running and he is a talented competitor over 800m and 1,500m with Belvedere College and Dunboyne Athletics.