Way back in the Middle Ages known as the 80’s, I spent the summer as Nick Holmes-Smith’s first working slave (an affectionate term), starting at Peter Gray’s old Stonehill Farm near Orangeville before moving to Checkmate Farm near Collingwood. Aside from all the riding (of which there was plenty – thus the ironic use of ‘slave’), what I remember most about that summer is the bugs. They’ve got ’em all in Ontario: mosquitoes, black flies, deer flies, horse flies etc. etc. ETC. So I’ve got my little bottle of deet all packed and ready to go.

Once I’ve recovered from my red eye to Toronto tonight, I’ll do a recon to the Caledon Horse Park tomorrow, so that I won’t be late for the nine am start of the first day of competition on Saturday. The jog took place this morning, which I am sorry to have missed, not least because it sounds like there was some blog fodder provided by a loose horse (my sources haven’t been able to ID the horse). According to one of my moles, the horse was caught by a volunteer, which caused some confusion – the authorities apparently couldn’t decide whether they should thank the volunteer for grabbing the horse before it hurt itself, or chastise the volunteer for interfering.

So far I’m giving the results page on the TO2015 site a tentative thumb’s up, since I have been able to print off an order of go for this morning’s jog.  I’ve had an unconfirmed report that one of the Mexican team horses, Mariana Quintana’s Guapo, has been held for re-inspection tomorrow. Otherwise I believe everyone passed. A total of 46 horses were presented this morning (2 fewer than in Guadalajara 2011), which thoroughly annihilates any argument in support of the quotas the FEI imposed on the Pan Ams, which made getting to Toronto far more expensive for all of Latin America.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this whole split small tour/big tour competition is going to work out. I’ll try to reserve judgment until all the medals have been doled out, but here is one thing: if the US needed any more of a leg up in its two-decade stranglehold on team gold, giving Steffen and Laura a 1.5% bonus sure can’t hurt. Oh and just one more little tiny comment: the purpose of including GP (and making it mandatory for the team getting the sole team ticket for Rio to have at least one GP horse) is ostensibly to pull the level of the Pan Ams up to be more in line with the Olympics. But it looks to me as though one will need not much more than a six fingered hand to count the GP entries, and four of them are from the US and Canada – the two countries that don’t need any pushing in this regard…

You can expect daily posts from me over the coming week, so stay tuned!