Shane Sweetnam & Main Road. ph: The Book LLC
Coming off of his opening day win in the $10,000 Palm Beach Masters Open Jumper Class at the Hampton Classic, Ireland’s Shane Sweetnam and Main Road led a six-horse foot race to finish 1st in the $50,000 Longines Cup in Bridgehampton, NY on Saturday, September 2, 2017.
“When you walked the course, you immediately thought there wouldn’t be many clear,” said Sweetnam. “The combinations were tough, the middle line was tough and the time was just tight enough to make you move. But it’s the standard it should be, especially for the Hampton Classic.”
On the 1.60m course designed by Ireland’s Alan Wade, 46 entries competed for a podium finish on the technical track.
“I like simple fluid lines,” said Wade. “Then I can put the difficulties with the distances and the dimensions, but the line should always flow. I don’t try to hide anything, I don’t try to get tricky. I will play with the dimensions and the standard of the class, but I try to have as few questions as I possibly can in any one course. I don’t like certain fences to cause trouble, I really like to spread difficulties out over the entire course. Some days it doesn’t work like that, but I try in every single course to make it so that each fence has its own little difficulty to define the overall result of the entire show.”
In the jump-off, Andrew Ramsay of the USA set a quick, clean pace of 35.32 seconds with California 62, which proved difficult to beat. Sweetnam put down an incredible round with Main Road to set a time that would remain at the top of the leaderboard. Last to go in the order, USA’s McLain Ward gave it his best shot aboard his new mount Cartouche, but they ultimately came up shy of the time with his new mount.
“It was the first jump-off I’ve ever done on the horse so I didn’t know quite what to expect,” said Ward. “He’s an incredible jumper. I was a little cautious in the jump-off since he ran by the first jump the other day in a class; he’s just a bit green. As a result, I over-rode the first jump today and didn’t have a very good rollback to the second fence. I knew it would be very difficult to beat Shane.”
Andrew Ramsey and California 62 finished in 3rd place.
The feature class of the event, the $300,000 Hampton Classic Grand Prix CSI4* Presented by SOVARO, will take place on Sunday, September 3.
For the full results, visit this link.