Olivia LaGoy-Weltz and Rassing’s Lonoir ©SusanStickle.
Wellington, FL – March 5, 2021 – Week 8 of the Adequan® Global Dressage Festival (AGDF) continued on Friday, March 5, and welcomed a win for the USA’s Olivia LaGoy-Weltz and Rassing’s Lonoir in the FEI Grand Prix CDI-W, presented by Wellington Agricultural Services. With their score of 75.739%, LaGoy-Weltz and Rassing’s Lonoir, a 2004 Danish Warmblood gelding by de Noir 3 that she co-owns with Mary Anne McPhail, soared to the top of the leaderboard in the final class of the day, qualifying them for Sunday’s Grand Prix Freestyle CDI-W.
LaGoy-Weltz began, “I feel like he really stayed with me today. Our goal for today was to just go in there and have a clean test, and it was almost clean, apart from a little jig in the walk, but I’m not too worried about that. For me, he gives a lot, and my goal was to keep him back and more collected with more brilliance. That was the plan, and I feel like we executed that well. I feel like we have ridden that line for a while where I keep him quiet but there is less brilliance, or there is brilliance but then it’s hard to keep the consistency, so it’s just getting better and better.”
The score was enough to give the pair a personal best, and LaGoy-Weltz said, “It feels really awesome to get a personal best, especially when it feels like it was just another day in the office. We were already really happy with the last show, and in the last show if it had been clean, our score would’ve been closer to this type of score. This one would’ve been even higher if it was totally clean, so I’m feeling good about it.”
The duo has their eyes set on the 2021 FEI Dressage World Cup™ Final at the end of March, and LaGoy-Weltz said that she won’t put pressure on herself in regard to the Olympics just yet. “For the moment,” she explained, “our strategy is to just focus on the World Cup Final. We had a different plan, but our timeline got pushed back, so I made the decision to just focus on World Cup at this point and take the pressure off trying to squeeze in Grand Prix Specials before that as well. I’m trying to do my best with that, and then take the Olympics as it follows. We want to do as well as we can and see where it goes from there.”
For more information and results, please visit www.GlobalDressageFestival.com.