Qualification emails are on their way!

Qualification emails for the Winter Regionals and Petplan Equine Winter Area Festivals have just started leaving BDHQ. If you think you’ve qualified, please keep an eye on your inbox and remember to check your junk/clutter too. The process to get the thousands of emails out takes around six days to complete, so you may not get yours just yet – so please keep checking over the coming days.

The numbers are looking really positive with more combinations than ever having qualified to go forward to the next stage in their championship journey, despite the challenges of COVID. We took the decision to rollover all part and full qualifications from the summer season into the winter so your efforts were not lost. Plus, local restrictions permitting, many of you headed out to compete safely in line with our COVID protocols and made a huge effort to gain your scores over the course of the summer and autumn months, so thank you for your support and hard work.

We realise there are a number of members who live in more the remote areas of Scotland and Wales, plus the islands, who may have had difficulty achieving qualifications due to the mandatory travel restrictions in place. We’re working on pinpointing those riders affected and will be in touch directly via email in due course to review their qualification status. If you live in any of these restricted areas that adversely impacted your ability to qualify and you haven’t heard from us by week commencing 4 January, please do email us on operations@britishdressage.co.uk and we’ll investigate your personal situation in more detail.

We appreciate that these have been difficult circumstances for everyone this year, so we will do what we can to help and be as flexible as possible, on a case by case basis.

Please note that our head office in Meriden remains closed and we are currently operating on a skeleton staff due to ongoing furlough arrangements, annual leave – and, of course, next week’s grand finale for 2020, the LeMieux National Grand Prix Championships, where a number of staff will be helping out. Therefore, do bear with us if we don’t get back to every question we receive by email, message or phone immediately. British Dressage will be closed for the festive period from 24 December onwards until the team return on Monday 4 January.

In the meantime, we hope these questions and answers may help:

I haven’t had an email but my close of entries is soon, what do I do?

If you’ve completed your qualification, you don’t need the email to enter, as all Regional and Area Festival entries are checked and verified by BDHQ. So if you already know you’ve qualified, please just go ahead and make your entry as per the schedule.

I’ve achieved multiple qualifications but only had one email – where are the others?

Thousands of emails are generated to let everyone know they’ve qualified and we stagger the release to manage the flow of data from our IT systems. Overall it takes about six days for all of them to be sent, so your patience is much appreciated. There’s no set priority order (whether by date of qualification or in alphabetical order), so the qualifications may not all arrive together at the same time.

I’ve not got enough points, when does qualification end?

You have until 31 December 2020 to get any remaining points. We’ll be sending a second batch of qualification emails once all of the results from competitions over the festive break have been processed in early January. If you qualify during this period, please continue to make your entry – you don’t have to wait for your email to arrive.

I haven’t been able to complete my qualification due to COVID, will there be an extension?

By carrying forward points gained for the abandoned summer season, most combinations will have had adequate opportunity to qualify. In essence, this has been a 13 month qualification window in total, minus the lockdown periods. Even allowing for the full national lockdowns, there has still been eight months of qualification in total.

We will, however, take into account those who live in more remote areas in Scotland, Wales and the islands, with mandatory travel restrictions in place that have prevented them from gaining access to competitions, and therefore limiting their opportunity to qualify. Those riders affected will be contacted directly by email and we’ll work with them on a case by case basis to assess each individual’s circumstances on merit.

If you think you have been adversely impacted by the coronavirus restrictions, as outlined above, and haven’t heard from us by week commencing 4 January, please get in touch directly with our Sport Operations team on operations@britishdressage.co.uk.