Asian Games Dressage bronze medallist Anush Agarwalla (on Sir Caramello Old) gave his Paris 2024 Olympic Games dream a boost with a good showing in the International Rising Show in Frankfurt last weekend. More than the sixth place performance in the Grand Prix Freestyle Set to Music, the combination logged a score of 72.940 per cent.
By his own admission on Instagram, Anush Agarwalla made ‘expensive mistakes’ in the Freestyle to Music routine on Sunday but he was happy with the eventual 72.940 per cent score on their CDI 5-star debut. A reading of the scoresheet shows a routine where all five judges scored the combination 4.0 each.
Since Anush Agarwalla reunited with Sir Caramello Old on return from the Hangzhou Asian Games, the pair scored 73.485 per cent in a CDI-W competition in Wroclaw, Poland on October 29. He followed that up with a lowly 67.565 per cent effort in a CDI-W in Stuttgart on November 17 before coming up with a career best 74.400 per cent in a CDI3* event in Kronenberg, Netherlands on December 3.
At the end of November, the FEI website showed the pair having 548 points to be 11th in Group G behind riders from New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Japan and China. When the rankings’ page is updated at the end of this month, the efforts in Kronenberg and Frankfurt are bound to see the combination swell its tally of points and leapfrog in the Group G table.