Sunday Stills - Billboards

You gotta look for 'em ;-).



I love the reflection of the horses and wish I'd thought to try to capture that.



Check out the groom/navigator hanging off the back. The person on the very back of the carriages moves from side to side to provide important ballast. Sometimes you'll see them hanging way off to one side on sharp turns, turns on hills, really fast turns...



A Canadian driver - for our friends to the north :-). Beautiful horses.



From the first shots, you might think it's all refreshing and water-ful around here. This is the reality. Kentucky Brown Grass. It doesn't happen often. Why oh why did it have to happen this year...



You were either driving through water...or dust.



And if you saw any grass, it had been irrigated. A small oasis in the middle of the desert.



The basic idea of driving the obstacle section of the marathon is to find the fastest way through each of the eight hazards. This one is Spook Hollow.

If you watched the video from last night (Head of the Lake), you saw the horses making turns back and forth, around and around. They were negotiating "gates" marked with red and white letters - A through F. Red on the right, white on the left and you have to go through them in the correct order, the correct direction.



Many of the gates offer big, sweeping options for turns. You are penalized for every second you spend though, so a tight turn like this one - if you can negotiate it - can save you precious time. Take a good look here. Measure how close this carriage is to the fence, the width of the gap in comparison to the horses. The FOUR horses. Galloping.



USA driver Tucker Johnson negotiating what, at first glance, looks to be a small hill in the middle of The Spring. Look again. Envision what it might feel like to be that high over the backs of your horses. At speed. With a "hard right" at the bottom.



The look on their faces says it all. Just the most fun.

The Spring was the last hazard on the course. We about killed ourselves running over there to catch the last of the US drivers. As Johnson blazed out of this hazard, he stopped at the top of the hill, turned around and saluted all the spectators. I had put my camera down to cheer and too late realized I'd missed a great shot. I didn't realize how great a shot I'd missed until later. He's retiring. That was his last hazard as an international driver.