The Qualifier,
the Challenge,
and five days without a pause

In May, this periodical closed on a question asked half in jest in the members' lounge: if the entries keep growing at this rate, shall we need a larger arena? We left the answer politely to the committee. The committee, one suspects, has since had it settled for them — not by a vote, but by a schedule.

Between the twelfth and the sixteenth of August, HPRC hosted two events back to back. The National Qualifier 2026 — run with the Telangana State Equestrian Association under the aegis of the EFI, and the first NQ of the season anywhere in the country — occupied the twelfth to the fourteenth. The 2nd HPRC Equestrian Challenge began on the evening of the fourteenth with a practice round and ran through to the sixteenth. Horses came off one programme and went onto the next. So, more or less, did the ground staff.

Consider what a Qualifier demands. Thirty-six horses through a formal inspection with a Veterinary Delegate present. EFI passport numbers against every entry. A ground jury signing sheets. And, per its own prospectus, no medals in any category — nothing travels onward from HPRC but a set of numbers. To run that, then turn the same ground around for a fifteen-class Challenge with prize money, is what a club does when it has quietly stopped thinking of itself as small.

The Challenge answered that austerity with range: fifteen classes across Hacks, Dressage and Show Jumping, from a 40 cm class built for children on their first competitive round up to three Open classes paying ₹1,02,500 between them. Same grounds, same weekend.

Entries came from HPRC, Archi Horse Riding Academy, Royal Caballo Club, The Ashwa Collective, Kings Equestrian, THEC, Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet, and riders competing unattached. The old complaint about junior equestrian sport — that the horse does the work and the child is a passenger — did not survive contact with this week.

The Qualifier exists to send riders onward to the JNEC, and it is built accordingly: no rosettes, no cups, no photograph with a trophy. It opened quietly on the Wednesday evening with a practice round, and got serious at half past seven on Thursday morning at the horse inspection, conducted by Col. Rajiv Dahiya (Retd) with Dr. Ravinder Reddy. Thirty-six horses were presented with EFI passports in hand: thirty-four accepted at the first check, two held and accepted at the second. All thirty-six went on to compete.

Fifty-five entries were received across both disciplines and all age categories. Dressage was judged by Col. Rajiv Dahiya at C and Col. S. L. Reddy (Retd) at E; the show jumping by both colonels together with Mr. Kishore Futnani, who came from Chennai for the May Challenge and evidently did not need much persuading to return. There were no entries in Dressage Young Riders.

What a Qualifier produces is not a winner but a threshold. The Minimum Eligibility Requirement was set at 60% in dressage and four penalties, time included, in show jumping. Clear it and your name goes forward; miss it by a rail and it does not, whatever your placing on the day. Signed sheets went to the EFI, copied to TSEA, on the fourteenth — emailed the same day, hard copies couriered the same day.

Seventeen horse-and-rider combinations cleared the MER across the two days — five in dressage, twelve in show jumping. Eleven of the seventeen were HPRC's. That is the number this club should be proudest of, because unlike a rosette it cannot be won by turning up on a better horse than the child beside you. You go clear inside four faults, or you do not.

One name appears on both lists. Vedik Guduri cleared the MER in Children II Dressage on Tin Tin A at 61.72%, and then went clear — a genuine nought — in the Children II Show Jumping on the same horse. Two disciplines, one threshold each, one pony.

Ayaan Verma Nadimpalli did something quietly harder: two clear rounds in the same class, on two different horses, Darcy and Western Style, both on nought. And Yuvraj Rohit Gupta produced the only round inside the MER in the entire Children I Show Jumping — eleven starters, six eliminations, one qualifying score, and it was his, on Brave Indian.

Saturday began at seven with the flag, and at half past with Hacks — where a child and a horse are judged on turnout, seat and manners, and where a great many riding careers quietly begin. Eleven placings across two age groups, several of them ties.

One detail is worth more than it looks: Mohammed Izaan took fourth in the Under-12s aboard an HPRC club horse. A club that only places children on privately-owned imports is not a club, it is a showroom. And Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet took four placings between the two Hacks classes — a school, not an academy, which is how a sport widens.

The dressage followed, and several riders carried their form straight across from the Qualifier. Gautam Sanjay Sujanaani topped the Juniors on Airstrike, as he had at the NQ. Janampally Hitesh Reddy and Anet Castilino went first and second in Children I.

At four the poles went up, and the day showed its full range inside three hours. The 40 cm classes exist so a child on a first competitive round has somewhere to go; the 105–110 cm Two-phase exists so riders who have outgrown everything else have somewhere to go too. Both ran on the same surface the same evening.

Archi Horse Riding topped the 40 cm Open and the 105–110 cm. HPRC placed in all three classes — and took a cash finish in the marquee.

Sanjit Kanumilli deserves the first of these. In May he took a Highly Recommended at 40 cm on Rizz. In August he went out in the 105–110 cm Two-phase — the tallest class of the Challenge, and the one where the entry list stops being a junior field — and finished third on Alaba, ahead of The Ashwa Collective, for ₹7,500 — one of two cash finishes HPRC took across the weekend. Whatever has happened to Sanjit Kanumilli between May and August, the club should find out and do it to everybody.

Samyuktha Lakshmi Vanapalli had the club's Sunday. In May she took third at 80 cm Children II on Chestnut Charmer. In August she won the 60 cm Open on the same horse, then went out again at ninety on S Captain and finished second. Two horses, two heights, two rosettes, one afternoon.

Ananya Gupta arrived in these pages in May with the highest Hacks score in the Under-12s, on Proud Girl. She has since swapped the Hacks ring for the poles and won the 60 cm Under-14 on Brave Indian, with an equal third in the Children II Dressage on Roudy along the way. Flat class to fences inside one season is the coaching programme doing exactly what it is meant to.

Gautam Sanjay Sujanaani topped the Junior Dressage in May, posted the best Junior score at the Qualifier on Airstrike, won the Challenge's Juniors Dressage on the same horse, and then took third in the 60 cm Open on him as well. Dressage riders who will also jump are rarer than the entry lists suggest, and more useful.

And a word for the horses. Darcy won the 90 cm Children I Open in May under Ayaan Verma Nadimpalli and took second in the 105 cm Junior Open under Aamir Shahnawaz; in August, second at 80 cm under Ayaan and second at 90 cm under Aamir. Brave Indian managed a similar trick in one weekend — the 60 cm Under-14 under Ananya Gupta and third in the 40 cm Open under Tia C Kumar. Airstrike carried three different riders to placings across two disciplines in five days. Somebody should check what these three are being paid.

Five consecutive days of competition are not run by a committee. They are run by the people who arrive before the first horse and leave after the last one has been rugged — stewarding the collecting ring, checking numbers, moving poles between classes, chasing entries, carrying water, and doing a hundred small things that are only noticed when nobody does them.

Seventeen volunteers gave their time across the Qualifier and the Challenge. Some are members, some are parents, one is our riding coach, and one of them competed in the marquee class on the Saturday evening and was back on duty on Sunday morning. The club is grateful to every one of them.

Both competition days were carried in the city press, and — a small thing, but not nothing — the reports named the children. Riders who had never seen their name in a newspaper found it there over breakfast, spelled correctly, with the horse's name beside it.

Three of the five ran in the Deccan Chronicle, the largest circulated English daily in South India, on three consecutive mornings, each carrying full class-by-class results. For a club sport that competes with cricket for column inches and usually loses, that is not ordinary coverage.

This periodical has developed a small habit of noting when HPRC says it will do something and then does it. Volume One closed with dates at the foot of page four — the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth of August. They held.

There is an older promise now coming due. At the press conference following the inaugural Telangana State Equestrian Championship, which HPRC conducted in October 2025, the club undertook to host the State Championship annually at HPRC — not as a rotating fixture to be bid for each year, but as a standing commitment, made specifically so that the club's own member riders would have a state-level competition on home ground rather than at the far end of a horse box.

Edition Two is now on the calendar, and it comes attached to a second National Qualifier — the two running back to back across a single five-day block from the fourteenth to the eighteenth of October, exactly as August did. Which means the arena will again be asked to hold a graded EFI fixture and an open championship in one week. On August's evidence, it will.