‘He’s a big lovable oaf’ – meet this rising eventing star and find out the novel solution to keeping him happy on holiday

Keeping buzzy competition horses happy on holiday can be a challenge, but Sarah Bullimore found a novel solution this winter with her rising star Corimiro, who finished fifth at Pau Horse Trials last year on his five-star debut at just nine years old.

“You can’t turn him out with anything else, because he’s a bit like Tigger – he goes bouncing around and doesn’t really know when to stop and back off. He can be just a little bit aggressive,” explains Sarah on an interview on the latest episode of The Horse & Hound Podcast. “So this winter, we tried something different. We put Lilly Corinne, his mother, with him. We thought, we’ll just see if that works and it’s been amazing.”

Sarah continues: “When we first put her out with him, he kind of bounced across, but he stopped 2m away and was like, ‘I won’t quite bounce on top of her.’ He just seems to have a little bit more respect for her. And she’s great because if he gets excited and a bit boisterous, she just doesn’t entertain it at all. She ignores him and if he gets too close, she’s quite a squealy girl, and she just squeals at him. He feels like he’s got his own squeaky toy and it’s worked great.

“He’s got a little bit braver now with her. They’re quite funny, because one minute he’ll be bouncing around, but then the next second they’re sharing hay in the field shelter. He’s got a little bit braver and he sort of says, ‘I think we should go for a walk now’ and so shepherds her out. He does occasionally grab her rug and she just squeals at him.”

Sarah Bulllimore on Corimiro: ‘A big, lovable oaf’

Corimiro is the fourth-born of Lilly Corinne’s offspring. By Amiro Z, he is now owned by Sarah’s husband Brett, Christopher and Susan Gillespie and Bruce Saint.

“Obviously I’m very rose-tinted glasses about him, but he’s just a pleasure – you want to get up in the morning and go and ride him,” says Sarah. “He just always wants to go and do a job, he’s so enthusiastic to get on and do something and just loves to run and jump.”

Sarah says Lilly’s children are all very different, but there are similarities and you see a little bit of the dam in all of them.

“The loveliest thing about all of them is that they all are doers. They come out and say, ‘Come on, let’s get on with it.’ They want to go and do a job. They’re very open to learning. They’d all be quite assertive, dominant characters and like to do it a little bit in their own way.”

Sarah says that Lilly’s first foal, the 2021 European individual bronze medallist Corouet, “is quite quirky, quite tricky”.

She adds: “Corimiro is still quite assertive in terms of saying, ‘Don’t touch me there’, or don’t do this or that, but he actually really wants to please and get it right. He’s like a big Labrador that wants to come and sit on your lap, and he doesn’t realise quite how large he is.

“In some ways he’s a big, lovable oaf, but actually, if you said, ‘Hey, don’t do that’ if he’s getting a bit above himself, he’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’ve overstepped the mark.’ There’s a sensitive bit underneath, but sometimes you have to scratch a little bit harder to find it.”

Last autumn at Pau, Sarah Bullimore and Corimiro took the lead with a super cross-country round.

“I went out with no expectations and I actually managed to knock my stopwatch off at about five minutes,” says Sarah, explaining that she initially tried to work out her time and whether she could re-start her watch, but by that point she was at the eight-minute marker.

“I was sort of thinking, ‘Well, I’ve come this far, if I’m down on time, I’m not going to make it up now. And realistically, I’m sat on a nine-year-old, I’m not here to come and make the time. He was traveling really well and I didn’t push him once. I just let him go in the rhythm he wanted to go in, but he’s naturally got a huge stride, he does cover the ground and jumps out of his rhythm. It’s all very easy for him.

“As I came into the arena, the crowd was cheering. I was trying to look up at the screen to see if it gave me any clue, but I couldn’t see it. The commentary was obviously all in French and I heard, ‘dix minutes’ and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s good, I might have made it’, because I knew the optimum time was over 11 minutes.

“And then you’re busy getting the horse brushed off and comfortable and my husband came up and I asked about the time and he said I was well inside. So it was all a little bit of a shock really, but ‘Milo’ literally made it feel like a BE100 – he was just fantastic.

“So then I was sorting out my horse the rest of the day and I hadn’t really seen what happened to anyone else. It was literally the last two or three horses on course that I actually managed to see.

“I had absolutely no idea where we were and literally the last horse came through finish, and then they put the results up, and I was at the top of the leaderboard. It was just a complete and utter surprise. It was really quite emotional, because my baby, my little nine-year-old’s name was at the top of the leaderboard.”

The pair had one fence down to the next day to finish fifth, still a super result for such a young and inexperienced horse.

Hear more about Pau and Sarah’s plans for 2026 by tuning into the current episode of The Horse & Hound Podcast here or search “The Horse & Hound Podcast” in your favourite podcast app. 

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