Who knows how much they got to practice in the arena with the crowd - it always makes some horses and most importantly some people very nervous and the horse respond to that.
I used to haul my hunters to the nearest indoor arena, 20 miles away, so that they could get used to the noise the stands made when people walked or little kids or small dogs ran up and down. The noise of the mic, the shafts of light coming through the doors, the clapping of the crowd could all be scarey for the best of horses. And those were hard to pre-train. The ex-race horses actually did better because they had been exposed to noise and crowds already. Nancy
