Just think of it as formal logic,
your opinion is
a therefore b
but the reality is
not a, therefore not b.
but since you don’t understand or accept why your fundamental premise (a) is wrong, you’ll never grasp of accept or acknowledge that your conclusion is wrong.
I ended up with sand as deep as the reiners in my dressage ring. No way was I going to work my non world class dressage horse in there until I got a bunch of sand removed. I have seen locally 3 or 4 non world class horses blow out hind suspensories in sand that deep ( one ride too) and end up permanently lame. And there aren’t that many dressage horses where I live so that is a large percentage.
Why the reiners don’t have problems? I don’t know but from what I have seen is that they have short bursts of intense activity versus a sustained effort like a Grand Prix dressage test, Maybe that is part of the difference. Maybe shorter pasterns are less likely to have soft tissue injuries. I am not a vet so I don’t know. But nobody is going to risk their nice dressage horse in footing that deep.
I agree, and am lucky enough to have arenas with different footing types to work in, as well as roads and fields and trails that I make good use of. But none of them are as deep as reining footing, and I don’t think it’s fair to expect everyone to install anything as deep as reining footing for the purposes of conditioning their horses just in case they encounter that footing someday. Were I a WEG competitor (ha!) I certainly wouldn’t accept the risk of acute injury associated with a sudden shift to very deep footing. Shoot, I don’t even take that kind of risk as a regular joe – when I once moved to a barn with very deep footing (a reining barn, in fact) I worked up from walking to real work over a matter of weeks.
Have we met? Are you in upper level corporate management?
These are the non-answer responses I used to get when some VP came in with his/her “stretch goals”…and I had the temerity to ask “How are we going to get there?” when manufacturing didn’t have the capacity to manufacture all the parts that needed to be sold.
Manufacturing people are known to be curmudgeons…so add that credential to the village idiot.
Thanks to XHS, Susan and others who have actually entertained my question. I thought perhaps some folks were more up to date on footing studies.
My premise about a horse is a horse is that regardless of the discipline they all have the same anatomy of the legs…suspensories, flexor tendons etc.
So why do the reiners function ok and not break down in “deeper” footing than the dressage horses is the basis of my question.
Look at average age of a world champion reining horse (5? 6?) vs average age of world champion dressage horse and put some thought into that.
I think largely because reiners train in it every day and condition for it. They also tend to have very short careers, which may or may not be due in part to the strain from doing such intense work in deep
footing.
because they aren’t the same, nor are they doing the same thing. That’s why the requirements are different.
think of a tennis ball on a hard surface and one on a soft maleable surface, like a oh, deep soft sugary sand. One gets a reliable spring effect, the other does not. Dressage horses are bouncing, reiners are not. A deep, soft, unpredictable footing will lead to far more issues for a 1300lb tennis ball on ankles comprised of many small glass bones than say, a bowling ball.
the horses are different, but the disciplines are more different. It would be bad to ask a reining horse to slide in a dressage ring also, but likely not as bad.
too deep footing is a common cause of serious injuries.
So I’m a village idiot in both dressage and reining, but I spent last Wednesday bouncing back and forth between dressage and reining at WEG and even to my relatively uneducated eye, it seems obvious, after watching it in person, why you would not put your dressage horses on reining footing and why reining footing is the way it is and dressage footing is the way it is.
I think the answers to why reiners function OK in the deep footing are that they are trained in deep footing and thus are acclimated to it, and that the things they are asked to do are things that can be accomplished in deep footing and, in the cases of sliding and probably spinning, require the deep footing to do safely and well.
I’m not sure it would even be possible to do some of the dressage movements with the necessary precision and rhythm for upper level competition in the kind of footing I saw in the reining arena.
Yeah. I think reiners need the grip for the spins, and the depth lets the horse dig in on the slide. The looseness also lets the horse slide as opposed to stick. They don’t do trot work. And as others have said, they’ve conditioned to canter in it in between the spins and the slides.
When I think of the perfect dressage footing, it’s a hypothetical ‘dead’ gymnastics floor. It gives or compresses to absorb a bit of concussion, then rebounds. Just much less so than a real gymnastics floor does. And it doesn’t have ‘depth’ to it. It’s easy to walk across - you don’t have to lift your feet up and over mounds or out of holes. Obviously we can’t quite create that as footing - but there are definitely some rubber and fiber arenas that come close. It’s amazing to feel how much it affects your horse.
Obviously, there is the conditioning but try doing some nice half passes in such deep footing or even extended trot. Just the leg lifting would be half as difficult.
Do people want these horses to be injured?
I’m sorry but no one wants to run on bad/inappropriate footing. From eventers to reiners, hunters and jumpers; it’s the horse well-being that matters.
FWIW, the western PCHA (California affiliate of USEF) won’t use a facility that has only the GGT-type footing. I thought it was something about it being too grabby for slides and spins. A local facility had to remove the fancy footing from one ring to accommodate the western shows.
However, the only reference to synthetic footing I can find in their rule book is to a trail class that is a finals sort of thing:
“The PCHA Trail Classic is not to be held on synthetic footing. PCHA Trail Classic must be competed on an ordinary dirt/sand mixture footing. This rule was passed to start in the year 2013 for the Classic (in August 2013). This rule holds true for any subsequent PCHA Trail Classics.”
There were some photos of flooding on fb this morning. But it seems may be limited to one area.
I just watched it today, from the beginning. Steffen was in the first section, meaning low expectation, but I looked him out intentionally because have followed him before.
His ride was phenomenal and remained the most impressive of them all to me. His young horse made two gaffes in a row at the walk to piaffe to passage transition, which knocked him to almost the bottom. But Steffen’s position/technique looked the best of them all, and the movement of his 10-year-old daddy-longlegs KWPN gelding Suppenkasper was to die for. I imagined myself riding that extended trot and it felt like flying. So light and high off the ground!
And maybe Steffen has a whole new look on this horse because it dwarfs him. But boy did he make that horse look fun!!
I was not as affected as much by any other ride, though Charlotte was majestic as always.
[Did not take note of Adrienne, but saw someone else responded to that part].
So, why couldn’t they remove some of the footing? It seems massive crews worked overnight every night so I am not sure why that wasn’t an option?
The eventers were out hacking their horses yesterday in the weather saying it wasn’t really that wet and they could have show jumped just fine Sunday.
Do reining horses wear support boots in competition? I don’t know much about the sport, but it seems most of the photos I have seen show the horses in boots. Or are those photos only from warm-up runs?
The reiners can wear boots and most do. They are usually some variant of a SMB type boot. and many wear bells or a combination boot for overreaches.
Reining horses need the deeper footing to slide. Jumpers and dressage horses don’t want to slide…thus totally different footing is appropriate. It also tends to be rounder sand where sand for English events is angular. If the footing is too grabby it is really hard on their hocks. Reining is hard on hocks to start with.
And there is the answer to why the dressage freestyle could not be held in the covered arena on reining footing.
The footing is not only a different type, it is a different depth. Add to it the fact that reiners can wear boots, dressage horses can’t.
Isabell just spent 3+ years rehabbing her mare after she was injured at the last WEG because of BAD FOOTING. I don’t blame her one bit for not wanting to risk competing on uncertain footing. Nor do I blame the other riders for making the same decision.
They could have removed all the footing and switched it out. It was on the table. The dressage riders needed to ride on it Saturday pm in order to agree, and hold the competition on it Sunday. The reiners were still using it for their final as of 3pm Saturday I believe. So they didn’t have a night to do it; an hour or two maybe. They would have had to move the reiners much earlier in the day to have the time to change out the footing.
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