View from the peanut gallery;
Olympics: Ballroom dancing for horses is so out of step
David Mitchell The Guardian,
Saturday August 16 2008
I’ve just been watching coverage of the Olympic dressage and I must say I’m absolutely baffled. In case you haven’t seen it, let me explain what happens: people dressed in a sort of funereal version of fox-hunting gear take it in turns to go into a large sandy arena riding horses that seem to have been driven mad. The horses behave like the deranged dancing bears in those charity adverts, doing weird fidgety fastidious things that clearly aren’t natural to them: they hop from foot to foot, they walk on the spot, they stand still for a bit, quivering, before turning round in awkward timorous circles and walking diagonally across the arena.
Quite what treatment these creatures have been put through to get them to be this odd I dread to think, but it gets stranger: sometimes the horse and rider’s obsessive antics are condemned by the commentators and judges as disappointing and sloppy, while behaviour no more or less insane is hailed as excellent and just the thing, and indeed quite the spectacle to behold.
I wonder if any of these people saw the opening ceremony? For their sakes I hope not; if they find watching a horse getting the shakes in a sand-pit spectacular, the sight of those fireworks would have exploded their minds.
Now I know there must be rules to dressage. It’s not really just craziness arbitrarily scored, like a sort of tortured horse version of Mornington Crescent, but the fact that brilliance and incompetence are indistinguishable to all but the dressage cognoscenti does not speak well of the sport.
I couldn’t watch it for long without the question “Why is doing this in any way good?” springing to mind. I’m perfectly willing to admit that it must be very difficult to make horses do that, but what’s the point?
Obviously I’m straying into dangerous territory asking what’s the point of a sport - you can argue that almost any leisure activity is pointless, but most sports involve at least something accomplished or exciting enough to make it clear why the activity is pursued. But with dressage, I’m not sure. I completely understand why it’s good to make horses run fast or jump over things - but what is the satisfaction in this tuneless dance, this effortful yet unentertaining capering about?
I must admit that my feelings against dressage are intensified by the fact that it’s one of the sports that is scored by judges. I don’t like that. I accept that some sort of judging is involved in all Olympic events - whether it’s a referee in a hockey match or a line judge in the tennis - but the judging involved in gymnastics, diving and dressage is on a completely different level. They’re not just deciding whether or not a goal has been scored, but what a goal actually is. The spectre of artistic impression hangs over them all in a way that makes me suspect that, skilful and worthwhile though gymnastics and diving may be, they should be put in the same category as dancing rather than the shot put: they’re not, essentially, proper sports.
A proper sport has a clearly defined aim: “Get to that line first”, “Throw that object the furthest”, “Kick that round thing into that gap more times than them”. It doesn’t matter how inelegantly these things are done, the winner is clear; indeed, as sports develop, what is effective in the achievement of the stated aim is what comes to look elegant.
Sports that involve a judging panel have much fuzzier aims - a combination of electing to do difficult things while not being seen to have made any mistakes - and so you need several people’s opinions to determine the extent to which the competitor has succeeded. If such subjectivity is permissible in determining victory or defeat, then why not open up the Olympics to ballroom dancing (after all, ice dancing is in the Winter Olympics), flower arranging or amateur dramatics? You might say that not all of those activities require peak physical fitness, but then neither do archery or shooting.
The distinction between proper and judged sports is at its clearest when you compare ski jumping in the Winter Olympics with the long jump. In ski jumping points are determined by various factors including “style” whereas the long jump is entirely about how far you jump, no matter how much of a gangly fool you look while you do it.
Surely the aim of ski jumping should be to jump as far or high as possible and then land safely? Why should style have anything to do with it if it doesn’t help you jump further? If it was discovered that an airborne attempt at the hokey cokey added yards to the jump distance, surely that’s what the jumpers should do - but they wouldn’t because they’d lose points for style.
Of course the scoring problem is less easily fixed when it comes to gymnastics and diving, and I’m not really saying that the Olympics would be better without them. The fact that they are Olympic sports encourages people to get involved. And, within those sports, there’s undoubtedly a clear sense of what excellence is.
But I’d nix the dressage in a heartbeat - and bring in snooker instead. It should be at least a couple of Olympiads before the Chinese and the Germans are better at that than us.
She’s there to win, not to impress the peanut gallery.
