When I was young, I also remember the goal being a quiet rider, balanced and in harmony with the horse. I was out of the loop for a decade or two and when I saw dressage again with the riders moving around in the saddle, spurs tapping with each stride, and legs bent back giving aids I was really surprised.
It is so different now. I actually enjoyed watching the eventing dressage b/c there are no flailing legs and frothing mouths and whatnot.
Did you see the last French rider?
Agreed. That would have been better.
If theyâre being called names and threatened with violence, yes. Like I said, questioning motives and actions is not in and of itself bullying. Calling someone names and threatening violence against them is.
This isnât hard to understand.
Indeed.
I miss those tag lines.
They played the whole song on our local public radio station not too long ago and the people in the room were shocked, shocked I tell you, that I knew all the words to the song.
âŠthrow, the roll of toilet paper out the window, slide down the roll, and have an escape. 
I saw Arlo perform it live at the Amherst Folklore Center in the early '70âs.
If dressage competitions were banned all over the world, would this type of forceful training still go on? Without striving to be the best or even to improve scores in a test at a local schooling show, would riders or trainers still resort to doing these things? Before the audience got bigger, dressage was a kinder sport.
I sometimes think that riders who do nothing but hack around on trails are having the most fun with the happiest horses.
This has been done before. Jeremy Steinberg gave a very informative lecture on it a few years ago, .
and (I believe) discussed the topic in one of his COTH columns.
I think that theyâve taken the amount of fences from 12 to 10 and dropped the height by 10cm per fence (am sure someone will correct me if they know more).
And yet Reiner himself came under scrutiny on this board, where a poster wrote that they witnessed him using very harsh warm-up methods at a show.
And??? Someone thought the 75 tempi changes during the Olympic victory lap were abusive. Which goes to prove everyone can have an opinion.
Here is video of Klimke warming up at AachenâŠin a snaffle
Have you ever ridden with Herr Kottas?..I took a three day clinic with him, and when he told me to do tempiis on the diagonal, he cracked my horseâs ass with the lunge whip as we came out of the corner, without warning, and my horse bolted down the diagonal. Kottasâ english wasnât great but I interpreted the hard crack on my horseâs hind end was because he wanted him more in front of my leg. Thatâs a guess on my part. Kottas never explained why he hit him.
He used a lot of whip for the piaffe (not gentle taps) and two whips for the passage (front and back legs). I have to say his timing with the passage was amazing. And he was not whacking the legs with force.
He was excessively kind to the amateurs that rode, and brutal to the professionals.
We were working on 6 meter trot circles into piaffe down the long sides, and he berated me for patting my horse. He yelled a lot (which I was kind of used to having spent many months training in Holland).
Of course Kottas is retired from the SRS anymore, so maybe they have instituted a kinder, gentler approachâŠ
The word rollkur is in the AP. I donât think Iâve read it there before.
Regarding Klimke, I believe he himself mentioned that at one point he got too forceful and angry with Ahlerich during piaffe training and he always regretted it, noting that the horse maintained some tension in the piaffe throughout his career. Humans make mistakes, even humans who are normally empathetic and careful trainers.
I respect SteinbergâŠbut his opinion is not what I am discussing. There are statistical methods that are applied to training and test development. I have never seen dressage judging submitted to rigorous statistical methods by the governing authorities USEF/USDF. You do have a few individuals doing these studies.
David Stickland invented his own statistical methodology and publishes the web site Global Dressage Analytics, but that is a money making web site.
A simple google search leads to these results
The 2005 paper by Whittaker and Hill from Writtle College and the Institute of Land and Food Resources, University of Melbourne,
Dressage scoring patterns at selected British Eventing novice events
https://www.wageningenacademic.com/pb-assets/wagen/files/cep/cep_back_issues/ECP200554-1432646557567.pdf
A 2028 MS Thesis at Bowling Green State University.
AN ANALYSIS OF THE VARIATION IN DRESSAGE JUDGE SCORING
https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/ws/send_file/send?accession=bgsu1530480688061936&disposition=inline
Here is a 2023 paper published in the journal Animals, with Hilary Clayton as an Editor
These are examples. More of this sort of academic work needs to be done to understand judging and the results incorporated in judging programs to improve the judge training.
That article about Carlos Parro doesnât make it clear where the incident occurred. Was it on the grounds at Versailles? In a schooling session? During the warm-up? If on the grounds, then I wonder why a steward didnât take action. Unless it was just a brief instant of asking the horse to come deep and round, with instant release - and it just happened to get captured on camera. It would be interesting to see a video of the session to see how often he did that, and for how long.
His competition ride was apparently not very brilliant - he finished in 51st place on 37.70 penalty points.
If I can find the post, I will cross-post it here.
My point is that everyone is human, and no one is a God. But the more we hold them up as Gods, the worse we are when they falter.
Anyone read this and feel that Charlotte has become the fallguy for dressage whilst the icons hide on pedestals of clay?
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