Is Dressage Declining?

[Scribbler]

Some folks have a long consistent history, decades, observing the evolution of the horse world in their town or region. So they can probably more accurately speak to actual numbers.

But for a lot of us, there’s probably also a subjective aspect to feeling something is in decline.

When you first get involved in something it can seem exciting and personally promising and also large and mysterious and important.

Then you get to a point where you have all the dimensions and players mapped out in your mind, and it isn’t so mysterious but it’s fascinating and compelling and there are people you envy, people you admire, people you hate.

Then at some point, whether you have been relatively successful or unsuccessful, you do reach the end if your fascination with a field. You might still enjoy the basic activity, but you’ve lost your illusions. Or you might realize you have hit a ceiling in your progression and you don’t have the resources to get to the next level.

And at that point the activity or scene or whatever will start to feel in decline to you.

This applies to every thing not just to horse shows.

[Willesdon]

It is interesting that cost comes up so often in this discussion. I read recently that the average member of the USEF is female (85% of membership), earns $185,000 p.a., owns three vehicles and four horses (Horse & Hound 15 Feb 2018 p 12).

How many women are being pulled away from dressage, a somewhat obscure fascination, by the demands of family? The cost of their children participating in any sport in increasingly heavy too - even soccer costs more than $8 K p.a. if playing at the lowest level of school competitions. Kids whose family can not afford the uniforms and the cost of attending high-profile tournaments just don’t have a chance of becoming the big names of the future. All sport is becoming more ‘professional’ in attitudes and expectations. It is not limited to dressage or to equestrianism as a whole.

[MysticOakRanch]

@4wdNstraight

Right horse at the right time, Snowdenfarm, and Scribbler, right on! There will always be the haves, and the have nots. You can’t get caught up in it. There will always be someone with a nicer horse, better trainer, better saddle, more money, more horses, blah blah blah. Ride for yourself. Be realistic. If you have a 6 mover and score over 60% good for you. Many times people are on 7and 8 movers who aren’t scoring anywhere near a 70 or 80%. So it’s not just about the fancy mover. It’s about the training and how well the rider can present the training. That’s it.

If you can’t handle criticism, or that someone’s pretty pony might move better than yours, or that someone might just be able to out ride you, they do yourself a favor and don’t show. If it’s not fun, and you are an Ammy, don’t show. It is meant to be fun. But this is competition. Also, the best horse doesn’t always win. It’s a subjective sport.

I think you lost track of the original question. People here aren’t ducking criticism, aren’t crying sour grapes, they are seriously and thoughtfully answering the question “IS DRESSAGE DECLINING?”.

I’m in California - a dressage “hot spot”. And the answer is YES, dressage membership is declining. Our GMO (the largest in the Nation by a huge margin) is down considerably, even though the economy is back up and booming. And the loss is primarily in those (ex) members who see dressage moving away from being an affordable sport. They are moving to schooling shows, to Western Dressage (booming), to Cowboy Dressage, to places where they can feel part of the gang, without owning a super expensive horse and being in full training.

Dressage won’t die out - but it is becoming more and more a sport of those who can really afford it, and less and less a grass roots discipline. Especially if you are in a dressage-centric region.

[pluvinel]

Perhaps the question should be rephrased. Perhaps the question should be “Is competitive dressage declining?” The USDF…and guilty by association, the GMO’s…have a singular focus on competition…and perhaps that is declining.

This focus on dressage as ONLY competition (vs training) is clearly seen in their criteria for auditing the FEI Trainer’s Workshop. The only criteria is competitive success. Makes one wonder if Karl Mikolka or Charles Dekunffy could qualify.

I think people are still interested in connecting with horses and learning to ride them. What and how they do that is changing. I see a group of people changing their focus to disciplines where they find “kindred spirits”…and it ain’t in the high end dressage show ring.

I was at Dressage at Devon a couple of years ago on Saturday GP freestyle night. I saw a horse with gaits like I had never seen before. Think of a German Shepherd Dog with that slinking walk…but to the extreme…it was a trot…I recognized the gait…yes, it was a trot…but it was …odd…like no trot I would ever is in the barns I’m familiar with.

Perhaps that is where “dressage” is morphing…perhaps it is “big lick dressage”…vs “make a usefully trained horse dressage.”

[ladyj79]

@pluvinel

I was at Dressage at Devon a couple of years ago on Saturday GP freestyle night. I saw a horse with gaits like I had never seen before. Think of a German Shepherd Dog with that slinking walk…but to the extreme…it was a trot…I recognized the gait…yes, it was a trot…but it was …odd…like no trot I would ever is in the barns I’m familiar with.

Perhaps that is where “dressage” is morphing…perhaps it is “big lick dressage”…vs “make a usefully trained horse dressage.”

I made this exact German shepherd remark while in Holland and then relayed that on these boards somewhere and someone here was of course randomly offended and obvs I don’t know anything. But it was true. And really really weird.

[fordtraktor]

@pluvinel

You guys do realize that before the 1980’s or whenever the IOC allowed pro-athletes to compete in the Olympics, that the only equestrians who rode were (a) military or (b) very…very…very…wealthy amateurs.

Bill Steinkraus, for one, comes to mind. Married to Helen Ziegler Stdeinkraus, she was one of the founders of ADI (American Dressage Institute). She was the daughter of William Ziegler, one of the founders of Royal Baking Powder. The Steinkraus home was an estate on an island (Great Island) off Connecticut that was recently put on sale for $175 Million.

Ditto for Jane Forbes Clark, patron of Robert Dover also comes to mind. It was considered an honor to have a request from the USET to use your horse as an Olympic mount.

Bill Steinkraus was sort of an exception for the last 30 years. He was a true amateur under current rules. He had a publishing job in NYC.

he also had amazing talent. there are precious few who can ride weekends only and compete on a world level with success.

The amateur rule for Olympics and Nations Cups was abolished in the mid-80s I think.

Still, there were MANY people who rode horses at a local or farm level. Same as today, the pool for International competitions is and always has been very small, and most consist of either the wealthy or those brought up in the sport (kids of trainers for the wealthy).

I think as society becomes more stratified so does equestrian sport but it was like this when I was a kid too. I ran a successful local barn business when I was in college in late90s/early 2000s, but I knew international success was outside my financial realm and chose a good day job. The writing is and always has been on the wall. But I think it is worse now for sure. The pay to play is astronomical.

[pluvinel]

The USET used to be funded by very wealthy patrons. In the post WWII era of Jack LeGoff and Bert DeNemethy, USEF provided horses that were owned by these wealth patrons…like Idle Dice owned by Harry Gill.

The difference with today is that in the past they (all riders) all got together at Gladstone (in the dorms) and bowed to the will of the coach (eventing or jumping).

Bill Steinkraus wrote a very interesting book (Refections on Riding and Jumping) where he devotes one chapter, “The Rational Rider” and discusses his thoughts on riding during his commute to Gladstone. Interestingly, dressage never had a long-term coach the likes of LeGoff or DeNemethy.

I recall years ago reading the lament that when the USET morphed from its post-WWII format to its current format that central focus and “team” focus disappeared as everyone went off to do their own “thing.”

[poltroon]

The real problem I see comes back to the facilities. We have a generation of barn owners in California who are aging out too, and they are selling. Sometimes when they sell, the property goes to development, which is a higher value use for the land if local zoning allows. But even if they stay as horses, the property tax goes up enormously with the sale, and the younger new owner has to carry the mortgage payment on the new value where the old owner had the land paid off or was paying on a 30 year old loan. This is a big blow in costs (never mind the learning curve) such that even a thriving going concern often doesn’t survive a handover.

Building new facilities is really expensive. It still happens, as a labor of love, but on the whole more are torn out or abandoned to private ownership than stay or are created as boarding stables.

So then the next problem is that with these high costs, fewer have any kind of lesson string. This is especially true in dressage. Where are new riders supposed to learn the sport and get enough skill to buy a horse if we don’t have lesson horses? Many training barns have one or two horses that can be leased or otherwise kind of used for lessons, but a good lesson string has a collection of wonderfully unsuitable horses that are perfect for learning the first canter, for learning to sit the trot, to ride a sensitive horse, for learning tact, horses that are very safe and used to riders bumbling through this or that. The variety of possible mounts is essential too. You can’t put a lesson string in stalls that rent dry for $500 a month.

And this is all before we even talk about how we all crave and honestly need better facilities than we used to make do with - better footing especially. The covered arena. Which costs money.

So now if you can find a barn, and even if you know you want to ride so much that you’re willing to put out the money, barns are just farther away from people, and there are only so many hours in the day. Most women work and also have children, and so to ride for themselves requires finding time that is very dear. For families with one horse-crazy child, it is harder and harder to justify the time and money unless you happen to live near a good riding school.

[poltroon]

IME, Dressage does better than any other discipline at creating meaningful and useful goals in competition that will fit you even if you don’t have a fancy horse or if you live in an area with too much or too little competition for your class ranking to be useful. The numeric scores and the goals of moving up levels and earning the Medals and other rider qualifications with the 60% score are really terrific and I think any discipline that can figure out how to co-opt some of that sauce would find real benefit. The fact that I can get a judge to give me a meaningful and comparable evaluation for a third level ride even if I’m the only rider who does that test all weekend is actually really powerful.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that everyone is happy with the goals they can reach through competition with the resources that they have.

[Cowgirl]

@rjr

As to the question about highly accomplished amateurs entering low levels on their new mounts: What I would really like to see is a separate “novice” division – i.e. for teams where neither horse nor rider have ever competed above 2nd level. This would allow beginners on their ordinary (i.e. non-schoolmaster) horses to compete against peers that are more similar to them. The only problem with this is that many shows are so small already that when you divide up the Amateur classes into a regular amateur class and a “novice amateur” class, then the classes get so small that there is no real competition. – Thus bringing us back to the original topic of this thread. Declining numbers. If there aren’t enough participants, then everyone gets thrown into the same class and there is no way to make it fair. The amateurs with upper-level experience binging their 2nd or 3rd horse into training level don’t feel like they belong against pros who are riding 5 hours and brining their 30th training level horse into the ring. But the true beginner on their first dressage horse doesn’t want to compete against either of them. We need more people if we want to have more divisions and still have meaningful competition (i.e. not classes of 3 where everyone gets a ribbon).

We had “green horse/green rider” divisions for all levels for a few years. The problem was that USEF/USDF didn’t recognize it, so those scores didn’t count for qualifying for regionals or for year end awards, so people stopped showing in them.

[Scribbler]

@poltroon

The real problem I see comes back to the facilities. We have a generation of barn owners in California who are aging out too, and they are selling. Sometimes when they sell, the property goes to development, which is a higher value use for the land if local zoning allows. But even if they stay as horses, the property tax goes up enormously with the sale, and the younger new owner has to carry the mortgage payment on the new value where the old owner had the land paid off or was paying on a 30 year old loan. This is a big blow in costs (never mind the learning curve) such that even a thriving going concern often doesn’t survive a handover.

Building new facilities is really expensive. It still happens, as a labor of love, but on the whole more are torn out or abandoned to private ownership than stay or are created as boarding stables.

So then the next problem is that with these high costs, fewer have any kind of lesson string. This is especially true in dressage. Where are new riders supposed to learn the sport and get enough skill to buy a horse if we don’t have lesson horses? Many training barns have one or two horses that can be leased or otherwise kind of used for lessons, but a good lesson string has a collection of wonderfully unsuitable horses that are perfect for learning the first canter, for learning to sit the trot, to ride a sensitive horse, for learning tact, horses that are very safe and used to riders bumbling through this or that. The variety of possible mounts is essential too. You can’t put a lesson string in stalls that rent dry for $500 a month.

And this is all before we even talk about how we all crave and honestly need better facilities than we used to make do with - better footing especially. The covered arena. Which costs money.

So now if you can find a barn, and even if you know you want to ride so much that you’re willing to put out the money, barns are just farther away from people, and there are only so many hours in the day. Most women work and also have children, and so to ride for themselves requires finding time that is very dear. For families with one horse-crazy child, it is harder and harder to justify the time and money unless you happen to live near a good riding school.

Riding is pretty much the only expensive sport left that does not enjoy substantial public or municipal investment to make it accessible to the average person.

Golf, tennis, skiing, were all once elite sports requiring expensive infrastructure but have all been made much more affordable. Also enormous funding goes into ice rinks and indoor swimming pools.

Riding is pretty much the only sport that still requires participants carry the full cost, and that is run as a for profit enterprise (or tries to:))

Everything else gets large public subsidies. Maybe horses should too.

[Cowgirl]

I do think that the recession cut out a lot of people with moderate incomes, not just from dressage but from horse sport in general (losing your home value, your retirement growth and having a stagnant income will do that to a person). Now I think we are going through another narrowing in dressage, not just economic but also due to: the ante being upped due to what it takes to be competitive (yes we have amateurs buying six figure horses to compete locally and yes we have a lack of qualified professionals and clinics are $250 plus per ride), aging out, lack of interest from youth, too far to commute for working people, lack of facilities (I am terrified of buying a second horse and doubling my boarding problems), show prices and the show experience (it used to be more of a party), etc., as others have mentioned. I do see a big boom here in western dressage and some of our local professionals moved in that direction and are leading that charge.

In the last 10 years, every single barn I have been at, except for the current one, a total of five other barns, have been sold out of the dressage community and I have been forced to move multiple times because of it. I don’t think this local decline is just my perception.

[HJdaydream]

@MysticOakRanch

Yes, it is declining, except in the moneyed populations. Dressage was a grass roots discipline 25 years ago - you could come in and do well at the lower levels if you had a horse with 3 functional gaits and you knew how to ride. You could make it through the mid-levels (2nd/3rd level) taking a lesson once a week and riding your horse yourself. And it was a logical sport with a defined progression, and a training pyramid that made a lot of sense. When you showed, you got instant feedback and you UNDERSTOOD why you placed where you did. So it appealed to a lot of people. And more and more people started riding dressage for that reason.

It got too popular. Which meant the money found dressage. And the Europeans realized that Americans were a viable market. So fancy horses because a requirement - imported or at least of imported bloodlines. Well, with fancy horses comes the need for better riding - so those horses needed to be in training. And those who rode regular horses, and hauled out for a lesson once a week found themselves losing ground. No longer competitive in the show ring. And Europeans drive the discipline rules through the FEI - so the rules changed to favor the expensive horses.

What had been a sport most could compete in - you could have a $5k horse (heck, my first dressage horse was $2k), $50/week lessons, and about $100 in annual memberships. Dressage shows were relatively inexpensive - even in California, you could show a couple of classes for under $100 - including all fees. Even some of our Olympians were riding Thoroughbreds. Now we have a discipline where the horse is going to cost you $30k (for a green horse) or $100k for a schoolmaster. More if you want to be REALLY competitive. Training and board are $1500/month or more (which is a HOUSE payment in the real world). Show costs have gone up, membership costs have gone up, everything has gone up and up and up.

I believe the quality of horses and riding have gone way up - but as a result, the grass roots rider, the vast majority of us are PRICED OUT. It isn’t fun to go to a show when you know you aren’t at all competitive. I see a lot of people complain that the horse that won “did this, and did that, it shouldn’t have won -it didn’t even halt”. But reality is, the sport is skewed toward fancy - a halt is a single movement - and the fancy horse will have the competitive edge just based on the fact that “quality of gaits” is included in every single mark. So even if they do get a 5 on the halt, they will get an 8 on the next several movements, even with minor bobbles. If you are riding that plain ol’ $5k horse with 6 gaits, no matter what you do, you can’t make it an 8 mover. You can improve the gaits, and maybe eke out 7s if you do everything perfect.

I relate to your post SO HARD. This was me as a junior. I had a grade paint gelding, that was originally my dad’s heading and healing horse. He was $2500. When I first started riding him (5 years after we got him, and my dad didn’t ride anymore) he spent 2 months with my dressage trainer, trying to learn the very basics, including leads (leads, NOT changes lol).

After that, we took max 1 lesson a week, sometimes only 1 a month. He lived in my backyard, and I had to ride down the street to a small time boarding operation to use an area. My mom and I did everything ourselves at shows, minus being warmed up by my trainer (no full service anything in those days!). I was the definition of “backyard rider”. Our very best rides at the pinnacle of our partnership at 2nd level earned us mid 60’s. They were as precise as could be, but he was just never going to be a fancy warmblood like some of my competitors horses. I loved it all, and it was a great youth, but even then I saw the difference in showing my paint horse and the “real dressage horses”.

Don’t get me wrong, I was proud as hell, but I also do not have interest in showing dressage as an adult unless I can someday afford a fancy warmblood dressage horse LOL.

Just my personal experience though, I’m sure everyone’s various experiences and backgrounds effect their view.

Former western horse:

http://hunkyhanoverian.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/palwestern1.jpg

Turned dressage horse:

http://hunkyhanoverian.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/dressage.jpg

[ladyj79]

@HJdaydream

.

Former western horse:

http://hunkyhanoverian.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/palwestern1.jpg

Turned dressage horse:

http://hunkyhanoverian.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/dressage.jpg

He is the best! :love-struck::love-struck:

[KayGee]

@poltroon

IME, Dressage does better than any other discipline at creating meaningful and useful goals in competition that will fit you even if you don’t have a fancy horse or if you live in an area with too much or too little competition for your class ranking to be useful. The numeric scores and the goals of moving up levels and earning the Medals and other rider qualifications with the 60% score are really terrific and I think any discipline that can figure out how to co-opt some of that sauce would find real benefit. The fact that I can get a judge to give me a meaningful and comparable evaluation for a third level ride even if I’m the only rider who does that test all weekend is actually really powerful.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that everyone is happy with the goals they can reach through competition with the resources that they have.

This. (For me anyways.) I’d rather get a crummy dressage score than guess as to why, or why not, I placed in other disciplines with the exception of glaring errors. For however many minutes, for better or worse, I’m being watched and scored. In a rail class with several horses, the average ‘look’ time is 10-20 seconds. Not a good value imo.

[poltroon]

I think if we want to grow our horse sport in general, we have to move more to an easy model for people sharing horses and not creating a situation where ownership is the only way you can enjoy it or progress in it.

[atlatl]

So many divergent opinions in this thread.

Some decry the lack of training opportunities, while others think it’s unreasonable for boarding stables to offer only full training. Seems to me that if anyone actually wants to make a living in the horse industry, it only helps them to have a reasonably stable (no pun intended) income which pretty much comes from having clients in full training as opposed to infrequent or few lessons.

The whole haves and have nots thing has already been addressed so I won’t go there again.

Regarding sharing horses, there is absolutely nothing stopping people from doing that today. If you want to share a horse, go and find others of a like mind, pool your resources and have at it. I suspect the issue really is that people do not want to make a life-long commitment to a single horse and want to have easy access to multiple horses to move up as they improve. Yeah, that would be great, but we’re talking about a recreational sport; not health care.

I’m in LA county, so definitely feel the pain of the expenses of owning horses. However, I recognize that I CHOOSE to live here.

Back to the original question: I agree with those who have pointed out that horse sports, in general, in the US are becoming more and more expensive particularly in urban areas.

[mvp]

@soloudinhere

And personally I am starting to see the “hunter effect” which always occurs when horse prices get expensive - the adult amateur ranks are filling with people who bougt a $$ horse that is ridden full time by the trainer except for the five minutes of the test because when you spend that much money the horse and the ride better be perfect every time. This means that you have people competing at first level on something with 4th level skills. Sure, you are only competing against yourself yadda yadda but when the person who wins training level adult amateur at regionals also wins the I1 freestyle, you stop wanting to show because it’s a waste of money when people are poor sports like that.

This is what I see… or won’t pay to stay and see.

What’s interesting is that when I point out the masochistic stupidity of expecting the un-moneyed rabble to show in a markedly unlevel playing field in Hunter World, I’m told I ought to compete against myself. Maybe it’s that I’m an adult or that I have to earn the money and choose how to spend it, but I’m not satisfied by that solution to the problem of unfair sport. (And here, the topic is usually about the shamateur problem in Hunter World.)

But maybe Dressage Land is populated by more grown-up, financially responsible adults like me who won’t pay to loose because they didn’t spend enough on purchasing the horse or the full training. Or maybe it’s that you can have a really fun time going up the levels via lessons and clinics without ever going to a horse show, but I think this demographic won’t stay at a show for long if there’s not something in it for them.

[mvp]

@ladyj79

I don’t think you can randomly determine amateur status based on someone being better than you.

that’s totally not a good rubric.

I say this as a generally sub-par “professional”.

You kind of can.

If I understand it, some parts of Western World have ways of assigning horses and riders points based on stuff won. So “better” becomes definable and so does a group like “amateurs,” though ammy/pro that might not be the way to divide folks up anymore.

[atlatl]

@mvp

You kind of can.

If I understand it, some parts of Western World have ways of assigning horses and riders points based on stuff won. So “better” becomes definable and so does a group like “amateurs,” though ammy/pro that might not be the way to divide folks up anymore.

Yes, AQHA has a novice division which I’m ok with. However that won’t address the perceived “unfairness” of people having nicer horses or access to and resources that support full training.