Like I said, I’m just a ding-dong amateur. It also appears that Developing Athlete and Emerging Athlete are for different disciplines than this subset (driving and dressage?). So why do we care then if this isn’t that big of a deal to be there?
Some of us don’t care that much, other than the fact that it’s a fantastic learning opportunity not just for the riders involved, but also for all the people who can watch it online.
I’m trying to think of another clinic that you can audit for free from your own couch that has three different clinicians who are all Olympic/World Cup medalists. So far I’m drawing a blank.
It just seems like a shame if that learning opportunity will disappear in the future due to the online reaction from a lot of people who got very whipped up over a 2 1/2 minute highly edited video from a 2 1/2 hour clinic session.
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I’ve been commenting solely on the comments regarding flipping a horse over backwards and the fact these riders are young and impressionable especially to verbal abuse.
I stand by my words.
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Oh well so sad. Abuse no longer tolerated. Must be heartbreaking.
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Could you please post a timestamp for a video from that clinic that shows abuse?
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And I don’t believe that is what she meant 
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Go to Vrooms page on FB and listen to her tell a minor to flip a horse over backwards.
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I’ve watched the video several times, and once again, that is not what she said.
It may be how you interpreted what she said, but those are not the words that came out of her mouth.
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The funny part of your post is that you are speaking as if I’m the only one saying this. I’m but one of a huge number of people saying this. Just admit it’s not a good look at all.
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I won’t swear it’s not in jumpers but that is a part of the US Equestrian elite pathway program in Olympic/FEI World Championship for dressage, driving and eventing as both a talent pipeline AND a training and funding mechanism, so it’s hard to imagine jumpers not conforming to that system in some form or fashion. But since ushja maintains its own comprehensive website it could be defined or potentially even rebranded there. But the point is, this event was a very long way from that level of scrutiny.
Huge numbers of people are wrong all the time.
Or huge numbers of people have different opinions on the same events.
However, sticking with the Dragnet approach of just the facts, those were not the words that came out of her mouth.
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I think, in addition to some election season/political discourse transference, I’m worked up over this whole thing because of the potential for this
When I was a kid and had the luxury of riding every day, sometimes multiple horses a day, I turned up my nose at watching videos. You know, during the VHS era, lol. I didn’t think you could learn from a video.
Now that I’m an adult who’s resource-challenged and geographically-challenged, I realize what a nitwit I was (to some poster’s points re the mental maturity of teenagers).
Access to streaming and on-demand video has been huge for me.
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I don’t get your point of view at all when an admired instructor says were it me I’d flip him over backwards. Logic says an impressionable young person listening would think this is what is required when you’re a star trainer so I should do that too. She is telling me to do it.
If you don’t see that, or acknowledge it’s possible, there’s really nothing else left to say.
Maybe top sport equestrian should he banned since as a collective we seem unable to care for our “toys” - the things we use to advance our egos and ambitions.
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If she had been teaching a bunch of short stirrup kids, I might consider that to be more of a possibility.
Those were not short stirrup kids, even if they had trouble with some of the exercises. They were between 16 and 21, and all of them had ridden and shown and won a lot to get their slots in that clinic in the first place. Some of them have already spent more hours in the saddle and in the show ring than most people do in a lifetime.
As such, I expect that they were going to ride in their sessions on that day, and then confer afterwards with their own trainers to decide which parts of the clinic they could apply to their riding going forward, and which parts would not be helpful for them.
I would expect they did the same thing for all three days at the clinic, not just Saturday.
Maybe I’m just giving those kids and their own trainers more credit as thinking riders than some other people do.
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I’ve worked with a number of kids this age and some of them would think this is what you do just like they learned from a previous instructor to “jerk his face off”.
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I don’t know - to elaborate on MHM’s point, I would think that if any of those kids went home and said to their trainer “my horse won’t stop, should I flip him over backwards?”, the answer would be a resounding NO and that would be the end of that idea. I have a really hard time believing that any of those kids even considered that flipping a horse over backwards would be a good thing to do just because Katie Prudent said it in a clinic. Do you also think those kids believe that they have actual bird brains?
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Actually I imagine kids riding on their own in a ring or elsewhere deciding to try other methods when frustrated with their horse.
Because I’ve seen it.
Y’all can try as hard as you can to discredit my POV. Won’t work.
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Good lord, Knights Mom, flipping a horse over is not normalized in H/J show barns, no matter how much you want to spread that conspiracy.
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So you really think that kids are going to try to flip their horses over backwards when no one is looking just because they heard Katie say she would do that on a livestream? Thinking back to my own riding as a kid, when we rode on our own without the trainer present, we never saw it as an opportunity to hurt our ponies. We would gallop around the fields jumping over bushes and shrubs bareback, we would go down the road to swim in the stream, we would switch ponies, but it never occurred to us to do anything that would hurt our ponies or ourselves. I just don’t get why you think that suddenly the riding youths of America are going to start randomly flipping their horses over backwards because of some random comment in a clinic. It doesn’t take an advanced, long time rider to know that flipping a horse while you are on its back is putting yourself at a huge risk for injury or death. What normal kid would have the strength to even successfully flip a horse over backwards unless it was already up in the air and off its front legs? The whole argument that Katie has now created a bunch of kids who are going to start flipping their horses for fun just defies logic to me.
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It honestly reads like zealotry to me. And you can’t argue reason with zealots. They aren’t open. They’ll argue their points to the death even if they know in their heart of hearts that they are wrong.
Either way, I think the ponies of America are generally safe from flipping, and late teenagers aren’t going to start eating birdseed any time soon.
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