At the risk of pissing people off, but that is ridiculous! Maybe dressage land should go the scoring route of reining. Plus or minus on each movement, the highest being a plus 2, the lowest being a minus 2.
Agree. PLUS - the concept of removing gaits from the scoring. That will go a long way toward leveling the playing field. Folks that will never be able to afford an uber-mover will still feel like their training is what is being judged, not how fancy the judge thinks their horse is.
Fair question - I submit that lateral walks, 4 beat trots, and lateral canters, would all render the movement incorrectly performed and not get more than a 4. JMHO
Used to be…back in the dark ages…you had a “Gaits” score in the collective marks. That was the ONLY place where gaits were evaluated…NOT in every…single…movement.
Were you responding to me? If the gaits are not correct, the movement would not be correct. Four lateral canters would lower the score for the whole movement. It’s not about the fanciest gaits. Your horse lopes properly, they aren’t going to lose marks for it (or at least shouldn’t, they should score a 0 on that maneuver)
I’m pretty sure if a reining horse was pacing during it’s circles, it would be marked down for not doing the correct gait. A horse with a less fancy lope would not be.
ETA more
ETA because I had a brain fart and Reining horses don’t trot in their patterns!
Well, tell that to the trainers in the L-judges seminars I attended. I can’t count how many times the instructors used the word “brilliance” as applied to a descriptor to a gaits score.
Guess you missed where I was talking about reining scoring methods, not dressage, where apparently brilliance is more important than correct gaits and maneuvers. Dressage has a problem as do most disciplines. Taking a kick at me for making a suggestion helps how?
jvranrens suggested that maybe dressage should adopt the reining scoring system:
Then Dbliron asked, possibly in relation to the reining scoring suggestion:
to which jvanrens replied:
So all of jvanrens replies read to me as discussing how the issue would be handled if scored in the system reining uses. In reining, it is not about the fanciest gaits. Therefore, theoretically, a dressage scoring system modeled off of the reining scoring could eliminate the hyperfixation on gaits.
In dressage right now, it absolutely is about the fanciest gaits. Personally I don’t know the first thing about reining scoring either, but it sounds like an intriguing idea, to me. Probably go over like a sack of hammers with the PTB though.
Yes but… (I’m asking the question here, not offering an opinion,) shouldn’t a horse with naturally God-given beautiful movement score higher than a horse with perfectly adequate gaits if all the other qualities of the test are equal? Would going back to just the consideration of the gaits in the collectives do that adequately?
If you want to reward the training…then judge the training…Then the judges would actually have to judge the movement. I guarantee you there will be differences in quality…like GP horses that can’t hold an entry halt.
Yes…put the focus on training and give credit for the horse’s natural ability in the gait score…where the directive is for “correctness” of the gait, not how flashy/bling/brilliant is the gait. Eg, this is where lateral trots, canters, 4-beat canters, etc can be judged and marked down…and quit obsessing with 2-foot overtracks.
I think there can be a bonus point given at the end for the flash, but honestly this gaits thing has gotten us backwards as a sport. When you can buy an 8 mover and ruin its gaits to get 5s and 6s on every movement, but enough high 6s, you can get your medal. The medal is supposed to show proficiency and you just screwed up a horse!!!
The hyper traditionalist answer is…no. Dressage has endured a long evolution from a military training tradition to a classical art to what is is today, in our context, as a supposedly objectively judged sport.
So this one thing to judge the correctness of a movement, but another to call some idea of a “brilliant gait” in that what? It is bigger? Loftier? Higher-leggier? Even if the dramatic gait compromises the correctness of the movement as we see with the stiff backs and braced necks today? Disunited hoof falls?
The only way to be “objective” would be to judge the horse against its previous gait quality as it moved up the levels. And that’s one thing for famous GP horses but quite another thing for the 99% of the rest of people going up the levels.
And anyway, as has been pointed out, gait quality is dramatically more consequential in lower levels than in FEI where the z-scores (closeness to the “average” at that level) quality are closer.
So Hegelstrand can breed out his alien giraffe horses, they move big and score big, and we can all just keep buying into a big gaits arms race if we care about gait “quality” (scores).
Another point I’ve been wanting to make is that our sport is shrinking and part of that is that an extravagent mover is hard to sit when it’s not through. If you create a system where the newbies and the amateurs have to be overmounted to compete, where a smaller mover might be easier for them to learn to get through and more fun and comfy to ride, you are going to lose people from the sport. You will lose them from the sport if they have to choose between home ownership and buying a horse fancy enough to score well. There are plenty of wonderful horses who are not 8 movers who can do dressage. When their beautiful, harmonious tests get a 58 because they had a mistake or two and because their 6 movement limits every score, you turn people away from a sport which, at its heart, is supposed to be about training. AND you turn away all the extra people who just want to do a dressage show now and then to test their training.
But the biggest elephant in this room is HOW to get it done. You are never going to get the PTB to agree because they are focused on fielding International teams. It is the international landscape that has to change. How can that happen?
For reference here are some videos from the Sweet Briar archives showing the 1948 dressage team in training.
Look around and look at the loose reins…the horse’s nose is always in front of the vertical…there is little/no overtrack in the extended trot, and according to the video the riders would post the extended trot in competition.
Robert Borg placed 4th with Klingsor
And Willi Schultheis riding in a snaffle with drop noseband
I haven’t showed dressage for a long time, but when I did, I had a horse who usually got 7s on gait scores, and when we rode a movement well, the judge would award a 7, with the comment of “Very correct leg yield!” Or whatever it was. That was in the US. You’re like, “But it’s not even an 8? You’re saying the 7 is the best we can do at this. Awesome.”
More recently, I’ve gone along as a groom with a friend to British Dressage shows, riding her Connemara, who is calm, correct, and willing, but moves like a pony. Same sh1t, different country, different decade. My friend is a lovely rider, but the Connie is a 6/7 mover, at best, and when he does something well, he gets a 7. My friend got very disheartened, saying, “I don’t know what else I can do.” I responded with, “Nothing. He moves like a native pony. He hasn’t got floaty, flashy gaits. Why do you think I quit competitive dressage back in 2005? Dressage shows are expensive, and if I really want to be disappointed and upset, I can find ways to do that for free.” (I’m the best groom!). You hear those success stories of off-breeds who win against warmbloods, but they are the exception, and both horse and rider have to be exceptional. An average warmblood, with an average rider, will beat an average British native or QH and their average rider because the ‘base score,’ if you will, is higher, due to the gaits. The warmblood rider can afford more mistakes. The native pony rider has to execute a pretty flawless test to compensate for their low gait scores.
Decrease the importance of gaits in dressage scores, you will start cutting into the guts of some of these problems. You can buy gaits and you can breed them, but at what cost? These horses bred with extremely flamboyant gaits seem more prone to fun stuff like CVSM and DSLD. It also makes the top levels of the sport more corrupt because it’s something you can throw money at and improve your odds of winning, and as we all know, there is now f&9ck tons of money tied up in the breeding, selling, and training of these horses. Too much. It makes the lower levels feel more inaccessible, because people who can’t afford the 8 mover feel there is no point in trying to compete. It lends itself to abuse like what we are now seeing, because like the TWH people have known for years, you can make gaits even more dramatic by doing dodgy things to your horses.