That just kills me.
That mare is sweet and obedient (not forward enough, not even for Training level, IMO) but completely capable of a 60%+ Training level test.
Why pretend she’s 3rd and 4th level? You can tell even from the grainy video that she simply doesn’t have the top line or the impulsion of a horse correctly trained to that level.
Agreed, but I’ll go one better. Honestly, my flashy tobiano mare goes pretty much the same way as the horse Nick is on. But she ain’t doin’ no Third or Fourth Level dressage test. She wins in ranch riding and ranch horse pleasure.
(Warning: What follows is potentially an unkind remark)
After watching Nick’s horse at the canter, I had strange visions of circus elephants parading through town, their heads and trunks lazily swinging side-to-side. Is that the way the horse is supposed to look at the canter, for Third and Fourth Level? And why are his hands buried in his lap? 
I will say the mare seemed perfectly happy to do what Nick thought to be Third and Fourth Level tests. She dinked along obligingly on her forehand, doing her lead changes the way she wanted. When the test called for a half pass, she was quite willing to trot the diagonal just as Nick asked her to do.
I think his in-hand efforts to teach her to piaffe frustrated her much more than anything he did in the saddle, if you discount his considerable unbalanced poundage slamming down on her back with every canter stride. 
He put similar restrictions in place when he was casting about for a schoolmaster to (free?) lease. The owner had to be willing to let Nick take the horse to a barn of his choosing (assuming there were still any around that hadn’t closed their doors to him) and work with it completely unsupervised.
Not surprisingly, there was not a rush of horses on offer to him. He’d be bounced out of the tack on a true Grand Prix working trot. (So would I. The difference is that I make no claims to expertise in dressage. Or, for that matter, in any horse related discipline. “Moderately capable with hunters in my younger days” is all I got.)
IIRC, Nick claimed to have been a working student for Lorinda Lende for years. He stopped riding with her when she became jealous of his talent and refused to put him on her upper level horses.
I think someone who knew Lorinda Lende contacted her to verify and she vaguely remembered Nick coming for a few lessons.
I’d have to look back at the original thread to be sure, but I think this is what happened.
Oh, and fun fact…Lorinda Lende coincidentally had a horse named “Maestro”. Lol.
Really? This suggests that the woman “Corey” in the book is Lorinda Lende, as the story is the same. He was just a teen at the time, who as he recounts helped train a horse to fourth level (with little formal training and just with natural ability) and she laughingly showed the horse instead of letting him, as promised, show the horse. She was apparently jealous of him and this story was just odd. There is also a set of photos of him riding with “different hair cuts” to ward off some person’s obvious comments that he was only there for a week, not the amount of time he claimed.
I don’t think he’s pretending. I think he honestly doesn’t know the difference. He makes a horse shuffle and thinks it’s a piaffe. Presto! That’s now a GP horse.
He clearly doesn’t understand that riding through the pattern of a Third Level test doesn’t automatically make that horse a Third Level horse without the appropriate level of strength, impulsion, balance, suppleness, self-carriage, etc. The poor horse’s upside down muscling speaks volumes about how incorrectly she was being ridden.
He’s far from alone though. Lots of people seem to think capable of a flying change = a Third Level horse. When I was a teenager living in the back of beyond with no access to dressage training or information, none of us even knew what “on the bit” was, let alone how to achieve it. We still went to small local dressage shows and rode our horses exactly the same way in every test, just with smaller circles and harder movements as we moved up the levels (albeit not very far up lol). Anyone who cracked 60 was considered amazing. 40’s weren’t unusual.
When I look back now at the judges we brought in back then, I realize what absolute saints they were to be encouraging while still scoring us fairly. Several of them are now senior and FEI level judges.
The difference is that for most people at least, when they know better, they do better. Nick should know better. He has certainly been told how and why he needs to improve, and has had ample opportunity to check his ego at the door and take lessons with someone who could actually turn him into a half decent rider. But his mantra (and I quote verbatim) is: “I don’t take lessons, I teach them.”
So…just got home from Nationals and will begin reading his captivating account of the death of his dressage career tomorrow. Right now I just need sleep!
After watching some of his videos and seeing some of his photos…how can I put this…am I correct that this was the man who grabbed other people’s photos (mostly women, I understand) off the internet in order to fat shame them? After hearing that, I had assumed he’d be of a rather athletic build himself. Imagine my surprise. I am 100% against fat shaming, but I do, at least, assume that the various highly public fat shamers are themselves looking down upon people based upon their own high level of fitness. Not that it being fit makes it any better to fat shame, but it certainly makes that fat shaming less pathetically hypocritical.
Question for all you dressage experts: what is/are the main difference(s) between “classical” and modern/German dressage?
I interviewed Charles de Kunffy, among others, for an article on this very topic and loved his answer to that question. He said he doesn’t accept that the way a horse is presented in classical dressage is different than for competition dressage. There is no such thing as classical vs modern or competition; there is just good dressage and bad dressage.
That makes abundant sense to me, but I’m not a dressage person so thanks for sharing. I must admit that the Nuno video above wasn’t as earth-shattering as I had expected, so I thought I’d ask.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/narcissistic-personality-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20366662
That is a question that could spark responses worthy of being moved to Current Events lol.
The difference, some of which may be perceived differences, is that some modern dressage riders use training methods, think Rolkur but not necessarily that extreme, which result in false frames and a lack of harmony.
Classical
Here is a YouTube of Reiner Klimke which has been edited to show the harder movements. Notice his horse is never behind the bit, he looks calm, focused, listens, harmonious but not flashy.
A contemporary example, Charlotte du Jardins https://youtu.be/DcDLLxgWa_Y
Modern
Anke, one of the architects of the movement. Notice the arguably flashier movements but at the expense of harmony. Tail wringing, over active mouth, head behind the vertical, resistance in the more collected movements like the pirouette and piaffe, agitation at the halt. https://youtu.be/qbjolVA0p_A
His floppy ears. 
I remember being unimpressed with Anky’s test in 2012… why are we at the Olympics if we cannot sit our horse’s extended trot?
I do think this is part of a greater epidemic, which has been discussed ad nauseum and probably doesn’t need to be brought up again, but-- we are breeding greater gaits and horseflesh than most people can or even deserve to sit on.
Exactly, and while as Mara suggest mare was content to do it ( hence her sainthood status, other horses would tolerate him for a very short period of these shenanigans ), we should be better trainers; if we intend to ask things of them it is our duty to be sure we’ve done the time consuming, hard, investment of insuring they can, physically do it.
Yes, that section in the book would highly suggest this. And the horse that went off to the show without Nick, which really upset him, was named “Royal” in the book. No clue which horse that really was.
But I’m pretty certain that Metal Pond Farm in the book is actually Iron Springs Farm (poor Mary Alice Malone). And the horse NP refers to as Walk Around is IRL the stallion Roemer.
Many of his thinly veiled aliases are so unclever as to be silly.
Aha! So that’s where Nick got the idea to ride with excessively long reins and his hands in his lap. But in this video, Nuno still maintains a light, sympathetic connection to the horse’s mouth. There’s an elasticity in Nuno’s arm; his hands are neither fixed nor bracing against the horse’s mouth. (At least that’s what I believe I am seeing).
In anything— skateboarding, guitar playing, painting, horseback riding— there’s always a potential problem when one watches a video and then tries to emulate said video without having an objective consultant nearby who can say, “Uhm, I don’t think you’re doing what you think you’re doing.”
And what people don’t see, the seat and leg are MUCH more important than the reins when trainers like Nuno ride. Most of the horses reactions to Nuno are coming from seat and leg, not reins. Takes years to develop that level of riding.
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