I earned my bronze a year ago, and am working towards my silver. This post brings a whole new light to what my mare and I accomplished. Honestly, after everything I spent on lessons, shows, tack, and maintenance on my horse, I never even thought of USDF’s charge for my certificate and award were out of line. I went the cheap route too, trained an inexpensive two yo through the levels and got my scores in twelve tests.
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I have just started showing recognized dressage, switching from eventing. The medals give me a fun goal to work towards as an AA. It would be cool to get some idea of the stats - like what percentage of AAs get a bronze. I’m happily working on my 2nd level scores after 2 shows for my 1st, and think 3rd is a doable goal maybe next year. Gives some nice structure to the effort.
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Denny did an article for COTH a few years back, and he shared stats he’d looked up on eventers that said fewer than 1% compete at the advanced level, about 3% at intermediate and 7% at prelim. So 90% are at training and below. 15% are at training so 75% are at novice and below.
I’d really like to know the same sort of info for recognized dressage shows.
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I did an analysis of this a few years back but haven’t visited it lately. I’ll dig around and see if I can find something.
The short & quick answer is “no”, you can’t assume that those who have Gold already have Bronze. Too easy to go lease the schoolmaster and skip the first 2 medals. This is the primary reason I created the CLS Rider Rating system. It’s based on the Dutch National points system and requires demonstrated proficiency at lower levels before earning the upper level achievement.
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