At a recent dressage clinic, the highly regarded presenter/judge/clinician, said, “I didn’t even notice” that the 1st level horse wasn’t coming close to tracking up in its working trot. I marveled at this, since when I went through the “r” program many many years ago, we were told a horse could never score well that couldn’t track up. This horse in the clinic had been give many 7s by this judge (since it was a New Test clinic) and an 8 on the trot lengthening in which the horse just barely tracked up, though it had a bit of front end enthusiasm. Further pressed, the clinician said, “they can always be more forward,” implying that this was totally correct work for this level.
During the discussion, we were also told that the reason the coefficient of 2 on the “gaits” collective had been removed was because we didn’t want to reward the fancy horse so much.
Now, in my experience, it’s only the fanciest horses that can pull off a decent dressage test if they aren’t forward, I mean, really nicely on the aids. So, by not focusing on this we are in effect, really discriminating against the mediocre horse, because with a missing motor, he is nothing. With impulsion and thoroughness you can make quite a nice horse out of a pretty poor mover, but now he’ll never amount to a hill of beans.
Further, the encouragement to “slow down” in the first level trot lengthening encourages bad riding, as the trainers now seek to help their students achieve a level of suspension and front end action that does not include hind end push. In my experience, letting the first level horse get a bit quick is fine as long as the stride lengthens, because then the trot keeps its ground-covering quality. With practice, the horses eventually will shift into a lengthening that offers all the qualities desired by the second level mediums, but for first level, my vote is keep the motor! Don’t slow it down!
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We’ve eliminated the stretching canter at second level, because everyone did it so badly – yes, but what a great education we got trying to learn to do it! We now straighten the haunches to the track out of the haunches in – what’s up with that? We always learned to straighten over the hindquarters! Further, I was told that engagement didn’t really matter in a walk pirouette. What? Isn’t that one of our preparatory collecting movements for the piaffe?
Over the years we’ve eliminated the mandatory score of 4 for a horse that steps back at x because why? Everybody does it – especially the highest level horses. In my opinion, this 4 should stand as the score for this error; the horse that does it, is not thinking forward.
Well, enough of my ranting, just depressing me how my discipline is now only about great horses and politics, witness the 3 scores on the rider. What is the judge going to do there? Reward her buddies. Yuck.