In the beginning of my journey into Dressage, there was confident talk about the longevity of the Dressage horse.
It was generally accepted that the Dressage horse wasn't expected to reach Grand Prix until they were nearly in their teens, and perfectly acceptable to be working towards it even after they'd hit teenage years.
The twenty-year-old and retired Dressage horse was evidence that the training had been incorrect, rushed, incomplete.
The thirty-year-old Dressage horse was something we as riders genuinely believed we could reach for with our own horses, insufficiently bred for high-level Dressage as they were.
We looked at living “Masters” with scrutiny and hesitation. We quoted the “Old Dead Guys” (ODG's) aka confirmed Dressage Masters, as easily as a teenager might quote popular movies.
A horse coming behind the vertical was commonly known as an error and was to be avoided at all costs.
Our instructors told us to watch the best riders of the time, to memorize their best tests and commit to memory the elegance, the lightness of aids, the invisibility of the aids.
Taking your horse out for a gallop was expected regularly, and the benefits drilled into our brains between every outing.
We believed that scoring 100% was not possible, but always worth reaching for. That a Dressage test was not a competition with other riders and horses, but instead it was feedback about your progress at a specific level.
I really miss those times. I really miss believing that Dressage riders were always working hard to improve themselves and their horses, with the well-being of their horse being a primary requirement. When the longevity of the Dressage horse was proof of your training, not some arbitrary Dressage competition score.
But I also miss a time when it wasn't applauded that a 20-year-old Grand Prix horse being ridden overbent, with heavy rein aids and arthritic movement was still being shown after years of incorrect training.
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Wow – haven’t seen a dressage video the likes of either of those in a long while. It was very easy to tell that the horse in the second video was in pain and having trouble – looks very similar to what my arthritic horse does on a bad day. 😛
Thanks for posting – good thoughts to think about.
Wow! You hit home with “I really miss believing that Dressage riders were always working hard to improve themselves and their horses, with the well-being of their horse being a primary requirement.” To that I would only add that I miss knowing that the horse and rider pairs you watched at Grand Prix forged their partnership over many years of learning from each other, and weren’t just created by someone writing a really big check!