In my last email I took you to Anja Beran’s workshop. A few days later I was at an equine science conference, while the FEI world championships ran in Aachen at the same time. The competition kept finding its way into our conversations. At lunch one day we agreed quickly that the sport has welfare problems, and came apart on the question of good examples. A colleague named a rider he considered light. That surprised me. I had assumed, without ever checking, that none of us would find much to praise in that arena. I knew the name and had my doubts, but the sport is his world in a way it has never been mine. So a few days later I watched the live stream. I wanted to understand what he was seeing.
I watched the way I have learned to watch. Not the piaffe, the moments around it. What I found was a heavy contact that never changed, from the first halt to the last stride. The horse answered with tension. Open mouth, short neck, even in the extensions. I understand the hold. A looser rein risks the judges calling the frame open, and it gives the horse room to make a decision of his own, which costs accuracy, and accuracy is what wins. But a Grand Prix horse should be able to carry himself in balance, follow the rider’s cues with ease. This is the level where the rein should be needed least. Yet the hands never gave.
A few days earlier I had watched Anja ride. There are moments in her work where she seems to disappear. The horse has found his balance, and she lets him carry it, and for a few strides you forget anyone is riding at all. Then the balance wavers and she is back, quietly, and then gone again. And she works this way through everything, the same care for how the horse stands as for the passage. Alex taught me to start even further down, with how I hand Blondie a treat, both of us in balance.
That is what Blondie and I are looking for in our trot-walk transitions. They are not there yet. But in the good ones I can feel the walk arriving carried, and the rein goes quiet in my hand because there is nothing left in it to hold. That is the picture I brought to the live stream, and it is why we saw two different rides.
And he was not wrong, from where he stood. Compared to the other rides in that competition, this pair really was slightly softer. A few grams less on the reins stand out when everything around them is heavy. If competition dressage is what you watch, this is what is seen as light. I had seen another rider in that competition, earlier, who gave some rein more often. But there were mistakes, visible ones, and mistakes cost placings, and nobody studies the riding of someone who does not win. My colleague and I had watched dressage with different pictures in our heads. His was the sport arena. Mine was Anja’s riding school.
I flew home without an answer to the bigger question, the one underneath the conference. What actually improves life for the horses. Everyone in that room wanted that. That is what struck me most, in the end. I was surrounded by people who had given their working lives to horses, and we did not agree on where the line sits, the line of what each of us accepts.
I want to ride. Some don’t. I accept to ride with a bit, even a double bridle. Others wouldn’t. And I understand them. If all you had ever seen was competition riding, or riding without skill or knowledge, I think you would have to conclude that we should stop riding altogether. I might have concluded it myself. What kept me from it was what I got to see, Anja’s horses, and the horses coming out of Alex’s work, horses that seem to gain something from being ridden. When I ride, the minimum is that I do no harm. Ideally we both enjoy it. Some days I think Blondie and I get there. But I cannot tell you where exactly the line runs, not even my own. Each of us draws it somewhere and has to live with where we drew it.
If I only worked with the people who draw the line exactly where I draw it, I would be working nearly alone. What I am afraid of is the all-or-nothing fight. It feels principled, and I understand the pull of it. But the horses in that arena are wearing their bridles today, and a fight that ends the sport someday helps none of them now. A few grams less on the reins is not enough, and it is still better than nothing. And there is something all of us can do. To ride like Anja may take more than one lifetime. But a balanced trot-walk transition on a quiet rein is within reach for most of us. The next morning I was in the arena with Blondie, working on ours, trying to make the rein go quiet a little sooner.
Michaela
Happy horses make happy people!
PS: Learning to see is its own skill, and Anja is worried it is getting lost. She has written a book about it, Blickschulung, training the eye. It shows what is rewarded in the dressage arena next to what healthy movement actually looks like, using animations built from real competition footage. It changed how I watch. There is a YouTube video in English here
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