PrintOur columnist analyzes one of the most common jumping faults—and how to avoid it.
During the summer of 1961 I was working as a very lowly assistant trainer of Morgan show horses at the Green Mountain Stock Farm in Randolph, Vt., when I drove down to South Hamilton, Mass., one weekend to watch the Wofford Cup, then the U.S. National Championship Three-Day Event.
Although I’d never seen an event, nor jumped a jump, I decided that this was the sport for me. I was 20, or just about to be, and between my sophomore and junior years at Dartmouth College (N.H.) when I started switching riding careers.
Just as everyone does, I’d get to see photographs of myself jumping, and just as everyone does, I’d compare those photos to pictures of the great and famous riders of the time.
Fifty years ago, many of the U.S. Equestrian Team riders had come up through the equitation ranks, and many of them had won or placed highly in the Medal Maclay Championships, as we all called them. I’d look at photos of Bill Steinkraus, Frank Chapot, George Morris, Mike Page, Mike Plumb, Mary Mairs, Bernie Traurig, and similarly accomplished riders, and most of their jumping photographs showed a similar style. Their eyes and chins would be up, their backs would be flat, their hip and knee angles would be closed, their legs would touch the horse just behind the girth, with their heels firmly down, and their hands would be softly forward, allowing the horse complete use of his head and neck in a proper bascule.
I’d look at photographs of myself, and my upper body would be too far forward, my lower leg would have swung back, and sometimes I’d be looking up, and sometimes I wouldn’t be.
I knew my style wasn’t correct, but I didn’t know the “mechanics” of how to fix it. I’d ask some of the good riders, “How come your posture is better than mine?” and they’d just make vague generalities about being experienced riders, which I already knew.
The people who coached me must have seen what I was doing, and although some of them, like Jack Le Goff, were famous trainers, none of them explained how not to jump up the neck and how not to let my lower leg swing back. They’d just tell me not to do it. Strange as it now seems, I can only think that they hadn’t broken the process into component pieces, or, if they had, they didn’t care to share that process with me.
A Lightbulb Moment
During the summer of 1974, while the USET three-day team was training at Wylie, in England, prior to the Burghley World Championships, I took reel after reel of super-8 films of Mike Plumb jumping. His posture was always perfect, and his leg, I’m convinced, hasn’t slipped back one centimeter in 50 years.
Back in Strafford, Vt., that fall, after we won the gold medal, despite my bad posture and wrong technique, I studied and studied those films, some of Mike and some of myself, in slow motion, until one day I had that “lightbulb” moment. It seemed simplicity in itself, and I couldn’t believe it had taken 13 years of doing it wrong before I figured it out.
