Right now, the dressage world, especially in Europe, is abuzz over an article in Germany’s respected St. Georg magazine that suggests the methods of several dressage trainers, including Olympic gold medalist Anky van Grunsven and her husband/trainer, Sjef Jansen, are unethical (see p. 44). Without condoning or condemning their methods, it does seem a good time to ponder the relationship between training a horse to ride and training a horse to compete.

You’d think the two wouldn’t be different, but they often are. Why? Because human nature always looks for shortcuts in training that don’t take months or years. Correct, classical training is a particularly significant subject in dressage because it should–really, must–take years to develop horses’ acceptance and confidence in the aids and the muscle strength necessary to perform passage, piaffe, one-tempi changes and canter pirouettes.

But it’s also a sport that lives by the numbers, and so a clever rider can overcome a weakness in one movement with exceptional scores in others. This is especially true in the Grand Prix, where the preponderance of scores for piaffe, passage and their transitions (about 40%) means that scoring 8s or 9s in those movements could outweigh other deficiencies.

Thus, training a horse to ride and training a horse to compete can diverge at this point. Most of us will never experience the level of discipline that’s necessary for both horse and rider, in training and in competition, to be competitive at the top of any sport. They say that perfect practice is the key to perfect performance, and it’s true. The rider/trainer must have the timing, strength and experience to give a horse the proper aids at the proper moment, but he or she must also have the mental discipline to always give them correctly, since most horses really do what we ask them to do. Still, the horse must be inclined to, or learn to, accept those aids and react appropriately–and the higher the level, the more immediate that reaction must be.

Few of us will ever compete at Grand Prix, in a grand prix, or at advanced, and it’s easy to watch someone schooling at that level and criticize them as too tough or even cruel. I’d say that 99 percent of the time, that’s not the case. But horses are as individual as humans, and while schooling, top riders will certainly require their horses’ total concentration and effort.

You may recall that at last summer’s Athens Olympics, Ulla Salzgeber’s great Rusty spooked repeatedly at the TV microphones partially hidden behind flowers at ringside during the Grand Prix Special. Well, I got to watch Salzgeber schooling her powerful partner on the day between the Special and the freestyle. Most of us would have probably tried to quietly reassure Rusty about the flapping flowers, attempting to regain his confidence that monsters wouldn’t eat him. But that’s not at all what Salzgeber did. Through her uncompromising aids, Salzgeber told Rusty, “You will ignore those distractions and think of nothing but my commands. You will trust me that nothing will happen to you as long as you are obedient to me.” And it worked. With no spooks, he nearly won the freestyle.

To compete at the top, you absolutely have to push yourself and your horse beyond what either of you would normally do. It requires asking more of them than most of us ever will, usually because we couldn’t ask it of ourselves. The key, of course, is to do it progressively and as correctly as possible, to produce, above all, a horse that’s content in his life and confident in himself.