Since my weekends tend to be dominated by horse shows, clinics and other general pandemonium, people tend not to schedule lessons with me on the few weekends I’m actually around—I guess my peeps are used to my absence. And it’s nice to have a quiet weekend, especially on weekends when there’s terrific live coverage of some little local horse show like the Rolex Kentucky CCI****.
We worked horses early, with my laptop sitting on the dryer for my staff and I to check in on as they started cross-country on Saturday. We got everything done by midday so I could make pizza, and we enjoyed watching rides in the comfort of my cozy little apartment, away from the cold and rain. It was really quite delightful.
But it got me thinking about a couple of things.
First, cross-country day was a bit of carnage—while (gratefully!) no one was seriously hurt, there were a lot of disappointed riders walking home on foot after falls, stops and other disasters on the appropriately challenging course. And in an Olympic year, this is how it should be: a challenging course that separates the men from the boys. It got me thinking about how underprepared I think our dressage people are sometimes, how expensive and challenging it is to get a similar experience in dressage. Short of the World Dressage Masters, there’s no way to learn how to deal with the deer-in-the-headlights feeling that Catherine so aptly described in riding against the Living Legends of the sport without spending a lot of dinero to get to Europe.
I don’t have a solution to that problem. I believe that there is a European circuit for young show jumping riders; I wish that there was something akin for us, for young dressage professionals to get thrown in the deep end without actually getting thrown in the deep end. But as of now there’s not, and certainly as one of those young dressage professionals I’m in no rush to get my tail to Europe because of sage advice Lendon Gray gave me—”Don’t go over there until you’ve won everything over here.” Seems like a reasonable plan. But I think for others, it’d be great if we had our own DQ-y Rolex showdown somewhere.
Totally unrelatedly, I also found myself frustrated with some of the commentary from the audience on the live blogs. We tuned into Eventing Nation‘s coverage and found that a lot of time was spent disparaging USEFNetwork’s live stream, its periodic technical difficulties, the music, the advertising. I was struck by this when Liz Austin and I did our live blog at the WDM this winter.
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Did everyone forget that this service is provided for free? Not even just free to USEF members—free. It’s paid for by our membership dollars, but also by the ads on the page. All the complaining seemed in pretty bad taste, so I want to make sure that USEF knows how grateful I was for their efforts. Thanks, guys.
Lastly, I got to tune into a little of the TV coverage of the event on NBC Sports on Sunday for show jumping. It was really quite terrific—while it would have, of course, been stellar if they’d covered the whole event in detail, they hit the highlights, did a nice job of explaining the sport without being patronizing, and made it all look incredibly sexy. I bet there were non-horse-people channel flippers who tuned in to the glitzy two hours of coverage and couldn’t look away.
I hope, someday, that someone figures out how to make televised dressage both practical and glamorous. I don’t have any suggestions on that either, so I’m just full of good ideas today. But someone figured out how to sell Snuggies—blankets with sleeves—on television, so one of the great minds of our generation has to be up to this challenge.
Congrats to all on a successful Rolex… and back to work for us!
