PrintWest Palm Beach, Fla.—Jan. 29
If Day 1 was all about simplicity, the afternoon session of Day 2 of the Global Dressage Forum North America was all about stepping outside of your comfort zone and incorporating fresh tools in training.
After a lecture on biomechanics from Stefan Stammer (see tidbits below), the program moved on to in-hand work with Bo Jena. Jena demonstrated working two horses with long lines. One horse was younger and greener, and the other more experienced. With both, he started out doing simple walk, trot, canter work, before moving on to cavalletti.
“Every horse needs to go over cavalletti; it doesn’t matter if it’s an eventing, jumping, dressage or driving horse,” said Jena.
“If a horse has jumping blood in him, he’ll never step on a pole; he’ll canter over all of them or jump the poles. If a horse has dressage blood, he’ll ‘clunk, clunk, clunk’ over the poles,” he joked.
With the more experienced horse, Jena did half steps, sideways work and even a working canter pirouette with the long lines. Jena demonstrated extended trot down the long side of the covered arena at the Jim Brandon Equestrian Center, sprinting after the horse.
“If anyone has ever run down one long side, you know how quickly you get out of breath,” said Felicitas von Neumann-Cosel, a member of the expert panel, along with Anne Gribbons, Kathy Connelly, Betsy Steiner, Leslie Reid and Jan Ebeling, for Jena’s demonstration. “You ran, you talked, and we could still understand you. I could see with the first horse, who was kind of nervous about the crowd, you worked a lot with counter-positioning, and I liked that.”
Jumping, Even For Dressage Horses
When Andreas Stano introduced the lively Ingrid Klimke, four-star eventer and Grand Prix dressage rider, he called her, “Our mentor and our superhero,” and most in the crowd seemed to agree with that assessment.
With candor and wit, Klimke told stories about her father, the late Olympic gold medalist Reiner Klimke, about her eventing career, and she talked about balancing her career with her family life.
“I am the only one who had a father who was competing in eventing and dressage, so I grew up with this,” said Ingrid with a laugh after Stanos introduced her as one of the only riders in the world on the top of both sports. “Seeing my father and his friends, there was no specializing. They all did the jumping and the dressage and they evented. In those days, the specialization wasn’t as high as it is now—not with the riders, and not with the horses.”
Ingrid explained how all of her dressage horses do no more than three days of straight dressage work in the school, and often they only do one or two days of it, before doing some variety of cross-training.
“On Tuesdays, the cavalletis are out, and it doesn’t matter if it’s dressage horse or eventing horse, young horse or older horse,” she said. “Once a week, I jump them all, so they all like jumping. Even if the dressage horses don’t have the scope, they like to do something different. I can really work on their back muscles that way. And what all dressage horses like is to go out and do work on the hills. They are not fast enough so they can’t keep up with the eventers—and no one beats Butts Abraxxas [Ingrid’s partner for team gold in eventing with Germany at the London Olympics]—but the next day in the dressage ring, they are ready for work.”
After showing a video of her cross-country round in London, Ingrid mounted a 5-year-old stallion owned by Marydell Farm, Doctor Wendell MF—a horse she’d never sat on before. Ingrid first did some stretching warm-up work, incorporating the cavaletti, and then she went into trot-walk-trot transitions and added in some canter work as well.
Ingrid worked on getting the horse to accept her aids in a timely manner, and to start to learn to carry more weight on his hindquarters.
“You always have to make sure that they’re in front of your leg and driving aids. In everything I do, starting it the warm-up, I want to have a sensitive horse so he’s easily on my aids, thinking of me the whole time. My half-halt must be more interesting than everything outside.”
As a special treat to the spectators and her mount, Ingrid had the ring crew set up a small jump. The stallion had no issues with the little fence, and Ingrid looked perfectly natural jumping in dressage tack.
Simplicity Again
Next on the roster of demonstrations, and last for the day and the forum, was Germany’s Wolfram Wittig. Wittig spoke less during his teaching demonstrating, but his short sentences carried a lot of weight, both with the rider and the spectators. As the horse, a 9-year-old Hanoverian ridden by Shannon Dueck, warmed up, Wittig offered concise snippets of advice that greatly impacted the overall picture.
“If the collection is higher, the contact is softer,” he said. “It is important, if the horse is going in shoulder-in or half-pass, that the rhythm of the trot should not change.”
Throughout his session, Wittig worked to help the rider he was teaching bring her horse to a better balance. The pair finished by doing very polished work, without ever upsetting the horse.
“It’s important to always have a positive end with the horses,” said Wittig. “If you do this kind of quiet work, it’s impossible that your horse is going to be injured. Ride, 30, 40, 50 minutes, it’s not a problem.”
