When the bell goes
When the bell goes, I think everyone on the planet feels a little surge of adrenaline and an increase in heart rate. Managing our nerves and our emotions in competition is a massive issue, and there are so many facets to it that it is difficult to know where to start.
I don’t think we will ever eliminate nerves. What we can do is take away some of the reasons for them. And one of the biggest, in my experience, is fear. Fear of what people might say. Fear of what the judge might say. So this article is about the judge: what they are actually doing at C, and why understanding that can take a lot of the pressure off.
A strange thing about horse people
There is something a little bit weird about the horse industry. We take other people’s opinions very, very seriously. There is a saying in England that if you tell a doctor he is a bad doctor, he will shrug, laugh and ignore it. Tell the same doctor he is a bad horseman, and he will be deeply offended.
Tell a doctor he’s a bad doctor and he’ll shrug. Tell him he’s a bad horseman and he’ll be deeply offended.
What it is about horses that makes us react this way, I’m really not sure. But it is there, and you can see it at any competition. Look at the bar at the end of the day. The winners are there having a jolly happy time, and the losers, in inverted commas, are at the back of the room feeling like inferior human beings.
I don’t see players in other sports going off after a bad day feeling that they are lesser people. That kind of stress is not in the slightest healthy or useful. And I think a lot of it comes from a rather incorrect idea of what a judge is there to do.
What a judge actually assesses
Somewhere along the way, a link has been made in dressage between the score and the rider. I don’t think anyone set out to make it, but it is there: the idea that judging assesses training ability and riding ability. If you don’t do well on the day, the thinking goes, you are not a particularly able rider or a particularly able trainer.
That is not what competition is. The purpose of a competition is to assess the performance on that day. Training is a big part of the performance, obviously. But plenty of other things affect it too: the environment, the grounds, the situation on the day, the journey the horse has had to get there. And probably the biggest of all, the natural talent of the horse.
So a rider who puts up a really good performance is not necessarily a better rider than one who puts up a poor performance. It just means that on that day, under those conditions, their performance was better.
No judge in the world can assess the training of a horse. They can’t assess several years of work on the basis of three or four minutes in front of them. What they assess, and usually assess fairly accurately, is the performance of the horse on that particular occasion.
No judge can assess years of training in four minutes. They judge the performance on the day.
If we can relate our competition riding to performance assessment, and get away from the idea that the judge is assessing our training or our ability, I think riders would approach competition in a much more comfortable and relaxed way.
Nine times out of ten, the judge is right
None of this means the judge doesn’t know what they are looking at. Judges are there to assess a performance, and generally they give marks that are sensible and understandable. If there is a disagreement between a judge and a rider over the marks, nine times out of ten the judge is right.
That is not necessarily because they know more than the rider. It is because they can see it dispassionately, objectively, from a distance. The rider is taking in so many feelings from the horse that the judge simply can’t see. With all those sensations coming at you, it can be very difficult to analyse what on earth is going on.
Marks and comments are not the same thing
The marks are usually pretty fair. The comments are a different matter, and I would say riders should not take them quite so seriously.
If riders did some judging themselves, they would realise how little time a judge has to write anything meaningful. The test keeps moving. You have a second or two to put something down before the next movement arrives. That is not the judge doing a bad job. It is simply the time available.
So I would give far more weight to what your trainer, your coach and your peers say than to an odd throwaway comment on a sheet. I see riders who become deeply influenced by the comments, and riders who change the way they ride depending on who is judging. That is the point where things start to go wrong.
Ride it for yourself
Somehow we have to get ourselves thinking only about our own performance. Our performance as it feels to us, not how it might look to Fred on the sideline or Betty in the judging booth.
Ride for how it feels to you, not how it might look to Fred on the sideline or Betty in the judging booth.
When I come down the centre line, I try to disregard the judges. I don’t mean that with any disrespect to them. I mean that I am there doing it for me, not to please them. If I do what I want to do and they understand it, they will give the marks. If they don’t understand it, then I am not really interested in their marks anyway. I think a slight degree of disinterest in what the judges may say is quite healthy.
I am not saying ignore the judge. I am saying ride for yourself. Once riders start trying to do what they believe the judge wants to see, the whole thing becomes really quite messy. I don’t know how you can compete like that.
Don’t dwell on the five per cent
Part of riding for yourself is being realistic about your horse. You may have a horse that doesn’t have a good walk, or doesn’t have a particularly good extension. Then you just have to say, “Okay, I’m only going to get a six for that. I’m not going to get more.”
Look at almost all our top international horses. Nearly every one has some movement that is not particularly efficient. Ninety-five per cent of the test may be totally okay. Don’t dwell on the five per cent where the horse just doesn’t have the training or the talent to perform well. Horses have won at the very top without a great walk. Nobody retires them for it. They just quietly keep going.
A healthier way to compete
Put all of that together and the bell starts to mean something different. The judge is not marking you as a person, or your years of work. They are marking a few minutes on one day, as fairly as they can, in the time they have. A good mark is a good performance. A poor mark is a poor performance, on that day. Neither one is a verdict on who you are as a rider.
That is also why we built PRX™ around personal results rather than placings. You ride a Training Test at home, I mark the performance and walk you through it on video, and your best score at each level becomes your Personal Result. Beat it and a ribbon goes in the post. The only rider you are measured against is the one you were last time.
If you want to go further into why riding tests matters, read Test riding helps keep us honest, and for the other side of nerves, Why your horse changes when the bell goes.