Show Jumping Point of View

Alicia Collin

A pony-mad Alicia didn’t get her first pony until she was 13, and at 15 she began to specialise in dressage. She is now a Grand Prix dressage rider and trainer who is based in both New Zealand (Auckland) and Australia (Brisbane). Alicia is passionate about passing on her knowledge, teaching and developing horses into successful athletes, and she is a sought-after trainer in both New Zealand and Australia.

To be competing in dressage is to be at the mercy of the final percentage. High percentages mean that your training is heading in the right direction, and are likely to mean that you’re having competitive success as well. A low percentage can mean anything – that your horse spooked at a blade of grass, that the rider had too many wines the night before and butchered their test, or it may be an indicator that your training is just not where it needs to be.

Given that our Grand Prix riders are having such success this year, and that the general impression is that dressage in New Zealand is on an upward trajectory, I thought it might be interesting to crunch the numbers. (I’d like to put in a clause here that maths was never my strong point, so please don’t consider these numbers accurate enough to use in a thesis! They do however show some interesting things that have occurred over the past decade.) ATTENDANCE – HIGHS AND LOWS

It’s hard to make direct comparisons over the past ten years, as every few years the Nationals have been held in the South Island, and we have also had quite a few format changes over this time, including changes of tests, more splitting of levels, and different programmes of events.

There was a slight decrease in entries at Nationals for some time, starting in the 2010 season when the event was still held at Taupo. Moving it to Manfeild may have had some effect on the numbers attending, as the last National Championships were the biggest since the lull point. Was this in part due to the introduction of stand-alone Amateur Championships? Possibly. It’s very interesting to see that the Amateur Championships didn’t have nearly the numbers competing compared to the Open Championships in Level 1. Only one quarter of all Level 1 combinations entered in the National Championships were in the Amateur Championship. In fact, there were more Amateurs entered in Level 1 at the Central Districts Championships (held at Manfeild less than four months earlier), and the costs are not that incomparable! If you’re an Amateur rider, perhaps competing at the National Championships could - and should - be a future goal for you?

On the flip side, we are seeing increasing numbers in Levels 6 through 9, which surely bodes well for the future. The more riders we have experiencing this level of riding the better, as they are hopefully going to be able to reproduce their training efforts with future mounts, building on their knowledge and improving the quality of work as their riding careers continue. WHERE ARE OUR SCORES GOING?

increase on average of 7%, and Level 8/9 which has increased by 4% – clearly dressage in New Zealand is going in the right direction! At the 2016 National Championships, the winning tests in Level 1 scored 75.7%, 75.4% and 74.2% - results which are simply outstanding. When you consider that the new benchmark score at Grand Prix level internationally is 80%, if our basic Level 1 work continues to be as good as it currently is, it appears that we can expect our Grand Prix scores to continue to increase in the same way.

The highly regarded international dressage competition held mid-year in Aachen, Germany shows the same 4% average increase in scores between 2005 and 2015. Their top scores are of course much higher than ours, but this may be due to having exceptional horses paired with exceptional riders. EXCEPTIONAL HORSES AND RIDERS

For me the real change in the dressage world came when Totilas came down the centreline and started not only breaking, but completely obliterating world record scores, time after time. Totilas was not perfect, but he bought an element of near perfection to the sport that I had not seen before. After Totilas has come Valegro - again not perfect, but near to perfection - and I am sure we will continue to see these great “near perfection” horses. When paired with a talented rider, there is no reason these horses cannot continue to produce 80% plus scores.

And that’s another thing I noticed when crunching the numbers - the same riders’ names came up time and time again, both within New Zealand and internationally. However I think the biggest difference comes down to horse power. The big players of recent time and of similar age - Valegro, Damon Hill, Totilas, Desperados - are in my opinion far superior in ability to anything we had in New Zealand at the same time. All of the above were successful in Young Horse classes, although not all were winners. Over the same time period (2004-2008), five New Zealand riders competed in Young Horse classes here, and those horses all went onto Grand Prix level. (Although it’s interesting to see that two of this country’s currently best performing Grand Prix horses - Déjà Vu MH and Antonello - actually never won the Young Horse Final in New Zealand.) To me this would suggest that a good-moving horse who performs well in Young Horse classes anywhere in the world is highly likely to go on and be a successful Grand Prix horse if he or she continues to be ridden by an exceptional rider.

So if you want to succeed in dressage, the numbers suggest that the trick is to find yourself a good-moving young horse and train it to obtain high percentages, therefore making yourself an exceptional rider. Those starting now should hopefully find themselves in the 70% score range when they make it to Grand Prix, if we keep going the way we are now for the next ten years. C