An Amateur Point Of View And take a look at yourself. Does your division suit your personality? Are you a highly-strung personality trying to ride western? In some classes, an important factor is suitability of horse and rider, so take a good look at yourself and your horse. Are you the best natural match? A thorough search of your presentation covers a multitude of other topics as well: your clothes, your manner of riding, your balance, the bridling of your horse, your horse’s weight, and of course, your performance. (Was it up to the standard?) Be tough on yourself. With that in mind, you have to be able to listen to your trainer with an open mind. He or she wants you to win as badly as you do. They have to be able to be honest with us, able to say such things as, “You had a great go, but you didn’t walk, so you didn’t do the specs of the class,” or “you were hanging on your horse’s face,” or “you were picking at the horse.” If there is anything you need to improve, you have to find it. Another field of exploration is what actually happened in the ring. Too often, I see trainers telling their riders, “You so should have been in there. That other horse took the wrong lead and it made it in, and you didn’t.” Okay, that happens. You may have seen another competitor take a wrong lead, but there is no guarantee that the judge did. I’m neither condemning nor condoning what happened; I’m just saying that such an occurrence might be the reason you didn’t earn a better ribbon. (And if you stay around long enough, this situation will happen to you in reverse, and you’ll get the benefit of a judge’s attention being elsewhere.) You may just conclude that your performance was lackluster or not up to standard because you allowed your nerves to get to you. Nerves can throw both you and your horse off your game. It doesn’t matter if you’re riding a finished show horse or someone brand new, it happens to everyone. (It happens to friends and family too. What if you have a wacko parent like me, who was always nervous when my daughter showed? I had to get out of the barn!) Your horse senses that, your trainer picks up on it, and it has a domino effect. It changes your mood and, ultimately, your performance. Priority one has to be figuring out how to alleviate most of those nerves. My favorite solution is to picture myself riding a successful class. That doesn’t mean seeing myself winning, but just walking, trotting, cantering, and getting my leads. I take all negativity out of my thinking, and focus on how good it feels and how hard I’ve worked. Then it doesn’t matter so much how the judges place me. Something that I think helps everyone is recognizing that there are some outside factors we can control, and we can
improve our preparation by addressing them. For instance, sometimes the reason we didn’t do well is that we didn’t get enough sleep or we ate too much spicy food the night before the class. That can easily be remedied. We should recognize too that changes in routine can throw a horse off as well. If your horse has a foot’s worth of shavings at home and he gets to a show and has only six inches of shavings, he’s sleeping on a hard bed. Or if you feed your horse alfalfa at home and you don’t bring your hay with you, he’s experiencing a change in diet (alfalfa contains different proteins, so it tastes different from other feed). Those changes may make him feel different. I’m a stickler for keeping as much as possible the same, because if your horse reacts to things like that, it is silly not to keep him as happy as possible. It comes under the heading of good preparation for a show. Hauling horses also is important. Keep your horse as comfortable as you can. Horses are used to moving around, just as we are. If you sit still for hours, as when you’re on an airplane, you’ll get off stiff. It’s just like that for a horse. So maybe when you get your horse out of the trailer, you might take him for a 10- or 15-minute walk to let him readjust his body and get rid of muscle cramps. To wrap up, I think that it’s up to us as amateurs to try to figure out why we were rewarded as we were in the show ring. Let me add, in the majority of cases, I don’t believe that politics are involved (sometimes I’ve actually seen judges be harder on the well-known people because they expect them to be better). In the final analysis, we’re paying for a judge’s opinion. When it is not in our favor, accepting it becomes easier if we can figure out exactly why we got the ranking we did. Before signing off, I want to add one observation. Being able to ride and compete on horses is an incredible gift. The accomplishment of being able to get on a horse and with your body do maneuvers as one is amazing. That doesn’t happen overnight. Winning a prize is the icing on the cake. In horsemanship, what we have to figure out is how to make the cake. ■ For anyone who would like to email questions, topics, or comments, I can be reached at info@battagliafarms.com. I’d love to hear from you. Russell Vento Jr. has been involved in the Arabian industry for 30 years, and since 1989, has been a partner in Battaglia Farms. He has been honored twice with APAHA Amateur Horsemen’s Awards, and has been a Large R USAE/AHA judge since 1996. To date, he has owned or shown more than 30 U.S., Canadian and National Show Horse national champions, many of whom he shared with his daughter Skyler, a national champion rider in her own right. Now Vento and Bob Battaglia enjoy not only showing, but breeding champions and following the careers of horses from their program.
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