Following on from my dressage gripe...

We were at Burghley on Friday and watching the eventing dressage was a totally different experience.

I know I'm biased but in high winds and biting cold (!) the horses looked like happy (if sometimes a bit sprightly!) athletes. They all had a partnership with their jockeys. Lets face it, eventers need to have a relationship with each other - both their lives depend on it!

There was little sign of the domination/sweating buckets/tension/hoiked in necks and handyness that was so obvious at Windsor. I'm not saying the eventers are better at dressage. They aren't! In the main they are performing school tricks as they don't neccessarily have the ability or the neccessity to collect like the pure dressage queens do.

Don't get me wrong - there was plenty of tension - trying to do a dressage test on a very fit eventer that wants to gallop and jump, not ponce round in circles, tends to breed tension in both horse and rider! But generally the tension was about the wind, the atmosphere, the stands of people, not being allowed to gallop etc etc not the sweating buckets kinda unneccessary and UNhappy athlete scenes of Windsor.

The thing I found most interesting was the extensions. Here, the eventers really let 'em go - medium and extended canters were going for it, and they got to their markers to collect and just collected, like it was easy, with nothing to physically see.... none of the leaning back, gobbing it in the mouth with a curb, socking it the side etc etc.... and generally in a snaffle!

Which begs the question - if eventers can produce happy athletes that also have to be "jacks of all trades" but that are controllable and containable and polite.... why can't the dressage queens, when their sport is all about "training"?

Ha, it does rather make a mockery.... doesn't it?