Ermelo and Onward

The view from our room at the Landhotel Buller in Hagen.

The countryside surrounding Hagen is dotted with horse farms. We have been in countries where each hilltop is adorned with a church steeple: here, there are indoor riding arenas.

Our Lady of Perpetual Half Halts is apparently the area’s patron saint, and is much revered here.

Driving in Germany is not a spectator sport. On some stretches of the A roads (interstates) there are no speed limits. Which means stay in the right lane with half an eye constantly on the rear view mirror so that when you are overtaking a truck, which DOES have a speed limit, you are not stuck on its rear bumper while the “elite runners” fly by in the left lane. It’s a speedy ballet, and I’m pretty sure no one is texting and driving. I’m comfortable keeping it below 130 kph (80 mph), and when the Porsches and Maseratis whizz past 20-30 mph faster, it’s like watching Thoroughbreds breeze while riding a warmblood: they are just a different breed, and you can see at that speed the difference in the way they relate to the road.

As we cross into the Netherlands, the ground flattens, and we return to the world of speed limits. We stay for two nights in Apeldoorn, near to where the International Dressage Trainers Club is holding its annual meeting, at the KWPN headquarters in Ermelo. Judges were invited to attend as well, and there were two days of congenial discussion and demonstration at this handsome facility. Axel will cover this conference in more detail in a future article.

From there we steer toward Amsterdam. As we head out, I see woman going for a hack on a paint draft type. And I realize there are horses everywhere. For miles along the freeway, I see horse farms of every size, from the spacious pastureland of breeders to compact properties with an indoor and small barn. And this is when it hits me: how do we compete with this?

In the US, our size is our undoing; our geography is our greatest obstacle. Dressage-wise, there are only two areas in our country with a concentration that can even be remotely compared to this from a training point of view: Wellington and Southern California. And in neither place is there a strong connection to the breeders. In these areas of Germany and the Netherlands, there is a culture of horse. It’s just what people do, and what their neighbors do, and what the kids do after school and what the family does on weekends. There is a riding club network in place, where riders can learn and compete at a very local level on club owned horses, and then progress to inter-club competition before being thrown into the deep water of open dressage shows. These clubs are often become the social focal point of the family, too.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve run into several ex-pat trainers who are now living in Europe. Each has the same story: it was cost prohibitive to be a professional rider/trainer in the US. The need for two different bases of operation (Wellington and Somewhere Else Further North), the long hauls to shows, the cost of horse husbandry, the cost of showing…. I am told that all of these things are far more manageable in northern Europe. Now granted, in southern California we get pretty darned spoiled because so many show are so close to so many of us, but the cost of real estate throughout southern California has been the demise of many a horse property. And those who can afford to winter in Wellington have 4 months of an overabundance of dressage shows within 20 minutes drive.

But we drive on – we are now on vacation for a few days!

A curious youngster at the KWPN headquarters in Ermelo

The attendees at the International Dressage Trainers Club conference.

More Impressions of Hagen

The crowd around the warm up at Hagen

It’s the weekend, and the weather is glorious. I think the entire region has come to Hagen. The stands are full, the vendor village is full. The beer taps are flowing and everyone is walking around with ice cream cones. Fat Shetlands are making little girls dreams come true by stolidly carting them around the pony ride track. Jumpers are jumping, dressage horses are passaging, and crowds are cheering.

A bit about the amenities. The dressage VIP tent sits in between the warm up and the main arena. There are heaters for the cold mornings, and sides that open for the warm afternoons, and an outdoor area with black wicker chairs with white cushions for those who want to lounge in the sun by the practice arena  with a glass of white wine. Flowers and Russian dolls decorate each table. The food is delicious: small plates of salads, pasta, beef, chicken and fish, different each day, ice cream for dessert, and really good coffee from the espresso machine. There are dogs everywhere. The wait staff brings them bowls of water and bowls so they can share their humans’ meals. (Note to local American health departments: please pay more attention to restaurant kitchens, and worry less about whether dogs are in the dining rooms. We like them there. Note to American dog owners: please put manners on your your dog so it can behave properly in a public dining room.)

And the closer: you know every detail has been covered when the portable bathrooms have mood lighting, frosted glass doors, a designer sink and fresh flowers, and are cleaned constantly. Everyone was impressed. Hey, here in the States, with a few notable exceptions, we are used to the show facilities being little blue houses with scary surfaces!

There was frost on the windshield when we left the hotel on Saturday morning, so I’m glad that the sun is strong and there is barely a breeze. The first class of the day is the Grand Prix for the Freestyle. Even though the Grand Prix for the Special was perhaps the stronger field, the scores for the top six were still above 70%. Andreas Hegelstrand wins it on his new horse, Akeem Foldager, and Steffens Peters is second on Legolas. Legolas’ eyes opened wide when he entered the arena and saw the crowd and the flowers and the tents, but by the time they had halted at X and Steffen saluted he’d become comfortable in his “sandbox”.

But the real treat of the day was the finals of the Young Horse Grand Prix. This is a class for 8-10 year olds, and my gosh, I apologize to anyone standing next to me if I was drooling. The test is a compact Grand Prix, kind of an Intermediare 2.5, just long enough to show what these green-at-the-level horses are made of. Isabel Werth, Ingrid Klimke and Bridgitte Wittig are all riding future champions, elegant steeds with three brilliant gaits, full of go and lift and elasticity. And each of those riders have the know how and experience to bring horses along from the very beginning to the very top…. So rare, and such a pleasure to see these three masters together in the awards.

Sunday, we continue our great luck with the weather. Amazingly, the crowds are even thicker today. Axel is judging the first class of the day, the Grand Prix Special, so we scored a good parking space. Mistral Hojris and Laurel Bechtolsheimer from Great Britain win the class. “Alf” is 18, and I haven’t seen him in person since the World Equestrian Games in 2010. He’s as strong and feisty as ever, and as he powers brilliantly through the passage/piaffe/passage of the final center line, straight as an arrow, rhythm as regular as a metronome, I see Laurel grin…. I mean, who wouldn’t? She dabs her eyes as they walk out on a loose rein … really … who wouldn’t?

Following that is the German Professional Riders championship. Sixteen riders competed, and three qualified for the Derby format Finals. These three ride a short Grand Prix test, first on their own horses, and then again on each of the other two horses. The second and third riders only have five minutes’ warm up time to get to know their new mounts, so these pros better have a gift for catch riding! It is amazing how well they each do, on all three horses, and how accommodating those horses are, with unfamiliar partners in an electric atmosphere.

The final class of the day is the Grand Prix Freestyle. The place is jammed: the “in” crowd is six deep by the in gate, it is standing room only in the general bleachers, and the VIP tent is packed. There are more people lining the warm up than spectate at most shows’ main arenas at home. (And, I might add, that the kiosks beside the warm up are so perfectly situated that one barely has to turn ones head away from watching the practice arena to order a coffee.) The rides themselves are consistently good, although it is hard to hear the music inside the tent. Andreas’ ride seems the most solid, but Steffen and Legolas are just .08 percent behind them in second place. Steffen is heading home to San Diego, where next weekend at the Del Mar National they will officially retire his star partner Ravel. Tomorrow Axel and I are off to Ermeloh, Netherlands, for the International Dressage Trainers conference, and then a few days of sightseeing before heading for the show in Saumur, France.

Legolas and Akeem Foldager

After the Grand Prix Special

We don’t know either, but it made us giggle.

The best part of the day – even for a 5 Star judge!

Legolas in the Freestyle

Ingrid Klimke and Dresden Mann enter the arena

Impressions of Hagen CDI, Part 1

I’m not sure what Zombie Sheep have to do with Russia, dressage or anything else for that matter…. But this proves that they exist.

There is a great deal of shopping to be done. Everything from tractors to scarves, designer jeans to designer watches, entire shops devoted to galloping boots, human boots, horse shoes, people shoes. Puffy vests and jackets are in, though I can’t for the life of me understand why i would want to wear something that would make me look ten pounds more bulky. And just when we have all stocked up on long blouses, short little jackets are back in style.  Bling, of course, is on everything. Riding jackets are more and more of hi tech fabrics, and there are fewer and fewer traditional canary points on tail coats: I’m seeing lots of collars and points in matching blues and grays and browns. Top hats are still the norm, but helmets are gaining ground: in then US, as of April 1, all dressage riders in national classes must wear helmets, but the FEI has yet to adopt the same rule for CDI competitions. There are lots of beautiful helmets to choose from, though, some plain, some blingy, in many shades of blacks, greys, browns, and various patterns of matte and luster.

Because the theme is “Russia Meets Horse and Dreams”, there’s an entire Russian vendor village within the vendor village….. It’s not every day that one finds a yurt at a horse show!  I was lusting after a pashmina scarf that had a 400 euro tag on it….. I opted instead for a glass of wine in the vip tent. There were stands for bratwurst, stands for candy, and ice cream and pastry, and beer pulls being pulled as far as the eye could see. There was a playground for children, but not the usual swings and slides: we are talking bungee jumps and trapezes. And face painting. And a mascot handing out stuffed miniature versions of himself to the kids. And performances of folk music, and Cossack riding. And pony rides.

And all that “kid stuff” added up to a lot of kids dragging their parents out to the horse show.

Be honest, American dressage riders: when was the last time that you saw a child that didn’t belong to a competing rider spectating at a dressage show? And if they did, were they made to feel welcome? Or did you look upon them as a hazard to navigation that had the potential to spook your horse? If the latter, where do you think the next generation of dressage riders will come from?

There is a lot going on at this show. Indeed, there is a lot going on at most European shows that we’ve been to. Dressage horses here do not exist in bubbles. On a normal day, riders here are used to coexisting in an arena with half a dozen other horses, so they are far more comfortable in a crowded show warm up. Very few riders have “princess arenas” where they have the entirety of a 20×60 all to themselves on a daily basis.  Which probably explains the lack of drama that I’ve observed in the warm up.

Let me emphasize this: I have been watching the warm up for three days, and I have yet to see any drama beyond the occasional fresh horse on a cold morning. People pass left to left, they find their diagonal lines without hoopla, they step off the track to remove bandages and quarter sheets. They behave professionally, and then the go to the arena. The. End.

The quantity and quality of horses has been a joy to watch. There are over 90 Grand Prix horses here: a Grand Prix for the Freestyle, a Grand Prix for the Special, as Grand Prix for younger horses, a Grand Prix for younger riders, a Grand Prix for professional riders. The young horse Grand Prix was just plain old eye candy…. All those talented youngsters with a world of potential! If we had half the pipeline in our country that is evident here, we would be in a whole different position in regards to our chances in the next two upcoming Games.

These are not your usual vendor tents!

Inside the yurt. Hard to believe there is a huge horse show going on 50 yards away.

The Grand Europe Tour, 2013

Axel arriving at Moscow-At-Hagen

And so it begins, Axel’s final year of judging FEI competition. The Good Bye Tour actually began in Florida, with a string of CDI competitions. February was the 30th anniversary of the Palm Beach Derby, and it brought back memories of all the times that Axel has judged that illustrious show, and the many times that I photographed it. Axel, after all, was there for the first one, back in the day when it was an actual Derby, with the top three riders in the PSG switching horses. There are only a few shows where that happens anymore, and we’ll see two of them on this trip: Hagen, during the German Professional Championships, and also at the Hamburg Derby.

I started photographing the PB Derby myself in 1986, when dressage in the US was still a fledgling sport, and we were all younger and skinnier. I remember driving down from cold grey NY, and arriving in what is now the Wellington and Loxahatchee Disneyland-For-Horses…. It was a grand way to spend the winter even then, thrilling that so many good horses and riders did the same – and still do. This year we reminisced about those that were there at the Derby’s inception, the Pferdekampfers especially, and about those that are no longer with us: Thackery and Pot, Kimball and Fraesdorf, Hotz and Fritz. We toasted them all, as has become a tradition, at Janne and Stan Rumbough’s party at the Everglades Club, where once a year we enjoy an evening of extraordinary food and drink and hospitality.

March brought the 5 Star competition at the Global Dressage Festival ground (yes ground zero of As The Dressage World Turns, that clash of billionaires that holds the fate of Florida dressage in its grip). The facility is stellar. The footing and stabling cause involuntary grinning amongst the riders. There is delightful food and ambiance in the International Tent, and if my airplane seat seems a bit narrow today, I am blaming it on last week’s desserts. And there was big prize money, and good competition, and lots of keen-eyed spectators.

Many people have asked me why Axel is retiring from FEI judging: The FEI, in its collective wisdom, has a mandatory retirement age of 70 for all its officials. Which is strange in this day, when 70 is the new 50, and people are running marathons in their 90’s. It’s not just judges who must retire, but ALL officials, from stewards to course designers. When you consider how many years of experience that it takes to attain international status in any of those capacities, and especially how long it takes to get to the 5 Star level (which is the only level that can judges an Olympics), it makes me wonder why the FEI considers its senior officials so disposable.

But here we are. On this trip we’ll attend four CDI competitions and the trainers’ conference in Ermeloh, Netherlands. We arrived in Dusseldorf after an uneventful flight, and then the usual discussion with our gps, during which we couldn’t acquire a satellite whilst still in the parking garage, and needed to know immediately upon exiting said garage which direction to turn, and so made some colorful comments about her ancestry, we made it to Hagen without further incident. A quick nap, a cup of coffee, and we were ready for the jog, which took place in the lovely indoor arenas at PSI. Jogs here are low key affairs, and the horses were quite well behaved – no handlers appeared to be the tail of the kite, in other words. But all around the rest of the grounds, however, final preparations are at a fever pitch. This “Horses and Dreams” show will be huge: over 90 total Grand Prix Horses, a good-sized Small Tour, and oodles of jumpers. The theme this year is Russia…. This is going to be fun!