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Post by horseguy on Aug 6, 2016 11:40:55 GMT
"Can't tell the players without a program." (an old baseball saying)
Eventing
Phillip Dutton (West Grove, Pa.) Thomas Tierney’s Fernhill Cubalawn, a 2003 Holsteiner gelding Direct Reserves HND Group’s Mighty Nice, a 2004 Irish Sport Horse gelding Ann Jones and Thomas Tierney’s Fernhill Fugitive, a 2005 Irish Sport Horse gelding
Lauren Kieffer (Middleburg, Va.) and Team Rebecca, LLC’s Veronica, a 2002 KWPN mare Direct Reserve Marie Le Menestrel’s Meadowbrook’s Scarlett, a 2007 Thoroughbred cross mare
Boyd Martin (Cochranville, Pa.) and Blackfoot Mystery Syndicate, LLC’s Blackfoot Mystery, a 2004 Thoroughbred gelding Direct Reserve Gloria Callen’s Welcome Shadow, a 2005 Thoroughbred cross mare
Clark Montgomery (Tetbury, England) Jessica Montgomery’s Loughan Glen, a 2003 Irish Sport Horse gelding
Traveling reserve: Maya Black (Clinton, Wash.) and Dawn and Jonathan Dofelmier’s Doesn’t Play Fair, a 2005 Holsteiner gelding
Show Jumping
Lucy Davis (Los Angeles, Calif.) and Old Oak Farm’s Barron, a 2004 Belgian Warmblood gelding
Kent Farrington (Wellington, Fla.) and Amalaya Investments’ Voyeur, a 2002 KWPN gelding
Beezie Madden (Cazenovia, N.Y.) and Abigail Wexner’s Cortes ‘C’, a 2002 Belgian Warmblood gelding
McLain Ward (Brewester, N.Y.) with Double H Farm and Francois Mathy’s HH Azur, a 2006 Belgian Warmblood mare
Traveling Reserve: Laura Kraut (Royal Palm Beach, Fla.) and Old Willow Farms, LLC’s Zeremonie, a 2007 Holsteiner mare
Dressage
Allison Brock (Loxahatchee, Fla.) with Claudine and Fritz Kundrun’s Rosevelt, a 2002 Hanoverian stallion
Laura Graves (Geneva, Fla.) and her own Verdades, a 2002 KWPN gelding
Kasey Perry-Glass (Orangevale, Calif.) with Diane Perry’s Dublet, a 2003 Danish Warmblood gelding
Steffen Peters (San Diego, Calif.) with Four Winds Farm’s Legolas 92, a 2002 Westphalian gelding
Direct Reserve Four Winds Farm’s Rosamunde, a 2007 Rheinlander mare
Traveling reserve: Shelly Francis (Loxahatchee, Fla.) with Patricia Stempel’s Doktor, a 2003 Oldenburg gelding
One comment: Why does America have two Australians, Phillip Dutton and Boyd Martin, and a one American who lives in England, Clark Montgomery, on the US Eventing Team? Lauren Kieffer of Middleburg, Va. is the only Eventing Team member who was born on America and lives in America. In other sports like soccer, players who live and play for not home country teams join their home country national team for the Olympics. Also, all the Show Jumping and Dressage Team members are Americans who live in America. These are curious facts.
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Post by jimmy on Aug 6, 2016 14:41:55 GMT
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Post by horseguy on Aug 7, 2016 14:31:32 GMT
In the post WW2 era the US was always in the top 5 in eventing. The Fort Riley Seat was still dominant and our military standard of riding kept us competitive. Fast forward and we are now in the bottom of the top 10 countries competing in eventing. Since China we have been firmly below 5th in Team and individual in eventing. I think the reason is low national standards (dominated by Morris H/J standards) mixed with a culture of entitlement over hard work.
My solution is to go back to the old system of selecting the US Team. The used to hold open trial at Gladstone NJ at the Whitney barn. I used to go and watch. If a rider, however unknown, showed ability they would put them on the short list, give them better horses to ride and generally do a thorough search of the country's talent. That ended decades ago, the process became somewhat political and definitely closed to "outsiders".
Our best rider first day in eventing dressage placed 10th.
RESULTS: 1 GBR FOX-PITT William CHILLI MORNING 37.00 2 AUS BURTON Christopher SANTANO II 37.60 3 GER JUNG Michael SAM FBW 40.90 4 GER AUFFARTH Sandra OPGUN LOUVO 41.60 5 FRA NICOLAS Astier PIAF DE B’NEVILLE 42.00 6 FRA LAGHOUAG Karim ENTEBBE 43.40 7 NZL TODD Mark LEONIDAS II 44.00 8 NED LIPS Tim BAYRO 46.00 9 AUS GRIFFITHS Sam PAULANK BROCKAGH 46.30 10 USA MONTGOMERY Clark LOUGHAN GLEN 46.60 11 SUI VOGG Felix ONFIRE 46.70 12 IRL MCCARTHY Padraig SIMON PORLOE 46.80
As a Team we are currently in 7th place in eventing with the dressage still underway.
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Post by jimmy on Aug 7, 2016 15:39:41 GMT
Should we blame George Morris?
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Post by horseguy on Aug 7, 2016 16:18:01 GMT
Should we blame George Morris? Morris was the catalyst for the forces that wanted to turn equestrian sport into a total business. In the 70's there was a "conflict": between the equestrian community and the horse industry and the horse industry won, created the USEF and the rest is history, complete with small countries with fewer horses in them than Pennsylvania beating the US at international eventing. Morris provided the format for that transition with his "lite beer" horsemanship standards and a horse show every weekend to make the money for trainers barns and promoters. This morning I was watching a NASCAR pre-game show interview with a major NASCAR Sprint Cup track owner. He also owns a bunch of minor league tracks. He said openly that he watches the top level Sprint Cup drivers and he says he is not watching the best talent in the sport drive at the top level. This man's view is that it takes too much money for a entry level driver with talent to move up from the backwoods dirt track to the mid range paved short tracks, much less to the top super speedway level. The cost of the cars, crews and travel is out of reach except for the well financed teams that are multi million dollar businesses. He is proposing that there be a limit (like the NFL salary cap) to how much a car can cost and a team can spend from the top Sprint car to the dirt short track. I have proposed a similar thing for eventing. There is a model for this in horse racing called the claimer race. Claimer races have a dollar amount that you can commit to pay for a horse before the race, these typically start at $2,500 and go up. If there were claimer eventing competitions, that would open up the possibility for a young eventer to keep track of prospects competing at the various claimer levels and us that format to buy an eventing horse. It also would allow young talent to get a horse off the track, start it's training and compete it in claiming races. I essentially did this with polo horses and jumping horses. My best deal was an $875 auction horse that went for $12,000. What this idea does is take part of the horse inddustry business away from the rich barns and puts the business in the hands of the lower level trainers and riders. It increases the number of available eventing horses, which keeps lower or entry level horses affordable and thus increases the number of riders who can enter the sport. The NASCAR guy said that A.J. Foyt, one of the all time best US drivers, could not get beyond local dirt track level today because he was a son of a poor Texas garage mechanic. I think the same is true of so many American riders. They can't get started up the ladder but get stalled at a level and the sport passes them by. A more open affordable series of competitions like a claimer series would make it easier for many to get exposure and horses too. Since China and in London we failed to reach the equestrian Olympic level the US can demonstrate if the system were more open to the talent that exists in America. That's my opinion, and it's a lot like the NASCAR track owner's take. Big money suppresses talent. It's that simple.
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Post by jimmy on Aug 7, 2016 19:35:04 GMT
Another idea is to do something similar to what Carolyn Hunt and Buck Brannaman are trying to do with the Legacy of Legends. A select group of young trainers are watched how the handle and break unbroke young horses, and win a scholarship to study with on of the mentors in this field.
I know there is a developing rider program in eventing. Katy was on the under 25 and under for a year. She was able to ride with David O'Conner several times a year. But that program doesn't address the lack of availability of top notch eventing horses they could have access to. It still comes down a small elite group who can afford an upper level horse. So the best money, not the best talent, gets to the top. There should be scholarship money that could acquire and maintain one of these horses. I don't know how.
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Post by horseguy on Aug 7, 2016 20:55:12 GMT
Yes, it's the horses. Back in the 60's there were wealthy equestrian patron families that owned strings of horses used in competition and hunting. A talented ride with receive support in the form of a horse on loan. One of those families was the Whitneys, as in the Whitney Museum in NYC. They owned the national equestrian training Center in Gladstone NJ and loaned it to the USET. In the 80s the next generation had lost its connection to horses and horsemanship and that generation sold most of the farm to Trump, who build a golf course on the farm. The USET (US Equestrian Team) which was connected to the US Combined Training Association, USCTA, had a great relationship with the old money equestrian families. Somehow in the years when I was totally focused on polo the USCTA lost control of eventing to the US Eventing Association. The USEA to me is like the Professional Horsemen's Association of America,PHA, very commercial, very horse industry and the USEA popularized eventing to the point HJ riders were entering the sport at an alarming rate and injuries and death followed.
Bottom line, money controls the sport of eventing and it does not need to be that way. Like the big shot NASCAR guy said, "I watch the big races and know the best drivers are not out there".
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Post by horseguy on Aug 7, 2016 20:56:30 GMT
I watched the Dutton dressage test. Kind of a yawn.
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Post by horseguy on Aug 8, 2016 18:48:27 GMT
I watched the cross country today. First, I think the camera placement and how the cameras were used was among the best coverage of the cross country I have ever seen on TV. The Rolex needs to hire that camera crew and director.
Phillip Dutton gets the prize for best recovery in holding a horse on a line to a jump at the brush fences with the weird haircut on the right side. Amazing piece of riding. I loved Ingrid Klemke's cross country run until she had what looked to be a mental lapse for a split second in the water and got a refusal. I was shocked at the Chinese rider's ability on the course and the Japanese guy who won the Dressage in London and was disqualified in cross country there had a good day. Those are my highlights.
The course looked very demanding. Many riders were said to get out of breath (makes me wonder the altitude). Many really good riders had difficulty with the course. My favorite jump was the combination coming down a hill to a couple skinny jumps that required a right turn in the landing of the last skinny. I found the overuse of demanding striding in one combination after another to revealed a lack of creativity. That over use of a tricky striding combinations and the complete over use of skinny jumps in general, the haircut brush jumps being over the top stupid, was nonsense.
I just don't get where the cross country courses have gone. It seems to an old rider like me that the creative use of terrain, interesting but not trickster striding and visual challenges are almost entirely missing, replaced by some geeky idea of technical riding. I like Italian banks. They are a very visual challenge for horses and riders. The last difficult one was in Greece. Likewise, messing with simple depth perception with creative ground lines is a traditional perceptive challenge. I saw one. And as always, where's the slide when it comes to using terrain? And while the course was demanding in terms of stamina, there was no one combination that directly addressed stamina like the three uphill banks in the Korean Olympics. Instead we saw one striding game after an other, as if to put the horses into a blender and see if they can ride it. Real striding challenges are more intellectual and force a choice, and not a survival choice like many of today's staccato blender whirls, but rather choices in striding that calmly seduce a rider into a risk that they can imagine as a safe way to gain time but may be more difficult than they look. In a phrase, the course was physically demanding, causing mental fatigue in riders like Klemke, and tricky technical in the contemporary sense, which I find lacks creativity.
Maybe I will say more later about how America did, but suffice it to say the graph of success/failure in US Eventing continued its direction in today's cross country. On the bright side, maybe the end result of this competition will lead to a complete overhaul of the US system of selecting horses and riders, coaching and support. Jim Wafford's phone number is no secret. He's the guy I'd call.
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Post by horseguy on Aug 9, 2016 14:44:47 GMT
The US Eventing Team is out of the competition because as a team because a team must have three riders and the US now has only tow left, both former Australian citizens. The two American born members of the team were eliminated in the cross country phase. Clark Montgomery had three refusals and was asked to leave the course. Lauren Kieffer's horse fell in a landing, both were alright after but the new rules eliminate a rider after a single fall. I have posted several times that when I was young you got eliminated after the 4th fall. Then it was 3, then 2, etc. This is an instance when the rule of one fall might be worth another look. If the rider was allowed to take the horse to the Vet station and get the horse OKed to continue, then the US Team could continue as a team into the Show Jumping phase.
I think it is OK that Clark Montgomery had three refusals in his first Olympics. We need to get new Americans into the process. Maybe he learned something and will be back after this lesson. That is how better riders get better. Kieffer may have learned something too. I always say you need relaxation, rhythm, straightness and impulsion to get a good jump. She lacked impulsion into the jump where her horse fell. The horse made a desperate effort to manage it, but the jump was more of a pop. The horse acted befuddled and it laid there on the ground a while as if wondering what happened. In other words, the horse appeared to have a more passive nature, unusual for a mare competing, where a more determined horse might have saved the landing. Who knows? So, now we have two expatriates from Australia representing America in the final phase of Eventing looking for individual success. I'd rather see two young American riders in that position building their skills and awareness of Olympic completion for next time. It is an opportunity lost not to have young American talent there today.
Interesting that I could not find a video or picture of Kieffer's horse Veronica in the cross country fall. I suspect the Olympic teams have tried to limit the exposure to criticism by animal rights groups.
Here is a picture of the jump I liked a lot, the downhill approach to a skinny with a turn required in the landing. You can see Dutton setting up for the turn in the landing.
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Post by horseguy on Aug 9, 2016 15:58:31 GMT
France wins Team Gold in Eventing with a team of riders none of which ever rode in Olympic competition before.
After the world equestrian competition 2 years ago, where France received serious penalties for horse doping, they seem to have reorganized and come up with a winning strategy. I do not know if the doping scandal was the cause, but sometimes new blood can create an inspiring outcome. Congratulations to France and their rookie team. I hope the US takes note. Our US Eventing team strategy for Rio, unchanged since China, produced a 12th place finish out of 13. Time to clean house and start over. Sorry Boyd and Phillip and coach David, it just didn't work out.
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Post by horseguy on Aug 9, 2016 21:04:40 GMT
I was watching a ping pong game, a highly ranked German player against a man from Belarus. The Belarus player won and the announcer said he won " in spite of being plagued by injuries". Wow I thought, plagued by ping pong injuries. I immediately went to William Fox Pitt who came back 10 months after a coma following a fall to help his British Eventing Team to place 5th and an individual place at 12th. Every sport is different and I'll bet "plagued by injuries" has its own meaning in each one.
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Post by horseguy on Aug 10, 2016 12:43:47 GMT
Through the past several Olympics, particularly China and London, I have watched our national 3-Day Eventing Equestrian Team descend from respect to ridicule. Every Team in Rio beat us except Russia. Countries with less in the way of a tradition of horsemanship beat us. Countries with fewer horses and riders than several of our States beat us. This after so many decades of America always being a contender for a Eventing medal. During this same period I experienced a growing trend in my students of wanting to do less in their lessons. At this point I have no students because one by one they all have convinced me that they really didn't want to learn to ride well. My final student at one point told be that she wanted to focus on getting her horse "on the bit". Asking for specific instruction is not uncommon, but it has increased now to the point that many students want to completely control their lesson's curriculum. They feel that what they want to learn is more important than what their instructor knows they need to learn. I have become used to this change in riding students. With this last student, after I agreed to address getting her horse "on the bit", she began to tell me that my definition of "on the bit" was incorrect. What followed caused this student to quit her lessons with me. I think this attitude that riding students have developed played a large part in why we as a riding nation have sunk to the bottom of the Eventing sport in international competition. Students who seek riding lessons in general today are pretty much spoiled brats, regardless of their age. They tend to come from an economic strata that entitles them to do things like try to determine what and how they are taught. What is worse is that many if not most lesson stables accommodate or grovel at their entitlement. But there is hope. Our US Women's Gymnastics Olympic Team won Team Gold in a most compelling way. They won each and every phase of the competition and their final score was the equivalent of winning the Super Bowl by 5 touchdowns. I can only conclude, because a gymnastics score that they achieved is only possible by means of an extremely demanding grind of grueling repetitions punctuated by failure and injury, that these are extremely tough and disciplined women. They have gymnastic competition moves that the US Men's Team have tried and failed to accomplish. So, its not that America is weak and spoiled. We know how to reach the highest level of a sport. These young athletes have shown us that we are not lost in the landscape of sport, but we are very lost when it comes to Eventing. I will add that it is not that we don't have the necessary coaches. From a small farm in PA with less than 20 horses an unremarkable coach with a Military Seat background managed to get three riders in the past 15 years to top 5 national rankings in both Pony Club and USEA Eventing rankings. More importantly America has Jim Waffford, also with a Military Seat background, with internationally renowned skills in Eventing riding and coaching who is available as the National Team coach. It was the Fort Riley Military Seat that took America to the top of international Eventing competition but without students who want to learn this method, such coaches are irrelevant. Since the Chinese Olympics we have had carpetbagger Australians and American riders who came up through the Morris Hunter Jumper Seat method, with its flawed crest release technique and other "innovations" and short cuts that have resulted in our pathetic and embarrassing Rio finish. But we cannot blame only Morris because he didn't create the spoiled entitlement that exemplifies the pool of young American equestrians. Look at the young women in the US Gymnastics team picture. I believe that until our Eventing Team looks a lot more like those athletes, we will remain at the bottom of the sport that we have so methodically destroyed in our country one entitled child at a time.
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Post by horseguy on Aug 11, 2016 16:38:47 GMT
In thinking about winning teams like gymnastics and swimming I realized that the athletes in those successful sports train together.
The 1912 Military Bronze Medal Team: Army officers Benjamin Lear on Poppy, John Montgomery on Deceive, and Guy Henry on Chiswell trained together.
The US 1936 Berlin Olympics Equestrian Team: Captain C.C. Jadwin, Major W.B. Bradford, Major Hiram Tuttle, Captain I.L. Kitts, Captain C.S.Babcock;(2nd Row) Lieutenant H.S. Isaacson, Lieutenant R.W. Curtis, Captain Earl .F. Thomson, Captain M.H. Matteson;(3rd Row)Captain J.M. Willems, Major A.H. Moore, Captain C.W.A. Raguese At that time equestrian teams we not specialized. The team competed in Eventing, dressage and show jumping.
Earl Thompson won an individual Silver in Eventing in 1936 on a Standardbred cross mare.
Maybe our equestrian team should train together.
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Post by horseguy on Aug 11, 2016 16:54:18 GMT
And by the way, I see a lot of online congratulations for Phillip Dutton on his first individual Olympic Medal, a Bronze. His cross country ride was pretty special, especially how he handled the almost complete refusal at the brush jump with the weird haircut. He's a great rider. But there is another way to look at this. Dutton might be thought of as in America's debt for allowing him on the team that allowed him to win that medal. His presence in a US Team slot meant that some young up and coming American rider missed a chance to begin an Olympic career. Just saying.
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