(“What Do You Do When . . . “)
Among dressage judges some may be more experienced than others, some more insightful, some more articulate. But of all the judges I know, I can’t think of a single one who is not trying to get it right and to convey what they hope is a valid opinion of your horse and your riding.
A judge’s scores are not given capriciously. First we must determine in each instance if the horse is demonstrating the basic principles of dressage correctly. These are the principles you find outlined on the Training Scale (Pyramid)—beginning with rhythm and relaxation, contact, suppleness and acceptance, through impulsion and straightness, and all the way (when appropriate) to collection.
Beyond this judgment every movement performed should meet a set of criteria—each spelled out in detail in the rule book. For example, in leg yielding the criteria include the straightness of the horse’s body and the slight positioning of his poll away from the direction of movement, his alignment relative to the track or circle on which he is moving, and that he maintains that alignment from start to finish.
Then for every block on the test there are modifiers. These don’t speak to the essence of the movement but are smaller factors—the balance or bend through the corner, for instance, or the quality of a transition back from a lengthening if no separate transition score is asked for. The modifiers, if significant enough, can bump the aggregate score in the block up or down a point or half point, particularly if the performance has the judge vacillating between numbers.
A lot of years of study and practice go into the judge’s ability to arrive at the right score and the right comment in a timely manner—one number after another. If I judge a full three day weekend show, I can easily go through that process four or five thousand times!
Of equal importance is that each time a judge sees the same visual picture or the same combination of factors occurring before him, he is able to arrive at the same score. Otherwise the notion of fair competition goes out the window.
Judges are always evaluating the accuracy of what they see and whether they have assigned the right value to it. Over the dinner table at shows or at forums we find ourselves playing the What If . . . or What Do You Do When . . . games to compare our individual methodology with our peers’.
Being (presumably) human, there is no way that we will all agree in every case, but we are all conscious of trying to avoid outright contradictions that would leave a competitor scratching her head about who or what to believe.
When you start wondering what’s going on in your judge’s mind in the booth at C, remember that selection you can click on your Relationship Status on Facebook: “It’s complicated!”