(“There’s nothing worse than trying to make it up on the fly!”)

OK, so I might have been wrong. Finally, after about a year and a half of trepidation/anticipation, I judged two classes of Western dressage the other day. Not that I volunteered or anything—that duty was a minor part of an otherwise normal day of work at a local schooling show.

The day before, I pored through the North American Western Dressage rulebook, and I looked at a substantial number of Youtube videos in order to arrive at some standard by which I would score the rides. There’s nothing worse than trying to make it up on the fly!
I’ve already stated my reservations in detail [See blogpost 107 An Inwestment in Dwessage], but here’s what I discovered once I got judging it:

Disregarding the future possibility of cutthroat, highly competitive Western Intro riders carrying things to wretched extremes (it will happen), what I saw people doing was actually good for their horses. Their polls were the highest point. They did ride on contact—in conventional snaffles. The horses did move with energy and a bit of suspension—some moved better than a few of their “traditional” English counterparts which I had judged earlier. And the riders were interested—wanting to get it right, trying to figure out this new-fangled stuff.

I may have caught them all on a good day. The jaded cynicism of competition had not yet set in. They were all competing with each other, not against each other. On this day it was nice.

In Western dressage appropriate attire is somewhat less codified than what we’re used to. Afterwards I said to the show organizer, “If I ever ride a Western dressage test—and I assured her that would be NEVER—for the appropriate effect I plan to dress like Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

A couple more experiences like this one and I might even start talking to an empty chair.