(“Wins from whence? Might make you wince!”)

In every field of endeavor our culture tends to seek out someone to anoint as the very best. When I was in college back in the ‘60s, there was a move afoot to do away with grades. Supposedly this would stimulate intellectual growth by encouraging us to pursue difficult subjects for their own sake without the deterrent of possibly lowering our grade point average. Thus began an experiment with Pass/Fail. But very shortly that system morphed into high pass, pass and fail. And then an additional possible grade above all the others, honors. The next thing you knew, we were back where we started with A’s B’s C’s and D’s—just with new names. Knowing who was best was just too fascinating a bit of data to give up!

Sometimes “The Best” is determined by a mathematical formulation—wins versus losses or earned-run average or yards per game. Alternatively, it can be decided by popular vote as in a beauty contest. Or at a dressage show where an elaborately constructed system of numbers and decimals tries to objectify the judges’ subjective evaluation of which horse and rider best fulfill a pre-established concept of what most exemplifies beauty. The system determines a winner. It does not actually guarantee if that winner was the best.

Some sports confound me. In downhill ski racing, for instance, the difference between a gold and a silver medalist’s times can be so infinitesimally small—one or several one hundredths of the second—that were it not for sophisticated electronics, no winner could be determined at all. For all practical purposes, the top skiers, bobsledders, swimmers, or sprinters are often tied. Parsing tiny fractions of a percent between horses based on a sometimes capriciously awarded half point somewhere in the body of a test is another example of a distinction without a difference.

This awareness isn’t going to stop anybody from seeking the best score. But it should put that ribbon in a certain context.

Historically, some winners separated themselves from the pack. Remember Secretariat’s 31 length slam dunk in the Belmont. On the other hand, Al Gore’s win in the 2000 Presidential election was much closer, and with an assist from The Supremes resulted in a different outcome.

Think for a second. Who was the best US president of all time? Is there a consensus? Lincoln? Washington? We can probably agree that it wasn’t Millard Fillmore but he’s the one who has a cartoon named after him. How about the best tennis player in history? Federer? Serena? Not if you’re old enough to remember Laver or Martina. And again how do you measure? Do you go by number of grand slam victories, total matches won, or who played with the most aesthetically satisfying stroke? Coming to a rational, universally agreed upon conclusion is almost impossible.

American dressage used to try to pick national champions by flying a panel of judges around the country to three huge regional finals held on successive fall weekends. One year one of those three was conducted in a monsoon while another was contested on a hundred and ten degree baking sheet. So much for the level playing field.

The USEF’s/USDF’s goal is that all judges adhere to the same standards. In the best world for each and every judge those standards remain unchanged from spring until fall and from the first bright ride on a Saturday morning to the last one in the judge’s eighth or ninth hour of a sweaty Sunday with the taxi revving to rush him or her to catch a flight.

Year End High Point contenders face radically different conditions from one another, some even riding in front of judges whom they, themselves, have chosen for the show. (Are we “level” yet?)

Then there are issues at individual shows. Here I borrow a baseball metaphor. Not every umpire has the same strike zone, even though the rulebook mandates a very specific one. But the catchers behind the plate and the batters who step into the box to hit acknowledge and accept this situation. On one condition. And that is that the umpire is consistent. If he’s going to give the pitcher the benefit of the doubt on a ball near the outside corner, he has to be that way in the ninth inning as well as in the third and to Derek Jeter as well as to someone wallowing below the Mendoza Line. This is probably the dressage judge’s greatest burden. Otherwise, who wins is just a crapshoot.

Much has been made lately of inequities in panel judging at international competitions. As you probably know, a sixth and seventh judge have been added not just to observe the arena from additional vantage points but to dilute the effect of a single judge’s national bias tilting the results towards his country. Furthermore, there is now a review panel to adjust any extreme outlying mark if a member of the panel somehow goes astray. Along the way suggestions have been made to parse scores down to tenths of a point, to drop the scores of the highest and lowest judges (again to limit the amount a single judge can skew the panel’s consensus), and in other ways to make opinion into fact.

A radical solution would be to employ an applause meter and allow the spectators to decide. “Call in to the 1-800 number shown on the screen to support your favorite.” That’s when you risk abandoning all pretense of classical principles if Spanish walk or a horse that rears can make the crowd go wild.

However the end result is reached, it’s still an opinion. It may be one person’s or a committee’s. It may be laundered through a complex formula with coefficients and weighted averages. But as long as what we value goes beyond the objectively measurable “higher, faster, stronger” metric of simpler sports, dressage results will be subject to controversy and second guessing. That is a guarantee!