Guest columnist of the week is Canadian Karen Robinson, who divides her time between writing for equestrian publications and designing dressage freestyles.
She has coveredtwo Olympics and two World Equestrian Games for magazines in Canada, the US and Europe. She also writes a regular blog, called Straight-Up, at www.Horse-Canada.com. Her dressage freestyle clients include Canadian Olympians Ashley Holzer, Leslie Reid and Shannon Dueck, and international riders Michelle Gibson, Bernadette Pujals, Pierre St. Jacques and Jan Ebeling. A former three-day-event rider, Karen continues to ride and compete in dressage on her KWPN gelding Teodoro. She lives in Vancouver with her husband, a cat and a Dachshund named Chorizo.
The Trouble with Ten
Ten doesn’t mean perfect, but it might as well. According to the FEI rules, a score of ten indicates that the quality of performance was ‘excellent’. Judges speaking in defence of using the full scale of marks (instead of loitering nervously in the 4 to 8 range) never seem to tire of pointing out that the execution of a movement need not be perfect in order to achieve a ten – only very, very good. But since ten is the highest score attainable, there would be no point in attempting or expecting to improve on the quality of performance which achieved that mark. And therein lies the rub.
Totilas received 24 tens plus two more in the collective marks in his record breaking (let’s give ‘record smashing’ a rest for a while, shall we?) Grand Prix Special test in Aachen last month. That’s probably another record in itself. Who has ever achieved even close to that number of tens? Most never get that many in a career, let alone in the span of seven minutes. 86.458% is so close to a ‘perfect’ score it’s hard to imagine anyone beating it. Parzival’s second placed score was four points lower than Totilas’. Adelinde received only three tens in her test, and two more in the collectives. Is Totilas the greatest dressage horse the world has ever seen? Probably. Is he the best horse the world will ever see? That is not so certain. Forty years ago the dressage world could not have imagined the quality of the horses of twenty years ago. Twenty years ago we couldn’t have conceived of the horses that began pushing the scores up a decade ago. Except for a few observant people who saw Totilas on his way up through the small tour, most of the world could not have imagined him (or other envelope pushers like Parzival and Mistral Hojris) even two years ago. Breeding has inarguably had a dramatic and rapid effect on the horses we see in the international dressage arena. So when a better-than-Totilas comes along – in a year, in ten years or twenty – what are the judges going to give it? They have left themselves very little room.
An argument against the philosophical road I’ve just taken a few steps down is that tens have been handed out for decades in other subjectively judged competitions, such as gymnastics, with no negative consequences. At the 1976 Montreal Olympics, Nadia Comaneci received the first ten ever awarded in Olympic gymnastics; she won another six during those Games. Her achievement opened doors for future gymnasts by proving that ten was possible. But the difference between her example and Totilas is that countries don’t selectively breed human athletes – or at least they haven’t been caught yet. The equine athlete has changed dramatically due to breeding, and I’m pretty sure the ceiling hasn’t yet been reached.
By giving a score of ten for a movement, a judge is in essence saying ‘this cannot be improved. It’s as good as it can ever be.’ Discrepancies between judges on FEI panels frequently vary by two marks (which most people forget means a 20% difference) for individual movements, and occasionally – because of their positions or when someone gets a fly in his eye as David Stickland so humorously pointed out at the Global Dressage Forum last year – even more. Totilas’ GPS score sheet reveals that in the eight instances where judges differed by two points on a single movement, five of them happened when he was awarded a ten by one or more of them. A two point difference: five vs. seven, six vs. eight. Those differences stand out to us where the difference between eight and ten doesn’t – but it’s an indication all the same that the judges don’t agree on what should get the mark that for all intents and purposes means perfect. At a semi-conscious level most of us think ‘once it’s at least an eight the rest is gravy’. I suspect Isabell Werth would beg to differ. She isn’t getting tens any more. Isabell and Satchmo were the gold medal-winning GPS darlings of the 2006 WEG in Aachen, with a winning score of 79+. That’s only three percent higher than her score in Aachen this year, but there can be little doubt that relative value is at play.
If a better-than-Totilas comes along during the peak of Totilas’ career, I think the judges will have no choice but to lower Totilas’ scores to make room for the new star. How likely is this to happen? Is Totilas an exceptional freak of nature with looks to die for, a heart of gold, all the talent in the world for dressage, and never to be bested? We’ll just have to wait and see.
Postscript: My commentary would not be remotely possible without the efforts of Frank Kemperman in leading the world with scoring transparency at Aachen by publishing the movement by movement marks for every competitor on the CHIO Aachen website. And I would have nothing to talk about at all without the supreme talent and skill of Edward Gal. It will be an honour to learn about his methods at the Global Forum this October.
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