09/22/2024
There are, by actual count, 143,962 dressage riders who, if asked to place the appropriate letters with the correct distances between them in their designated slots, would be unable to do so with precise accuracy.
We wouldn’t expect someone who isn’t involved in dressage riding to be able to do this, any more than we’d expect someone who isn’t involved with hockey to explain the lines on a hockey rink, but wouldn’t we think that a dressage rider would have taken the effort to learn?
It’s the same thing in jumping sports, how many feet, roughly, should there be in a three stride in and out? Again, deer in the headlights.
Is this basic ignorance the result of sheer laziness? Lack of interest? Inability to comprehend any reason to learn the basics of the sport?
It’s an easy out to blame the teacher---“She never told me to learn that stuff.” But is that really the teacher’s job?
At some point what we see is that the learners are going to learn, while the non-learners probably won’t. Nobody can make someone want something. Sure, they can make them do it, through reward or punishment, but wanting comes from within.
(It will be interesting to speculate who will read this and decide to learn it.)
