04/22/2024
"...Oliveira took several young trainers aside and asked us a series of questions.
"What were our goals? Did we wish to teach? To train horses, either personally or professionally? To compete?
The answers we gave him determined the direction of the conversation. When it came my turn, I answered: "I want to train horses."
He considered the answer with the sincerity it was given, then replied: "Then ride a lot of bad horses. I don't mean ride dangerous horses - you are too valuable now to get hurt - but ride
the difficult horses and learn."
He elaborated a little on this theme during our last interview.
"Nowadays riders learn one system because if they have a horse that isn't suitable for dressage they sell the horse and get another,
he observed. "So instructors now don't know the old systems - for instance, Baucher's flexions - and don't know how to use those
systems to improve the horse. Now everybody learns one way, but that doesn't mean that every horse will respond best to that way.
"You can take pieces of a different system and apply them, and riders can understand why they do something from a different system to correct specific problems. But no one teaches the other systems anymore, so riders don't learn to be able to do that."
- Stephanie Grant Millham
