To find out, go ringside at the Paris 2024 Olympic eventing dressage competition
Text and photographs by Jennifer O. Bryant
What’s the state of eventing dressage these days? It’s been a while since I attended an eventing competition, so inquiring minds wanted to know. The top pairs in the world are here for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, so I thought I’d see how the best of the best are doing as compared to our dressage-only world.
They are doing quite well! There’s a lot to like about how the event horses present themselves in the dressage arena. They are keen to go forward (they wouldn’t be eventers otherwise, and of course they’re all bursting in anticipation of tomorrow’s cross-country), but it looks like “Yay, let’s go!” forward and not panicky or tense from other than supreme fitness. Their outlines are throwbacks to the dressage horses of yesteryear—which of course were closer in breeding and training to their common cavalry origins—including profiles that tend to be more prominently in front of the vertical.
Leaner than the average dressage horse, with streamlined muscling and noticeably less neck and crest development, the Paris 2024 event horses are not the extravagant movers you’ll find in the Grand Prix dressage arena, with their tremendous shoulder freedom and joint articulation. Most have gaits more like the Thoroughbreds that once dominated this sport, even though many are warmbloods.
Good event horses are described as being cat-like in their ability to recruit their entire bodies for maximum athleticism. They can get themselves over impossible-looking obstacles, and they can adjust their strides and turn handily, but what’s generally not required is a great deal of lateral suppleness. Some of the Paris 2024 competitors exhibited a measure of tightness through the back, ribcage, and loins that led to a common bugaboo, the hiccupy flying change. There were croup-high changes, crooked changes, changes with the hind legs together behind, “hoppy” changes, and failure to change with the rider’s aids. And, not surprisingly, the half-pass angles called for in the test aren’t nearly as steep as those in the Grand Prix dressage tests.
But don’t get me wrong: The Olympic-level eventing dressage test—officially the 2024 Olympic Games 5* Test (Short)—has plenty of difficulty. Let’s take a quick run through the test, and then I challenge you to consider whether you could pull this off the day before tackling a grueling cross-country course on a supremely fit horse!
The test. The first striking difference between eventing dressage at the Olympics and “regular” dressage is that there is no entry halt. At first I wondered whether I’d missed it, but no, horses enter in collected canter and at X transition to collected trot.
This is not as easy as it sounds. Canter-trot transitions can be marred with tension because the mechanics of the two gaits are quite different, so to do them well a horse needs to be balanced and longitudinally supple. More than one horse in the ring at Paris 2024 showed a raised, stiffened head and neck and some tension under the saddle, which disrupted the rhythm and the fluidity.
The Olympic eventing dressage test’s trot work included a shoulder-in to half-pass, mirrored by half-pass to shoulder-in on the opposite rein. Riding these two movements in sequence requires superb control of the haunches—otherwise shoulder-in turns into leg-yield and half-pass turns into renvers. In between is a halt at C with five steps of rein back.
The canter work begins in a unique way: with a depart from walk to right-lead counter-canter at C. Some horses showed tension or got crooked in the transition; they were eager to canter but possibly were anticipating the usual left lead in this moment. Then it’s across the diagonal with single flying changes crossing the quarter lines, followed by a half-pass zigzag between the quarter lines. The precise starting and ending points of the half-passes are not as specific as in regular dressage tests. The test finishes with an extended canter down the long side M-F, then down center line and halt at L.
There’s a lot of lateral work as well as tests of straightness. To develop suppleness and straightness in her mount Nutcracker, Team USA member Elisabeth Halliday has been doing “quite a lot of pole work,” she said after her dressage test. “Going over canter poles on a circle. Yesterday we did some cavalletti work and some bounces out in the field to get their body bending. For this horse it’s about moving him around a lot and keeping him soft and over his back in the warmup so that he can comfortably find his bend both ways and loosen up without pressure. For him also it’s been about practicing the movements,” Halliday said, explaining that Nutcracker “is quite a sharp horse, and he’s trying to do everything right, and I think if he doesn’t know what you want, it’s confusing.”
It Starts and Ends with Harmony
Interestingly, in the Olympic eventing dressage test there is just one collective mark, for “harmony of athlete and horse,” with this concise description: “a confident partnership created by adhering to the scale of training.”
That partnership “isn’t just the rider or just the horse,” said Halliday, who in her first Olympic Games (she was selected for Tokyo 2021 but had to withdraw because her mount got injured) put in a strong test to earn a score of 28.00 penalty points. “That comes from good management at home and having the horses be happy about their jobs.” Her rule of thumb: “When I get home from being away, do my horses stick their heads out and whinny when I walk in the barn? And they do, every day.”
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