A Weekend with Christophe Theallet at Revel Ranch
By Lori Barrett
This article was nominated for the 2025 GMO Newsletter Awards for general interest articles for GMOs with 75-174 members. It appeared in the April 2025 Utah Dressage Society newsletter.
For those of you unfamiliar, Frenchman Christophe Theallet is the rare International level trainer based on the west coast who chooses to focus on coaching, rather than judging or his own competition horses. A graduate of the National Academy of Saumur, Theallet went on to ride under German trainer Rudolf Zeilinger, before emigrating to the US. Under the tutelage of US Chef d’Equipe Anne Gribbons, Theallet coached US Team member Kasey Perry-Glass onto an Olympic medal and continues to develop top US Team riders and Young Horse trainers around the country. In short, we are excited to bring another key coach out to Utah for the first time!
Anyone who listened for the two days (thanks, auditors!) would tell you the focus of every session, from my three-year-old with 60 days under saddle, up to our horses schooling the Grand Prix work, was about bend. The most commonly heard phrase begat the title of this article: bend him around your leg “like a small banana.” While it never ceased eliciting a laugh each time we heard it delivered with a rumbling French accent, we understood the purpose in our daily training perfectly.
A concept with which most of us are familiar, the purpose of the shoulder fore in the horse (in addition to straightening), is to subtly shape the ribcage of the horse around the rider’s inside leg. In doing this, we create room for the inside hind leg of the horse to step through and begin to carry weight, which is the foundation of collection. Making this room in the barrel is what allows us to ultimately develop not just collection, but self-carriage, as the horse gets stronger and needs decreased support from the riders’ aids. As riders, it’s important to learn the difference between neck bend and the beginning of curvature in the horse’s barrel; we used both shoulder-in and haunches-in (for increased bend behind the saddle,) to create the needed bend as we worked the horses.
Anecdotally, as we worked in this vein, we saw each horse evolve and improve. The three-year-old who tended to hold in her neck while lightly dropping onto the bit began reaching more honestly out through the topline and making a more correct connection from her springy hind legs to the bridle. The FEI gelding who needed increased engagement in the piaffe benefitted from an exercise of trot shoulder-in directly into a gently straightening piaffe, as the hind legs stayed better placed underneath. And the in-betweeners: our young mare schooling Fourth Level work used shoulder-fore within the medium trot to keep the hind legs more honest, to correct her tendency to push too much out behind, while staying extravagant in front.
We could write whole chapters about other takeaways, but long story short, we are bringing Christophe back again at the end of February. Since he’s based a short one-and-a-half hour’s flight from the Salt Lake City airport, the goal is to have him here several times per year to continue developing Utah dressage. Onward into 2025!
