Story – Chris Hector & Photos – Roz Neave
Craig was 15, Prue was 19 when they got their first taste of Heath Ryan at the NSW Equestrian Centre, and now eighteen years later, Craig still pays tribute to Heath Ryan’s charisma: “Heath does allow the average person to dream, that’s what he does so well. Most competition people who go top of the line competition, do it because they are very confident in their own ability. They are very physically apt, and they have the confidence to pursue what they want to do.”
“Most people – and I would include myself in this group – don’t have that confidence until someone tells them that they could possibly do that. And 99.99% of people will tell you, you can’t do it. Heath is in the 0.01% of people in this world who will actually stick their neck out for you and say ‘you can do that, and I’ll actually be there for you when you try!’ Everybody else will say, ‘no you won’t be able to do that, you are not good enough, you are not talented enough, blah blah blah.’ And then when you fall over, they say, ‘see I told you’. They don’t want to stick their neck out, but Heath will stick his neck out for anyone who wants to have a go – and that’s what he does, he just allows you to think that your dream could be a possibility, then it is up to you to make it. He doesn’t do anything more than allow you to dream.”
“When I was a fifteen year old kid, I had pictures of Heath and Matt on my wall, it pains me to admit it, but you do start with the dream, but that disappears in most people because most people don’t have access to someone who actually says, yeah, you can do that.”
“So I’d bought this horse at the NSW Centre Auction – Billabong of Coolalee and when Matt Ryan couldn’t take me for work experience, he suggested that I got in touch with Heath. So down to Lochinvar we go with the horse and away you go. It was a great horse, by Mr and Mrs Ryan’s Andalusian stallion, a full brother to the one Matt took as reserve to the Seoul Olympics. He was very quiet, quite sensitive but he would have rather pulled up and stopped, if I was doing something ridiculous on him. I think he was a genuinely quiet horse.”
Craig on Billabong at Kooralbyn back in 1989 – what nice style the youngster had!
“I kept going back each time for work experience and school holidays. Any time we had holidays, I’d pack up, and move down to Lochinvar, two weeks, six weeks for Christmas – I wouldn’t even go home for Christmas, they all thought I was crazy but I would just stay for as long as I could. I remember going there and just hanging over the door. I don’t know that I did much work…”
Prue: “He was still doing that when I got there.”
For the young Queenslander, Prue Cribb, the Centre was a crucial step on the way to international competition:
“Major turning point. I went to Lochinvar when I was 19, and I took Navarone. I was as happy as a pig in mud, the whole time I was there I just thought ‘this is what I want to do…’ I’d worked in a bank for two years and decided that was not for me.”
Prue Cribb and Navarone at Melbourne in 1993 – winning the three star…
You were lucky to have picked up Navarone – a horse that took you on to international competition?
“He came from down Nowra way. Felicity was competing at Worrigee 3DE, around 1987, and Ruth Emery lived down there, and she was a really good friend of Mum’s. She taught us as children, she used to come up to Bundaberg and do schools four times a year. Her next-door neighbour had the horse, and Ruth said to mum – I’ve got a horse that I think will suit one of the girls. So we went and looked at it, and for the princely sum of $600 loaded it on our truck. We couldn’t really go wrong at that price.”
Was it a big shock to arrive at the NSW Centre – Heath has a fairly theoretical approach to riding, was that different?
“It was a different technique as far as the dressage goes. It opened up a whole new world as far as riding the horse on the bit, but I think Mum had actually given us quite a good grounding. She was really good at getting us taught, we were quite used to being taught and managing horses. Yes, Heath was tad more eccentric than Mum was, but I can remember at home we weren’t allowed to load the horses on the truck unless Mum was there. They had to go on in a certain order, so when I went to the Equestrian Centre and all the other students were going ‘why do these horses have to go on in a particular order?’ – I was like, yeah well they do have to go on in a certain order.”
“I do remember my first meeting with Heath and he had just hopped off a horse and he told me to hose the horse. ‘And it’s got to be wet you know! Wet all over, it’s not to have a dry hair on it!’ – I can remember thinking, okay, I can hose it, and I think I can probably wet it a bit… that was a bit strange.”
“But now when I am in a situation where I have people grooming or helping me, I can so understand where he was coming from. You don’t know what someone’s past experiences are. Some people you ask them to hose a horse, and they just go and hose its girth. So he did want things done in a particular way.”
He seemed to convince almost every student in that era that they were potential world champions?
“Yeah, I think he just opened up a door really. He gave you the opportunity. I do remember him talking to me and saying that I would probably be able to go to Barcelona, and I remember thinking he was crazy. ‘What are you on about?’ I think I was there at a really fortunate period, when there were other like-minded people there – Craig, Gordon Bishop, Bronwyn Batey – and we were all probably quietly in competition with one another, but I think we were all worked so hard, that competition didn’t raise its head.”
For Craig it was an inspiration just to be at the Centre:
“I just used to follow everybody around and do whatever had to be done. I remember Ludendorf was just getting to Grand Prix and doing piaffe and passage and one times changes – it was just fascinating. I remember Rozzie had an old grey horse – Percy, Stirling Tower – and she did a freestyle to music at one of the performances, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. It was just fascinating that dressage could be done like that. At home it was just riding circles, change ride the other way, and do another circle – dressage to music with the crowd is in tears was another thing. Wow this is amazing. So I got a bit hooked that way.”
“It was just a powerhouse of ideas, all bouncing off each other, all fired up with the passion to make our horses the best we possibly could…”
Next episode: Craig and Prue reach their goals – top-level competition…
Prue on Coaching
With two very small children, Prue Barrett has let her eventing career take somewhat of a back seat right now. Sure she is very serious about taking the family stallion, Staccato, to Grand Prix dressage, but when it comes to eventing, her role has been more of a teacher – and sometime understudy to National Eventing Coach, Wayne Roycroft…
Do you learn to become a teacher or is it something that comes naturally?
“I think you do learn, yes. I also think that some people have a gift in that area – but I think even if you have the gift of teaching you still need to develop it. You don’t just have it, and that’s it. You have to work at it.”
In the United States, they really venerate the great coaches – and it is regarded as a skill just like being a top competitor – whereas in Australia, teaching is something you do so you can go and compete yourself the next weekend. Teaching is not treated with a lot of seriousness in Australia…
“I think it used to be. When Franz Mairinger was the coach, there was a certain amount of respect. I can remember my mother talking about coaches that used to come up our way. She used to talk about people like Karl de Jurenak, they were names, and people would go – oh yeah, so and so is coming. Now I don’t know that it’s not a bit of a culture thing. Is it any different in our schools? I don’t think teachers get a lot of respect in our schools either.”
“I know when I decided to do horses full time, it was like ‘teaching, I’m going to have to do this to earn a living…’ And I wasn’t very good at it at all. When I was working for Heath and Rozzie I think I used to average one lesson a week.”
They never came back?
“I had the same one, they just had to be fairly resilient. In my situation I think it was more of a confidence thing. I don’t know whether I was so much a bad teacher, just that I didn’t have a lot of confidence in the teaching.”
“When I left school, I actually wanted to do primary teaching, I did work experience and my reaction was that I didn’t mind teaching those five children – but I don’t want to touch the other 25! I decided it wasn’t for me. But now I am involved in coaching and managing, I am actually teaching a subject that I really enjoy, so that has completely turned it around.”
So where did you find those skills?
“I had a lot of lessons with Vicki and Wayne Roycroft, obviously with Heath, with Rod Brown, I’ve been to a George Morris clinic, Joe Fargis clinic. I found it intriguing, in all those lessons – apart from the ones with Heath and Wayne, they are usually private lessons – are group lessons, and in group lessons you can really take on board the way those coaches are communicating with riders in the group. If you have a really good coach, it’s amazing how they can get that person to improve.”
“For example, in a George Morris clinic, I find it interesting how he focuses on a couple of things – you can watch a rider go through an exercise he wants, and you are wondering ‘why isn’t he saying something about the rider’s position?’ because it seems to be blatantly obvious – and then you realise it is because he is just concentrating on this one thing. I think he thinks, ‘I’ll get this right, and the other will probably be right as a result, and if it’s not, we’ll worry about it then’. I think that is a really big thing.”
“As a coach, the other big thing is to learn to watch everything. That’s a real practice thing. The easiest example is trotting through a grid. A trot pole, a bounce of cross rails, and then one stride to an oxer, and two strides to another oxer. Something simple like that. It’s really interesting – a good coach will be able to say, the hands did this, the legs did that, the pace was like this, the horse had its ears pricked looking at this fence, they can give you a whole story… but they might only say to the pupil ‘next time you come through there, I need your heel to be lower.’ And sometimes people watching on, go ‘what about this!?’ But you are not going to do it all in one lesson.”
“If you say to that rider, come again because that time your heel was up, you hooked it in the teeth, you sat on its back and you were too slow on the approach and afterwards you had no control. The pupil goes, ‘wow, where do I go to from there?’ That might have been exactly what happened, but a good coach is going to say, ‘OK now I need you to do that again, and this time when you come in I want you to think about having the trot a little more active, and I want you to try and do a crest release and hold the mane as you jump the oxer at the end, then halt.’ Then the pupil thinks, ‘this is my job’ this, this, this and this. And because riding has so much to do with feel, they will do all that, and halt the horse at the end. And you say to them, did that feel okay? I’m careful not to say ‘good’ – and that gets the communication happening. ‘Oh yeah, I felt a lot more stable that time. I didn’t feel like he was going to jump me off.’ That’s good, let’s do it again.”
I was lucky enough one time to have a few lessons with Jennie Loriston-Clarke, and she was fascinating, because she would pick on your weakest link and really focus on it and get you working on it, but before she finished the lesson, she would find something that you did well, and send you out of the school feeling really positive…
“I don’t believe people learn unless they are confident. It’s a bit like horses don’t learn unless they are relaxed, and it’s a bit the same with people. Keep them confident. It’s no good saying to someone, just relax, just relax… If they are really struggling with something, you’ve got to give them something that enables them to relax.”
“Say you are teaching jumping and the rider is really worried and tense, if you say, okay I want you to go through there and hold the mane while you jump that fence. You will find in just holding the mane, suddenly their upper body is going to get a little bit of support – they can use that to help them – then they are going to get better, then they will relax. You’ve got to give them tools to get to where you want them to be. You can’t just say ‘relax’ and it will go well. It doesn’t work like that – relax and you fall off.”
“You’ve got to say, I want you to do this with your leg, do this with your hands, and I want your eyes to look there. Then it fits – practical and simple, and you’ve got to try and get into their heads, so you’ve got to find out what they are thinking. If for example, you’ve given those instructions, like I want you to hold the mane, and I want you to look up, and it’s still a bit wild, then you have to try and find out – why didn’t they hold the mane? But you can’t say – you didn’t hold the mane… there must be a reason they didn’t hold the mane. 90% of the time they just forget, but they forget because they are concentrating on doing something else. That’s where you say, okay, remember when we jump this, you’ve got to hold the mane, and they go ‘Gee, that’s right, I forgot!’ Okay just do it again.”
“Now if they forget again the next time, then you’ve got to find out why they are forgetting. It could be something like ‘every time I come off the left rein he shies looking at that wing over there’ – so they’ve got this bit of history in their head, and they are thinking about the history and not remembering to hold the mane. Then I’ll say, okay when you come to the placing pole, you’ve got to be thinking, two strides over the cross rail, and then the next cross rail, and I’ve got to hold the mane here. That’s what you are going to be saying to yourself when you come to that fence. You’ve got to piece it together, it’s got to be really simple, and you’ve got to make it obvious without making them feel like an idiot.”
“To be honest, there is nothing I teach people that I haven’t struggled with myself – I’m not teaching someone something I haven’t already felt. I don’t believe I am a naturally gifted rider; most of what I do has been through a structured learning system. Yes, now it is a natural response, but hey, it wasn’t a natural response ten years ago.”
Some people say that the really brilliant natural riders are not such good instructors because they have never really had to sit down and analyse what they are doing?
“I don’t think there is a general rule there. Some people do have a gift of teaching, and some people we talk about as gifted riders – now if they happen to have both, great. They are not always going to have both…”
And there are some good instructors that are not good competitors?
“Absolutely. I also think there is going to be a personality thing, but is that any different from when we were at school. Some people had a favourite teacher who you thought was an absolute idiot. I think the personality match is important.”
You find it different teaching women riders from men riders? And that some very elite women riders tend to distrust their own strategies and tactics, and needed more support than the guys…
“We all know men and women are different, I’m not re-inventing the wheel, and I think women definitely have more of that peripheral vision happening. There’s a lot more going on – I think mostly men have much more of a one-track mind. Right we are going, this is what we are doing, let’s go and do it. Women factor in a lot of other things, and I think there are pro’s and con’s in both those approaches.”
“For the women that’s great because they pay attention to detail. Everything has been covered – they’ve thought about everything – but then you’ve got to be able to think about everything, match it together and then go with the tunnel vision. The other side of the coin, when someone just has the tunnel vision, their equipment might not be up to scratch, or the horse’s fitness. I know with teaching I think it goes much more into managing, when I am working with the elite riders, I was surprised that some of the top girls – like Sammi McLeod, Claudia Graham, Olivia Bunn – how much they wanted you to be there. I thought they were doing a brilliant job and I was surprised – this is before I got to know them so well – how much they wanted you there.”
“Now I shouldn’t have been surprised because I know myself when I was doing a dressage test, or walking the course, or whatever, at a major event – I needed Craig there, I needed Heath there, I needed Wayne there. They might not have been giving me information every second of the way but that was part of my support group. They needed to be there. I remember specifically one time at Lochinvar they were all standing there, and it was like, oh well who’s going to tell her, and I remember cantering past and saying ‘well if ONE of you could say something that would be great!’ They were like, don’t pick me.”
“I think everyone is unique in that situation, you need the people who are going to allow you to perform to your best, and I think that’s where the sports psychology comes into it. Gosh Pippa Funnell would have to be the prime example, she’s quite open about how she is unable to ride at that top level without that support and knowledge and psychology, to help.”
“It’s a very general term, sports psychology. I think in every very good competition rider, even though they might not want to have anything to do with the sports psychologist, I think naturally they are able to control their competition environment. They do that without thinking about it – when you find someone who is an excellent rider and very good in their training program but they keep on not producing the goods when it counts, it doesn’t mean they are not competitive enough, or they don’t want it enough – you can definitely get them an edge by helping them in the sports psychology department.”
“It’s a little bit of a tricky area. The sports psychologists that have been involved in eventing, say that the eventers are the most mature athletes that they have ever dealt with – and that is because eventers are used to managing so many things. They are quite used to managing their own anxiety levels, they are used to dealing with the horse and the crew that goes with it, it’s not like put your swimmers, just go out and get into the pool – there’s so many other issues that come into it.”
So how does someone work out whether the coach they are going to is a good one or not? There are a lot of fakes and unqualified people who call themselves riding teachers or trainers…
“Absolutely. I think with the NCAS system that we have in Australia basically its quite easy to find out who is qualified and who isn’t – and who has insurance! If you have never had a lesson and you don’t know where to start, the first thing is to get on the EFA website and find a qualified instructor in your area. They must be qualified with the NCAS.”
But I know a lot of NCAS instructors and some are fabulous and some I wouldn’t trust to teach a dolphin to swim?
“If you get a situation where someone is really keen on eventing. They have been through the Pony Club system, 14 / 15 years old, and they have already been to a couple of events and they are thinking, I am really keen on this, I need some help – first they find out who the NCAS instructors are. A lot of them are going to be competing at the events near you – watch them, watch what they do. Try and establish, are they where you want to be.”
“Okay not every good coach is going to be competing, but if you are trying to find out, do a little research, talk to people, that’s the best thing. If you look at your list and there are three possible coaches, all within an hour, find out if anyone else has been to them. You might find out – ‘oh yeah, I went to that person but they were really tough on my horse and I just didn’t understand what they were on about…’ It’s got to be that simple.”
To give your coach a chance how often do you need to work with them?
“I think you have got to have regular lessons. That could be once a week, once a fortnight, but it is important to be regular. If you come every single week, you may find that you only get a couple of things out of that lesson, if you have a coach that is going to ride your horse, that means they are going to ride it one out of six rides in the week, assuming it has a day off. So once week, your coach is on the horse – that does huge things and you will be surprised how quickly that starts to take shape.”
“Now if once a week is not within the realms of financial possibility, once a fortnight. It does depend on your financial situation, no doubt about it. But if you can afford once a week, do it – you’ll be amazed how much that can fast track you. Every time you go for a lesson, don’t expect to drive home going, ‘wow, it was just amazing!’ It’s not going to happen every single week. There’s going to be times you might drive away and go, ‘oh gee, I don’t know whether he went very well today, or whether I learnt anything.’ I would say in that situation, just turn up next week. Often your coach is going to say, ‘how did your horse go during the week?’ and you find that something during the week might have been better. Then you realise that your horse is going better. So don’t think that the lesson is the be-all and end-all. The coach is obviously working on something for the next time.”
“I can remember when I was having regular lessons with Heath and I’d have a lesson, and I’d think, great, I think I’ve got this. And I would go back whenever the next lesson was, and he would be totally on another tangent, TOTALLY! And I used to think, what’s he on now? I had this, and now we are heading in another direction. And I would be shot off down another road of discovery. Oh boy, this is just too much.”
“Now I am a coach, I can so see how that happens. Because you turn up the next time, and you’ve got that now – let’s move on. I would say if you keep getting taught the same thing week after week, either you are not getting it, or the coach doesn’t have enough imagination. I don’t believe you should be being told the same thing week after week, if you need the same thing told to you, a good coach will tell it in a different way. Do a different exercise. It’s going to come across in a different way. As a coach my most depressing lesson is when I don’t feel that the pupil has got where I’m coming from – then I think, ‘just how do I get that message across’. Sometimes I think a horse can go badly and I feel bad about that, because I think the rider is doing a really good job and the horse is just not responding, so you’ve got to say, ‘stick at this and it will come’. I think it is important that you tell the pupil that – you’ve got to say, these are really tough times but we’ve just got to keep slugging away, we’ve got to be resilient and we will come out the other side. Riding wasn’t meant to be easy – if it was easy every mug would be doing it…”
This article was originally published in the March 2007 edition of The Horse Magazine