Words by Chris Hector & Photos by Roz Neave
The news ran like a wild-fire round Australia, Ulla is coming, Ulla is coming, but sadly for those who wished to turn the coming of the Olympic and World Cup champion into a full on circus with them sitting their in their rows, complete with eskis, knitting and acerbic comments, Ulla was firm, if she came it was to be for the riders, not for spectators, and access was limited to those riders, their owners, trainers and immediate family. As a concession, we were allowed to take photos in the final session of the Sydney school, and the night before that reviewed Ulla’s time in Melbourne and Sydney over a glass or two of wine. For Ulla, teaching in Australia, was much like teaching all over the world:
“The horses all over the world have the same problems. I always find some good horses, some better horses, some very good horses, and some not so good – it is the same all over the world. Germany is much bigger, with much more riders, so if you have a clinic you always good ones, medium ones and some that are not as good as the medium ones. This is no different from home.”
Do we have the horses with the talent to go ahead?
“Some. But they are very young and I think the future has to show if the riders are good enough to get it, and the horses stay sound… there are so many things. If you pick some for me to work with after these clinics, then in one year you can assess, after one year.”
How many times would you have to come to Australia to make a difference?
“I don’t know. I have to wait and see if I qualify Wallstreet for the European Championships in Moscow, and after this, I will know more.”
Do you think we should aim at Aachen, or forget the WEG and aim for the Olympics in Beijing?
“I don’t know. I still have to look at the horses in Queensland. You need four strong horses for a team, already educated ones. There is no hope if you have only young horses that are not experienced because the standard in the world is very high. I think there is no sense to send off a weak team because it costs a lot of money, and experience is something you can get in every competition all over the world – for this you don’t have to travel abroad to try the horses out. The experience they have to get in their own country.”
What have you been trying to do with the riders to improve them?
“There were different levels, with some of them we trained on the position, some throughness, with some of them we started to do some Grand Prix exercises to look how it is, and in the beginning, always the basics – keep them up, in front of the vertical, get them under the centre of gravity.”
Do you think the riders really understand the basics?
“They understand, they are so happy because they all get the feeling of how the horse feels after they get this – and this I have to say, the riders are really very very good, they try – there were none who did not get it after the first day and this is very good.”
You enjoy teaching?
“If not I would have died before now, with so many horses here in Australia. Too many riders, too many horses, too many names for my little brain.”
You were primarily a teacher not a competitor before Rusty came into your life?
“Exactly and now I go back to the times before Rusty in little little steps because I don’t know what is happening with Wallstreet… If I could qualify him for Moscow that would be something I would love to do for my heart because he is from Moscow. But my aim is to go on teaching – in my life, this is my thing. I’ve spent a lot of time teaching in America, for the last four years, I have been going two times a year, last year I started with England – and my pupils in my barn are from Ireland, Switzerland, Austria.”
Ulla hadn’t met many of our trainers, only Clemens and Judy Dierks, and Roger Ftizhardinge, but she was impressed with the training ability of Renee Pedretti’s mum!
“That was so cute, such a pretty looking girl on a horse and I helped her a little bit on the ground with the whip, then I said, I think it would be a good thing if someone can help her from the ground so that she can keep her position and does not have to be too strong, she said, ‘only my mum can do it’ I said ‘Where is your mum?’ ‘There.’ Okay mum’ – but her mum said, I did this one time and I am a little bit scared of it. Doesn’t matter I’ll show you. So I helped her to do it and everything was fine. In the beginning she was standing there with the whip, making little waves with it. Then I said, you are allowed to touch him, after five minutes she got it and became more confident and she is going ‘cluck, cluck’ and I said, the same you are doing with your voice, do with the whip, and it helped so much. I said to Renee, take your mother to help you, make her confident with the whip, and then it will be fine. It was so nice…”
Every time the other participants saw Mrs Pedretti they shouted, hi coach!
“But you have to find a way, and if there is no one else there to help her, then I have to take the person who is there, who can help her.”
You met up with an old friend, Centaur, who you rode at Equitana in Brisbane?
“YES! My little chestnut one. He is still on my internet site. When I arrived I went up to him and said, Hello, then I put my hand on his nose and he was breathing very hard to smell me, so perhaps he remembered me. He is a very good horse.”
And you kept Heath Ryan under control?
“I only hear the stories about him before I met him, but in the beginning I always say to the riders ‘come to me and tell me something about the horse…’ What are the problems? And he said “Everything!’ That was all he said.”
You reduced Heath to silence…
“He just said everything. So I said, okay, show me your horse. Everybody said this has never happened before that he is QUIET.”
Debbie MacNicol who was sitting at our table, chimed in: “They had a little competition with Heath, and Maurice Bruce and Rozzie Ryan, who will get the most ‘goods’ or ‘excellent’. This morning Heath was going around and around, and Ulla said, ‘good’ and he turned to everyone and said ‘she said this was good’. Maurice got more ‘goods’ then Rozzie came out on her stallion, and as she rode out she said ‘I got a ‘nearly perfect’.”
Although I discovered later that Maurice was claiming that Ulla really said, ‘merely pathetic’.
Ulla enjoyed the Australian attitude:
“I think the riders are fun, they are fun to teach. Maurice is very good fun to teach, but perhaps he has a little bit still the riding style of an eventer but if you should have seen him today, because I made him a bit looser in his hip, suddenly he found how it is to sit in a soft way and he said ‘oh this is comfortable’, this man is really great.”
“Teaching for me in a strange language is not so easy, you have to be very concentrated, I miss words that I need.”
But also the words are just not there – I remember Ernst Hoyos saying he would never teach in English because in German he had a dozen words to describe what was happening in a half pass but in English only two or three…
“This is the difficulty if you teach in English. You really have to find a way to say it, that the rider understands it, and you need three sentences to get one German word. I try to get the horses into it, by working towards it, and then I can say to the rider, this is what we are looking for – if you use words it takes a long time, but if you have a good rider, they will know what you are speaking about, even if you don’t use the right words.”
You preferred to have these clinics a little bit private, without an audience?
“For the rider it is always a little bit better to have it private because they lose their shyness, and they can ride as they do at home. Sometimes you have to kick the horse a little to make it go more forward, but if there are a lot of people, you never know that some of them might get the wrong impression, ‘this one is pushing so much forward, why are they doing this?’ because this person who is watching does not understand. Suddenly the good work you are doing is turning into bad work because sitting there is somebody who does not understand. I think for the rider it is better for them to really work, and only have people around them who really understand what they are doing, and what I am asking.”
How can you keep what you have taught going after you go away – in Germany you have a number of trainers who help you, in Australia we just have mothers…
Once again Deb fills in: “The riders think it would be a good idea to get together at least once a month, and keep the memory, keep the feeling. As Glennis Barrey says, in three weeks it is going to be gone. Brett Parbery said, if she never comes back to this country it is now up to us, we have to be together and take what we have learnt in three days, and find a way to do it.”
Ulla: “If the riders stay together, and they say, we’ll meet each other and take care of each other. If that happens, then already this is a great job I’ve done. In Germany when you go to the competitions you always have the very good riders around you and you say, I will not be the worst. But I think it is very difficult in a country where the distances are so far, that you have to ride alone. They have no indoor, if they have an indoor they have a little mirror. I am very happy at home, I ride alone, but I have a big mirror to watch myself, and I think if they would only have the possibility to have a big mirror, they would see it if they knew where to look to. They are only little things, and they are always on the discipline of the rider.”
“It was so good today, my second day in Sydney, everyone was so focussed and concentrated. They were really drinking in the words and they did what I said, and today, all the horses were better than yesterday. Rozzie with the black mare was having trouble yesterday with half steps, and today she was doing a nearly perfect piaffe. I said WHAT DID YOU DO? – and Rozzie said nothing, I only watched my video and I was thinking. For me this is great to see, the riders listen, they watch it, then they try to do it.”
The only dark note on the horizon for the Australian dressage scene is that Ulla seems to have unearthed a new super star, the Jazz son, Piet, who won the Prix St Georges only recently at Verden:
“I love him. He is not the big mover like Rusty or Wallstreet but he is so comfortable to ride, very clever. I got him three weeks before Athens, so I haven’t spent so much time with him because I wasn’t at home, but with him I only have to pay attention not to work too much with him, because he takes everything. You show him something and the next day, cluck, and he can do it.”
Can he be another superstar like Rusty?
“I don’t think about this. At the moment I really enjoy riding him and I think I will compete him in Grand Prix this year – he is so clever, this is amazing. You never know what will happen.”
We just have to hope that you don’t get another superstar, so you will keep coming and teaching in Australia?
“Before I got Rusty I stopped riding in competitions, I taught – if it happens again, it happens, but for me it is not a big thing, I am not running after my riding success.”
Can we hope that you will come back and teach in Australia again?
“I think so.”
THE PLAYERS
DEB MACNICOL
Dressage Australia chair, Deb MacNicol who thought of the idea in the first place:
I guess it was a pretty brave move to invite Ulla to come to Australia as you did?
“It might have been unexpected to other people, it wasn’t for me. I’ve been thinking for a couple of years, trying to find the sort of person I thought would be useful to have. We are at the stage where we really can’t afford to compromise any more, we had to go for what we could. I don’t know if this is going to work, but it has got to be a start, and has got to give some inspiration to these riders who work so hard and spend so much money, that there is a little bit of hope for them out there.”
“I got the feeling in the last 12 months, that they thought we were just going round and round. Sure we should have done it two or three years ago, but the reaction from the riders at the clinics so far has been remarkable. I have never before been to a clinic of anyone’s where there hasn’t been one person with at least a tiny complaint.”
What’s the agenda from here on in, I hear talk of Ulla starring at Dressage with the Stars?
“The organizers would like it to be. I can’t say. I have no idea. After Brisbane, we will sit and have a bit of a talk about things, what she feels she can offer, see if what we want can fit into a program for her. She has to go home and look at what she has lined up over the next 12 months, two years.”
It’s a long break between now and Dressage with the Stars?
“Yes. If she is coming back, she would have to be back before then. Dressage with the Stars is Stuttgart show weekend and that is close to being her home town. I certainly haven’t mentioned anything to her about Dressage with the Stars, the first decision has to be whether she is going to come back.”
ROZZIE RYAN
“It’s been brilliant, I think everyone is feeling that it has been really hard but really inspiring. Absolutely what we need. The first day was focussing on all the weak spots and working on them, the next day we were working on the ‘Australian illness’ – that’s hands too high – I just hope she comes back, and that we don’t lose this intense focus, and huge power. What she wants is effortless power, you see that in Rusty don’t you? And with Jive I got this enormous powerful trot but it has got to look effortless, and she said, it has got to become the every day trot.”
“With Donna, we worked yesterday on making her more electric to the leg to go into piaffe, but she reacted really really well to that. She had a really interesting canter pirouette exercise which is travers on a small circle to straightening into the outside rein, very much, then sideways but not going faster and then back to the travers, then into a five metre, not a six metre, five metre circle, pretty much in shoulder fore then either out of it, or back into the travers depending on what the horse needs, but in three sorts of canter, like a slow motion, a pirouette canter and a collected canter, it was attention to very minute detail, that we have to be completely focussed and disciplined on.”
ANN SERRAO
What was it like working with Ulla this time, you had a little introduction to her at the Equitana in Brisbane?
“She was much tougher this time. At Equitana she knew I was just coming up to a competition, she is very clever at knowing where you are in your mind too and not pushing past it, but here there was no competition, just training, and she was very full on, amazing. There wasn’t anything that went un-noticed, no matter how far you went down the other end of the arena, or even if your hand or leg was on the opposite side, she knew exactly what was happening.”
What was she concentrating on with you?
“As with everybody, more engagement, more power – more power within the collection. All of us were told, still hands, still legs, make the horse react better to the aids. Just good basic work that we have to have.”
Where do we go from here?
“If she can stick with us, and if we work together as riders, there is a group of us that will at least once a fortnight, if not more, get together, and she said that’s our only chance when she’s not around. It has been great, every rider has sat down there and watched every lesson, we’ve got an idea of what everyone needs to do, and if we help each other in between the times that hopefully she comes out, that is the way to go… along with our own coaches, that’s the way to go.”
MAURICE BRUCE
“It’s been really great. I’ve got this problem with my backside leaving the saddle in the flying changes so I’d be doing them away from her, right in the corner, and no matter what you did, you couldn’t get away without her picking it up. And everything you did, there was an exercise to correct it. The other thing that I found that was amazing, if you want to activate the piaffe, you don’t start bashing them in the piaffe, get them going in the trot, and then bring them back. There were things I’ve never been told, when I was in Germany with Koschel, he didn’t tell me anything like that, or Zeilinger.”
“I think the thing that impressed me most was that when I knew Ulla was coming to Australia to do the clinic, I watched her ride on the videos, and her hands were just so good, so I said to my wife, Jane, the first thing I have to do is get my hands still – so for six weeks I’ve been trying to get my hands still but still she was telling me they were moving three/four inches, that’s not good. It’s amazing, if you can keep your hands still, then the horse’s mouth is still and you can do something.”
GLENNIS BARREY
“It’s just driven home to me that we ride on our own every day and we get into shocking habits. I don’t think she is telling us a lot of things that are new. It is all the stuff that Bimbo keeps drilling into us. Yesterday I rode a half pass on my young horse, and it was just how I dreamed it would be, I hope I get another one because it was just outstanding.”
“I suppose over all the years we’ve had Bimbo, he’s tried to put a system into us whereby we can ride our horses each day, whereas Ulla has filled in some of the gaps that Bimbo probably doesn’t have time to do because he is so busy trying to put into place some sort of organization.”
“I always look at the European horses and think, how do they get that much more out of them. I think Bimbo has put in the basics for me, but how to develop it? Ulla has just put the little bit of cream on the top. It’s just amazing, in two rides, you just go up that much more. I think we are starting to get the actual horse power but for someone like Ulla to put that much extra in, is vital. God I hope she comes back because for me personally, I think the combination of Bimbo and Ulla is good, but it’s the three months in between doing bad things every day… I’ll take a lot home from this, but I can’t see, I can feel it when I get it wrong, but when I get it wrong I can’t see what to do to fix it, that’s still our biggest problem.”