Story by Christopher Hector & Photos by Roz Neave
Jean Bemelmans is a traveler, not just in a geographical sense: although he has done plenty of that and continues to hop around the globe with a fine disregard of the perils of jet lag, but in a philosophical sense, because Jean is a thinker as well as a traveler, and like all good travelers, he knows that sometimes you need to change the direction and pace of the journey.
Jean was first and foremost a competitor: “When I started I had the goal to win one Grand Prix a season, now my goal is for one of my riders to win one a Grand Prix in a season… so far this season, they have won three…”
Jean was at the top of his form with the mare, Habana, when he quit the competition arena…
“The Spanish people came and asked me to work with their team, and I thought, maybe this is the time to stop competing and be a trainer – but I had a stable with 40 horses. It was getting more and more difficult, so I reduced the stable to 15 boxes, and I changed my way of living. I didn’t compete myself, I kept riding, but the main goal was the training.”
“I was 15 years with the Spanish horses, a lovely, lovely time…”
Jean may have quit competing, but that hasn’t meant that his saddle isn’t used:
“I had to keep riding, I love riding, this is my passion. Everything starts because I love horses, I love to ride. When you are young, you love to ride, so you love to compete, but I think the sport is for young people. In came Nicole Uphoff, then Isabell Werth, Anky van Grunsven, now we have Adelinde Cornelissen – why should I with my sixty years compete against them. Not that I cannot ride anymore, I enjoy to ride, and I enjoy to make horses ready for other people. If they have a problem I can sit on the horses and I am a unit with my pupil.”
“For example when I was with Rafael Soto and I was riding a little bit on Invasor he was looking he was riding I was teaching it was like a family feeling.”
“I retired this year, this year I am sixty five, but I feel like I am forty, and I love to ride, but I don’t like to ride the easy ones – I ride the ones that are not learning something, can I get it to them? It is always something that you have to prove to yourself.”
“I am always afraid of losing that contact. For example, when I was with Rafael Soto, and I was riding a little bit on Invasor, he was looking, he was riding, I was teaching, it was like a family feeling. This is something to motivate us, to keep us young, because the day when there is such a difference in age between your students and you, that they are saying oh this old man, then you are lost, you cannot be a good trainer any more. You can only be a good trainer if you feel, okay come on guys, let’s go, let me try, this feeling, then they want to work. The moment when you sit at the side of the arena and go, do this, do this, you are lost, and when I feel this, I will stop. When they say, ‘they have a respect for my age,’ I quit. I want to be in the middle of it.”
You ride the French horses?
“I ride some of them if they come here, but normally I don’t ride in clinics, everybody has a system and if you just get on the horse for ten minutes, it doesn’t make much sense. If there is a horse with a problem I will get on. I had some friends who said, can you come, our horse won’t do one tempi changes. So I went for two days, and then I came home, but I am normally not their bereiter. I also think at the end of the day, a good trainer has to make it without riding, he has to teach the rider how to fix it. I enjoy riding at home.”
Since we’ve been visiting Jean, he has moved three times, now he seems very happy in a large, busy public stable that is alive with riders, dressage and showjumping, with a great restaurant and a certain buzz…
“The owners of this place are not involved in riding, they are good friends of mine, I have known the owners for a long long time – and they said, Jean come here. They made a separate section for me, with 15 boxes, so five of them for friends, my wife has a horse. We have around ten customers, two Russian clients, one has three horses, one has two, a German lady has three to four horses, and one or two for visitors. Some come for a week or a month, two or three months. Last year I had all the Canadian team here preparing to go to the WEG. They were here on their own, but if they wanted me to help them, I helped. Some I helped a bit more, some a bit less.”
He may have scaled back on the number of stables but not on the traveling. While we were there, Jean traveled to Amsterdam and back to help one of his students competing at the big show there, in twenty four hours he was off to France to conduct a clinic, before flying to Florida to help out another student, Daniel Martin who is in winning form in Wellington…
“So I have a good system, I am free to do my job in France, that needs time, we have clinics, we have shows, and here I have a good Bereiter, Joost, he has been working six or seven years for me. Joost won a Grand Prix a few weeks ago, so he is a good rider and a good trainer, so if I am not here, everything goes on. My wife takes care of the stable. For me it is a very comfortable situation.
Jean leaves snowy Germany to help Daniel Martin in Florida… sometimes the journey is really tough – photo Kenneth Braddick
How is it going with the French?
“It is going better and better. Okay, everything takes time. We were not as good as we wanted to be in Caen because we don’t have so much to work with, in the last years the French have not had so much success, a little bit here, a little bit one there, the impulsion is not like I want it. If they give me time, I think I can develop the sport and we can get to where the others are. We just had a clinic with all the group, and we had around ten riders with young horses, young riders with a good prospect… But at the moment the French are a bit behind.
But the Spanish were too when you started working with them…
“Sure, I was there for 15 years, and now with the French, two years. Dressage is not like jumping where you can come with a good horse and from one day to another, you can win, dressage doesn’t work like this. In dressage you need to build up the horses, to build up a team you have find you core riders, and the other ones come around, but this is developing.”
“Amorak with Stephanie Brieussel, is only nine years old and already he has won a few Grand Prix – but okay, one day he is winning, one day he is not so good. Two weeks before our first international show, Mechelen, she was winning in France with nearly 73%, and in Mechelen the horse was nervous because it was indoors, everything was loud, and suddenly we are back to 65%. Now we have to go to Vidauban, and then to Hagen, we will get there, I am sure. We have others with young horses that do very good passage / piaffe. At the moment, we are getting ready at home. You make yourself ready at home, then you go to the show, at the show, you discover your homework. This is what we are doing now. We did the homework, so now we go to the shows to see what is the next homework. I am very positive.”
“Amorak with Stephanie Brieussel, is only nine years old and already he has won a few Grand Prix”
Will you qualify a team for Rio?
“To be qualified to go to Rio, we have to be in the top six at the European Championships. If we look at what happened in Caen and look at the scores, to be in the six you have to have an average of nearly 72%. We didn’t reach it this time, because we had one rider, Jessica Michel, who was super good in the training, and then she faded a bit, in the ring she lost impulsion, and she couldn’t give what we were expecting her to give, and the two others were just around 70, so it was not enough. All the teams are quite close together, and some teams have one top star, and this top star, makes a 77, then okay, one can make 67. At the moment if we are on 71, 72, then one gets 65, we have a problem.”
What do the French think of the new FEI rule where the bottom teams are all on the first day…
“I can only speak for myself, but it is not so good for the teams on the first day because the judges know that they are not so good, and they won’t give the points. At the moment there is a lot of changing of the rules, but I don’t know if these rule changes make it better. They look to make dressage more modern and more attractive to the TV, and I don’t know if this is always the right way because we are a very traditional sport. We have to decide, are we staying with our tradition or do we just do what the TV wants?”
“I would like to stay with the tradition, tradition can be something very nice. A modern hit can last just three minutes, but there is also an opera, and an opera takes more time – and you have to sit there and listen. If I look at dressage in the last years, it was super successful, look at London in Grand Prix, the Grand Prix Special, the Kur, the people were enjoying it. Even in the Kur, after the 18 horses, they could have had another ten horses… why should we break this up into little short parts?”
“In the end, where is it going? Will they one day say, only the top five of the world can compete, and the rest have to stay at home… All over the world, there is such a demand for dressage, but if they see that they have no chance at all, then they are lose interest. It is a pity for the sport.”
Will the Germans stay at the top…
“I don’t think they are that strong any more like they were in the past. With internet today, many trainers are flying all over the world, Holland has come up, Spain is suddenly a country that can compete with the best. The world is coming together. I was seventeen before I came to Germany, traveling to a foreign country. Next week I will get on a plane and I will be in Florida, and the week after, I will be in Paris, the world is getting smaller. Before, all the countries were doing their own thing, now it is more open. Before people did not understand, what is dressage and how you do it, but now you can learn on the internet, read books. Even in South Africa, they know how to ride a piaffe – or a transition – it is all much more global. I hope that with this emphasis on only seeing the top stars, they don’t break this growth we have all over the world.”
“Look at Australia, you are so far away, but you have Anky van Grunsven visiting, you have Charlotte Dujardin – Charlotte is in London, but she is also in Melbourne, so you know how she thinks. That is a positive power and we should keep this…”
Was it a surprise to you that the British suddenly became such a strong team?
“I think that all the teams, Australia or South Africa, if they have a good system and at the end of the day, a little bit of luck, they can make it. Don’t forget the luck because horses make the competition, you see very often when a good horse retires, then it is very hard for the rider to stay at the top, the horses are the most important thing.”
“I saw the development with Carl and Charlotte. I knew them for many years, because they started to compete in Spain a lot, so I saw them from the beginning. From M classes to St Georges, to the first Grand Prix. They were the motor for the British team, and then with Dr Bechtolsheimer with his daughter on a good horse, they were a very strong team. We will see after Valegro, because you know how hard it is to find the next good horse. Many times you see it is always the horses that make it… there was the time of Granat, of Marzog, of Ahlerich, now it is Valegro, maybe another one will come…
Maybe Bella Rose…
“Bella Rose is the best horse in Germany. What I admire a lot, is that Isabell Werth, with all the success she had, she went into a deep hole with normal horses but she kept trying, and now she has found again a super horse and she is there again.”
Maybe Bella is the best?
“Never say it is the best, at the moment it is the best she has, and it is a top one, sometimes in life we forget – the others were not bad, Gigolo was a pretty good horse.”
“Isabell is clever, with Bella Rose, she built her up step by step, she went very carefully, she didn’t push the horse too much, she has a very good way and I think she will arrive. Maybe she can replace Valegro one day, and I hope it for Isabell because she deserves it. You see Isabell at a show, she is riding four-year-old horses, five-year-olds, she is such a hard worker, if anyone deserves it, she deserves it…”
But with Bella Rose, she rides more elegantly…
“The horse makes the rider. One day I spoke with one of the top vets in the world, and I asked him, how can it be that in racing the Arabs have so many facilities, one groom for each horse, they have super trainers, the best vets, but that doesn’t mean they win all the best races. He said, Jean, a winner is born, a good racehorse will win despite a bad trainer, the winner has it. I think the good horses are born and then if they come in the right hands and they have a good rider, and the rider has the intelligence to let the horse grow – like Carl did, like Dujardin – she was ready to do Grand Prix maybe two years earlier, but she waited, she gave the horse a chance. The horse was always good, he won on the small tour, but at the end of the day, it came point by point, this is the difference of the champions.”
Tell us about the horse you rode, Tatiana’s horse…
“The horse is a Painted Black, we bought him last year in Holland. He is a very good horse, now he is seven. It took a long time because the horse had never been used for breeding and because the owner was castrating him, he wanted to have frozen semen, from nothing to every day jump on the phantom, this is crazy. First of all, just to help, we put on a little martingale, to make it more easy. I don’t need the martingale, but the lady is not so strong, and the horse knows it. So I put the martingale on to help get a little control.”
“I am working here on getting him coming and going in a nice normal way, not in such a wild way. He has to have confidence, if I say go, he has to go, if I say come back, he has to come back.”
What about your Pilates exercise, turning around and touching his tail?
“In my clinics, sometimes I tell people to do this, but I think the problem is that 75% cannot, they have no body control. I want always to see if they have body control, it is not a question to have a long arm or a short arm, just to sit and be able to move your body. But the other thing is it is a good gymnastic for the horse, the tail of the horse is connected with the back, the moment the horse puts his tail up, he puts the back down a bit, so if you touch him behind, the tail goes under and this makes the back round. It works with all the horses, but especially with the young horses, I like to do it. Then the next step is when they get used to this, they get lower behind, they shorten, and if you play with this, then they are better with the whip because they think the whip is the hand, and you have a better impulsion. It is not a wonder, it is a little toy that I use to help.”
This article originally appeared in the April 2015 edition of The Horse Magazine
We have lots of wonderful articles with Jean, you will find them here: