Thoughts and memories of a horseman
Starting with negative memory of Aachen, just to show everything hasn’t always gone perfectly for Carl:
Looking fine here
“I’ve actually been last at Aachen, I hold that record. In 2004 on Escapado, that walk of shame, coming out of A, to go back through the entrance and to the stables, is probably one of the longest walks I’ve ever walked, with that damn horse jogging the whole way back, foaming and so over-excited.”
The next year, the pair were selected for the World Cup in Las Vegas,
2011, and the Rotterdam Europeans with Uthopia
Here’s some pics of Carl, the one where he is rubbing his head is when he has seen his score.
He said in an interview with THM after the test, when the whole audience gave a collective OOOh, as he finished his extended trot diagonal which could be heard all around the arena.
“I thought for a minute that there must be a dog in the arena, or a bird had landed, everyone was laughing after the first ‘OOH’. I didn’t know I had seven 10s.”
Nip Tuck
Nip Tuck, he made it all the way to Rio in 2016
“When he got to Grand Prix I said, he’s not going to be good enough. Jane, his owner said, oh please do a Grand Prix with him before we sell him. I said, we’ll go down the road where no one goes. We went to a back-of-beyond Grand Prix, and the blooming horse gets 77%. He was as green-as-a-leek. When I came out, I said, I can’t believe it, he was pretty tense last year, he’s a very hot horse, and January / February is not a good time of the year for him because he’s not in the field as much as I’d like.”
Always ready to spook, Nip Tuck doesn’t like the look of the photographer
“I said that’s unbelievable – the horse is so tense, but he tries his absolute hardest not to make a mistake, he’s doing what I said.”
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George Morris tells his showjumping pupils…
“Why is Carl Hester such a marvelous horseman? No matcho. Strong, but subtle – no matcho. Wait for the horse. Matcho doesn’t wait for the horse – matcho is not horse training.”
2013 and the Euros at Herning:
Hasn’t it been nice at these championships, the riding at the top, Helen is another exquisite rider… dressage BC – before Charlotte and Carl – wasn’t so nice…
“That’s a great compliment (he is chuckling) but we as riders are ultimately responsible for our sport, and the negative press we’ve received – probably justifiably so in some cases – needed eradicating, if what we do is to be worth emulating by young people. It was a definite plan to ride like that.”
And you don’t need horses with steam coming out of their nostrils and fear in their eyes for dressage to be exciting…
“The test of balance for a brilliant rider is power and softness, that’s the hallmark of a brilliant rider, and both Helen (Langehanenberg) and Charlotte (Dujardin) have the ability to achieve that balance, and that is the beauty of it.”
What do you look for when you are selecting a prospect? And Carl and a young Valegro demonstrate – pic K Sparrow photography
“We don’t need to worry about the trot, what we need is a good walker and a good canter, we need that hind-end engine, that’s what we really need. It’s the mechanics of the hind end. You’ve got to know when you are looking at a walk, how will that walk make a piaffe? And you’ve got to know when you are looking at a trot, how will that trot make a passage? Then when you are looking at the canter, how will that canter make a flying change and a pirouette? Those are the visions you need to have when you are looking at a young horse for the future.”
K. Sparrow Photography
Can we talk about positive tension? It seems like a very weird concept…
“Where it tips over, that positive tension, is if you let the horse get strong in the bridle. Once you let the horse become heavy on the hand and strong in the bridle, it’s not positive any more, because then there is a block. If you can create what we try to create, without heavy hands, without hanging onto the rein, if you can do it with self-carriage, then it looks beautiful. It’s this word, expression, which is a dangerous word because once you put expression into it, like heightened suspension and things like that, then if you have got the wrong rider, or a rider who doesn’t ride with an independent seat, then they use their hands and that’s when you get that horrible looking, jerky dressage. It is something we really work on, to be able to create it, without going over-board.”
And self-carriage?
“Self-carriage is really easy to see. It’s that tension into the hand that we were just talking about with Valegro, that really tells it – it’s the first place you see it through the whole of the top line of the horse. The best thing you can do for self-carriage is the give and re-take of the reins. It is amazing how you forget to do that when you ride on your own. That constant giving the hand, taking, giving, taking, making sure that the outline is stable, the mouth is soft. You only have to look at the mouth to know how it is working, the horse is carrying its own head and neck. People that ride on their own, it can be something that they forget they are doing, people put in too much power and that’s why they find self-carriage difficult, and I always think you’ve got to create a balance and then put power in, that way around.”
Pic DigiShots
Delicato
There was a local young horse championship and Delicato was third, and he went cantering past me with this hind leg like so high up! He’s Diamond Hit / Regazzoni, and he has a hind leg like Diamond Hit in canter. If you describe to someone what an extended trot looks like, it is very easy to do, but when you say to someone what is an extended canter, lot’s of people think you just go flat out from one end to the other.
Charlotte has a ride
But a horse with a good hind leg, they go up first, and then they cover the ground, then up again, and cover the ground, and it is because the push sends them up rather than being on the forehand all the time. So many extended canters come on the forehand whereas the horses with a hind end like my new one, pushes them up. He’s a gorgeous horse, he looks like a show horse.”
Dear Carl, thanks for the memories, have a wonderful celebration!