Where Prairie meets Grand Prix

Nothing didactic or even particularly instructive today. I did want to share something remarkable with you, though. I've been thinking this week about some of the reasons I love horses, and amateur horse sports, so very much. I've ridden horses since shortly after I learned to walk, and can't imagine being without their unique energy and the very specific challenges of being a horse-owner.

The working horses I grew up riding were more familiar with prairie, cows, ropes, slickers, and mile after mile of fence to ride, than they were with stadiums, crowds, and loudspeakers. Like many ranch kids, I rodeoed on summer weekends, when there was an event within a hundred miles or so. And those same horses that worked all week climbed into the trailer to go do essentially the same job, just in front of a local crowd of cheering, beer-drinking ranch folks.

I wasn't a fan of dressage until I saw a clip from the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, years after the fact. Dr. Reiner Klimke, on Ahlerich, rode those amazing single tempi changes in a victory lap around the stadium. As flawless as it was, not even their gold-medal-winning ride itself made me catch my breath and hold it the same way—it was that fabulous, effortless victory lap that utterly won me over to the sport. There was also a sense of recognition that, for a horse person, a great animal doing a job he was born to do is a thing of beauty—whether that job is cutting and penning calves on a raw and windswept day in eastern Montana, or performing a flawless canter pirouette in a foreign country, in front of thousands of strangers. A great horse is something to marvel over, appreciate, and love.

Here's one clip of that victory lap, by the way, in case you've never seen it:

Between you and me, dressage at the lower levels is just a bit like watching paint dry, unless you're a dyed-in-the-wool horse geek—in which case there's no hope for you anyway. What other horse sport judges you and your trusty steed on how well you manage to walk from point X to point A, then track left? For the true enthusiast, though, even watching a training level test is spell-binding from the initial arena entrance to that final salute.

It's a great deal more difficult than it looks, though, requiring split-second timing, great feel, and remarkable understanding of your horse, your own body, and how the two work together. Once you start riding even the very basic beginning dressage movements, you'll suddenly understand why that hoary old dressage joke is so very funny:

A. Enter at ordinary serpentine.
X. Sprawl. Salute.

Dr. Klimke was a talented horseman and a brilliant rider, who encountered that rare once-in-a-lifetime horse, at just the right time in his career. Together, Klimke and Ahlerich made history—and they made something very akin to magic, as well.