Although a relative newcomer to the dressage scene, Brett Parbery has already acquired a considerable reputation not only as a trainer but also as a calculating and professional competitor. We asked Brett - what makes for a good competition strategy?

“You often see it, a great rider who can produce great work at home, come show day, and it falls apart. I think that is all to do with their game plan – or really, their lack of one. They don’t adopt a game plan before they hop on the horse and that includes the warm up. I can only liken it to Formula One racing - they don’t drive their car around in the warm up lap thinking about the track, they’re testing the machine, the accelerator and the brake and the rider needs to do the same.”
“In the warm up, I would be more focussed on getting reactions, connection with the horse, less worrying about doing the movements. Maybe touch on one movement here and there but you’re really testing or feeling the horse and its reactions on the day.”
“The game plan for the actual test should have already been made a week before the competition. I want to know when and where I’m going to be shoulder fore, where I’m going to make my half halts, setting up the horse in the test. Then when you get the feel of the horse at the show, you might have to alter that plan. Hmm, that doesn’t feel right today, that connection, so I’m going to just change that section of the strategy. So for example the half pass, if you get out in the warm up and you think he’s not listening to your outside leg, then rather than cause a fight just come into your test being ready for that to be a little wrong. You might decide that rather than riding this side shoulder fore, you might have to ride a little bit straighter or a little bit travers, if you feel like he’s going to leave the haunches behind.”

“In that warm up I am checking ‘the car’. Keep it very relaxed, but make sure I’ve got my collected work and my forward work and then a bit of sideways and changes on the aids. At the Dressage Championships with Victory Salute and Whisper, both of those horses, when I got in the warm up before the first competition, were very sensitive and very fresh and the idea was to just get the legs on, get moving around and start to feel that I had some adjustment.”
When they are sensitive, when they are fresh you put the legs on, you don’t sit there with the legs stuck out hoping it all works magically when you got through the arena gate?
“You’ve got to get the legs on, move the horse around, they have to take the contact with your leg. Canter them along and just move them around and get them not so fragile to your legs. A key part of the strategy of the riding is that you just have to know the strengths and weaknesses of your horse.”
“One thing I’ve made a mistake with in the past is having a party trick, getting in the ring and not pulling it off. I think you have to almost focus harder on your party trick! For example Whisper, one of his party tricks is his one times changes, and I’ve learnt to come through the corner and ride it like it’s his worst movement. Otherwise you can get caught in the trap of coming through your corner and thinking ‘I can relax, I’ll come through and I’ll just do my ones and that will be easy’ and they don’t happen. You’ve got to ride those good movements equally as importantly as the others and just know every step of the test for your horse.”
“Whisper and Victory Salute are two different horses and I ride different tests for each horse.”
“Victory Salute is a gelding and much more honest in his reactions, he just doesn’t have the balls so he is a lot more honest. He is a sensitive horse by Salute and is therefore more reactive. So the way of riding him through the test is more settling him down through the short sides and making sure he’s on the haunches through the corners and just trying to settle him down between the movements. He’ll fire himself up. With him, I ride a lot of shoulder fore through the half halt to be sure the half halt connects.”
“Whisper is different because he can be in front of your leg or like the stallion he is, be distracted and be behind your leg - all in the one movement! I really ride him more to the bridle and keep him more on the job and try and keep his attention. I rode him very much shoulder fore through the short sides and in the short sides I try, really try to drive him and say “Stay with me, stay with me” because stallions get distracted easily. Stallions by nature are quite dishonest creatures and they just don’t give you their all, that 100% when you want it.”
It’s interesting you were saying about not riding the test in the warmup. Years ago Karl de Jurenak said that Australia is the only country in the world where people prepare to ride dressage tests just by riding a dressage test in the warmup arena...

“Yes, I think there’s no point doing fifteen half passes just to try and prepare for the one half pass in the ring. I think it’s more the set up, the execution of the half pass and once you’ve done two or three strides, you should feel if you’ve got it right or not, and if not, think about where you broke down. Was it in your set up? Fix that and then move onto something else, don’t wear the horse out.”
So how do you know when it’s time to confront a problem in your warm up and deal with it and when it’s time to go okay, I’m just going to try and fake that?
“I suppose that is knowing your horse. At home, if you’ve confronted problems, what has been the result? You should know your horse and know how much you can push them in the warm up because if you make your horse fragile mentally in the warm up, one hundred times out of a hundred, he’s going to let you down in the ring.
You want him feeling good mentally, to be confident, and be good on the aids. If in the warm up you feel your pirouettes might let you down, then you must make sure that in the test you ride the game plan. You’ve got to work out that game plan before you go to the competition. For example you come in, you ride shoulder fore, you collect the horse cantering on the spot, a little bit quicker and then you pirouette, and if it doesn’t happen, well it doesn’t happen. If the pirouette outside is not good, focus on what happens before you have to make the pirouette inside.”
Do you like to warm them up once or twice on a show day?
“ Victory Salute needs at least 40 minutes to an hour’s warm up, he’s a lot hotter, more sensitive. Whisper really, depending on his mood, you can give him 20 minutes warm up or an hour warm up. It depends on his mood – how he is feeling.”

“Then when I arrive at a competition I make sure they are hand walked, head down picking grass, so they open up their back.”
Bimbo Peilicke remarked at the Sydney CDI that he was amazed at the first trot up that so many horses looked as if they had finished the show rather than they were just about to begin it – is that important that issue of conditioning and having them fresh enough for a five day show?
“Yes, I agree, that is 100% related to performance. That’s why we are fanatical about taking them for walks - to keep them fresh. I’ve said it to the guys at the Australian Championships and I must have said it a thousand times over that weekend, these horses are looking fresh, we’re on track. The horses are looking fresh, they’re bright in the eye, they’re interested, they’ve got their heads out the windows, they’re looking good. Being hand walked, I think that’s the only way you can do it. We don’t get a chance to go to big shows very often in Australia, when the horses do get to something big, it’s all overwhelming and the horses burn out by the second day. I think the art is in the management - keeping a horse sharp and fresh.”
“For example at the Australian Champs I had two novice horses, and some days I didn’t ride them at all. Just a hack, 20 minutes, a big long walk. I’m not going to teach them anything at the show, I’m just making sure everything’s working and keeping off their backs so that when I do have to compete, their backs are nice and free and soft.”
Do you think sometimes, especially with higher level horses that riders start to obsess about movements and forget about fitness in their training program?
“Yes definitely, and that’s where we lose that great movement. How many times have we seen this exciting moving young horse and they lose all of their movement coming to the FEI levels. The horse theoretically should be getting better in his movement coming up through the levels because we’re training that way. I think lots of horses fail, because people are focussing too much on the movements and less about the quality of the movement and the quality of the half halt, the quality of things that actually set up for the movement to happen.”
“Quality is the most important thing, I mean a half pass, going sideways is only one fifth of the actual quality of the half pass, the rest of it as we all know is in the quality of the pace. The quality of the half halt, the rebalancing, I think people need to focus more on that than doing 200 half passes – repetitions until the horse just ends up on its forehand.”
Do you do fittening work with your horses or do you think they get fit enough riding the movements?
“If we had a galloping track, I would like to introduce that into my training. We do a little bit, where we go down the road and in and out the gutters to try and teach horses that there’s unlevel ground, try and get their shoulders moving and their backs moving. Unfortunately we don’t have the luxury of having a big enough place to do a gallop track but I think a gallop track would be fantastic.”
“Like the old Klimke days at the St Georg Riding Club, they had a gallop track and that they warmed up and worked on. That would be the perfect set up for us.”
“One thing that both Nick (Fyffe, also based at Suntori Park) and I do is vary the work. So we’ll go one day with the horse just deep and round and a little bit more trot work. As you know with polo ponies they condition them by trotting. And then some days, more collected work, put them more onto their haunches and just try and vary it a bit for them that way.”
What about feed strategy, is that important coming into an event like this?
“Very important, I’ve noticed and I’m not trying to push my sponsor but one thing I’ve noticed with Prydes is that my horses have felt better from the start to the finish of a show - and it has to be something really obvious for me to notice it sometimes. This slapped me in the face, especially with Whisper because he used to die on the second or third day in. Now his energy levels from the start to the finish are usually the same and I can only put it down to the feed.”

Do you have problems with them coming to a big show and not drinking and not eating?
“No, we’re lucky that way, all of them have been drinking. Often times with the new shavings, the shavings will get into the water and it makes the water sour, so we empty the water two or three times a day to make sure it’s clean and they don’t taste something a bit sour and stop drinking.”
Jean Bemelmanns said to me that he even works around the actual time that he’s going to have a horse competing in a Grand Prix, that if a horse is on at 11.30 in the morning then a week out he’s working around that time. Are you as obsessive as this?
“Yes, I do that as well. I adopted that strategy because I heard that the Australian swimming team thought competition time might have to fit in with the American television and that the swimming in Beijing was going to be at 4 o’clock in the morning and that they’d have to adopt the strategy of training at 4 o’clock in the morning. I’ve adopted that simply because I think it’s all in the conditioning, whether it makes a difference or not I don’t know, but I think from a management perspective, when you jump in the saddle, you want to be able to tick the box, to know you’ve done it right.”

For you as a rider, do you have many strategies for yourself?
“It’s funny, I find myself cleaning up, that’s my thing, I end up cleaning up. I just feel that when I’m a bit nervous, a bit edgy, cleaning up gives me a bit of time to chill out in the mind but still be active. I can let a bit of tension out, so I often go down there and do the washing up and clean up and just get my head around it and then I’ll walk the test over and over - walk over every step just by myself. I try to make that when I get to the short side where I should be in shoulder fore for the next movement, it is no surprise, it’s planned.”
“Everyone’s told me that the Grand Prix is a very fast test - but I’ve found it to be quite slow because in my head, I’ve prepared for it much faster that it actually happens. I’ve thought to myself, if this test is as fast as everyone is saying, I need to find some places to slow it down. I’ve thought of some ways to slow the test down, should I find that it’s all happening a bit quick. I’ve found that in the passage, coming out of the piaffe, you can make the passage a bit more on the spot for one or two steps and then move it forward just to get yourself better connected. Also coming in from the walk to passage, maybe make it more on the spot for one or two steps and then move it forward. Ulla (Salzgeber) was the one that taught me that, to ride the horse small passage, big passage, small passage, piaffe, small passage, big passage, small passage, canter. So she gave me, all of us actually, that idea of riding variations in the Grand Prix.”

She thought a lot about that tactical riding in her test?
“She’s amazing. That’s one thing that Ulla is amazing at, she’s very analytical about her Grand Prix test and this is where I’m lacking experience. The only analysis I have is Ulla’s really, she talked us through the Grand Prix and this is where she really is very, very good. Once you get into her headspace and ask her questions. I mean she’s German and she doesn’t put it out there. They’re not communicators like we are but once you get into her and get her to open up to it, she can give you a lot of information about how to ride that Grand Prix step-for-step adjusting, going forward back, forward back and just making sure that it’s seamless.”
Do you want to be a little bit nervous going into the Grand Prix at a big show?
“I think so, I think if you’re not nervous, you’re really not on edge and you need to be on edge for that test. You need to be on edge, you need to have all you senses alive and I think you can only do that by being a bit edgy and a bit nervous.”
“Another thing that we feel is very important is for our horses to have good circulation. We have begun using an EQUISSAGE machine on a daily basis and are noticing a big difference in looseness and submission, especially when I begin warming up.  I think this machine also helps in preventing muscle soreness which, as we all know, can lead to submission problems.”