THE HORSE MAGAZINE

MARCH 2004

Olympians of Tomorrow
Lots and lots of Australians harbour secret dreams of wearing the Aussie Flag on their breast as they gamely lunge for the finish line to win an unexpected gold medal at the Olympics and the crowd goes wild and applauds the amazing heroism and dedication and wouldn’t that just be GREAT!
Well in actual fact if you are a soul that will one day turn into an Australian Great and ride for Australia at an Olympic Games then the above dream and visualisation is 100% one of the common denominators in all Olympians, past, present and future.
Interestingly there are quite a few common characteristics that all Olympians share and many common difficulties, which they all will need to overcome or defy.
This is going to mainly reflect characteristics and difficulties experienced by the equestrian Olympian.
Training a rider from scratch to Olympics would normally take a full 10 years. Most people however have quite an amount of prior learning either through Pony Club or bush riding, or riding on the farm, or at a riding school. So often a reasonable recreation rider gets to serious elite level within three years of training. Preferably these three years happens between the ages of 14 to 24. When a rider is in this age bracket their reflex reactions are at their best and are a wonderful conduit or catalyst through which the discipline of the intellect can train the body. Training these synapse reactions or reflex reactions is a matter of exposing them repeatedly to the appropriate exercises until it becomes second nature for the body to react in a classical and correct fashion. These exercises may be skills such as recognizing distances as you approach a fence on a cantering horse, or recognizing the swing in a horse’s back and how the tempo or activity can remain constant and yet the speed with which the horse travels can dramatically vary as in collected trot and extended trot.
After the age of 24 disciplining the body to learn those skills becomes more difficult. I do however rush to add it is not impossible for older students to learn this, just more difficult.
So bearing this in mind I certainly would encourage potential Olympians to study riding before they go to Uni. Whilst you are parking your bottom on a chair at Uni, the rhythm of life will gently waft out through the window to be lost forever – with it your best reflex reactions. On the other hand, while you are riding and shovelling manure, the rhythm of life does not take away your brain cells or your potential to perform outstandingly at Uni in years to come. In actual fact, mature age students can perform better at Uni than their younger counterparts.
FIRST BID
Many people do decide to just test the water and take a year off after school before going to Uni. Just to see how they go. One of the things you really need to be aware of is your first bid will always be your strongest. The fact is you are naïve, innocent and view yourself as a student trying to learn.
This fact remarkably and unexpectedly makes for a very strong and very beautiful effort. Life and genetics are however pretty weird and the danger is that you make great progress in heading towards the Olympics and then something unexpected comes up. You run out of money, your parents really think you should go to Uni, a boyfriend or girlfriend arrives on the scene and you wants to spend more time together, whatever, as a result you either put on hold your efforts to go to the Olympics or you downgrade your efforts as your temporarily focus elsewhere. No matter how you explain this phenomena the ugly thing about it is this is a common characteristic of the never-will-be's!!
This is what I call ‘breaking’. The problem with breaking is once you have done it once, it’s much easier the next time and the time after that you hardly even notice you are breaking. This is an early cross road where the Olympians of Tomorrow start to move apart from most of the dreaming population.
PARENTS
These people do tend to be the only real sponsor anybody can rely upon for any length of time, It is particularly interesting to study the parents of existing Olympians and they do represent a diverse lot in terms of background and just how much money they do or don’t have. What is however a standard characteristic is that at least one of the parents is an extremely determined supporter verging on the fanatical supporter. The support for an athlete going out onto their limits, throwing everything they have at an Olympic dream, has to be uninhibited. The athlete has to let go of all responsibilities, all considerations for all normal social considerations, for other projects and go for this with their soul. If a parent is hesitant because they are worried that little Susie might get so disappointed if she fails or that Buck will miss the butcher’s apprenticeship intake, then invariably the rider will break. At least one parent has to verge on being a fanatical, positive supporter just no matter what.
ELITISM
Elitism is a zone that the Olympians of Tomorrow have to move into. It’s not a matter of working harder or becoming a better and more skilled rider. Funnily enough once you are within three years of the Olympics, your riding skills will already be fairly awesome. You however may still be at pony club and by comparison with everyone else, very average. Elitism is when you start to become answerable for everything you do. I mean each minute, each second you are on a horse you are actually encouraging the horse’s development. This is of course focus or accuracy. No longer do you work so hard on improving your skills but work on how best to use your skills; to calibrate your ideas so that they have become the most effective. It’s possible to have an idea which is 100% right but apply it without enough intensity. Conversely it’s possible to have an idea which is 100% right but you apply it with too much intensity. In both situations progress is minimal and it’s like hitting your head against a wall. However there is intensity somewhere in between these previous two calibrations that opens up the next level of play and has a wondrous effect on the horse. This is called focus or if you like being ‘righter’. Traditionally people would say to themselves, ‘what I am doing wrong?’. Well once a rider enters the Elite world it would be just too easy if the real problem was you were ‘doing it wrong!’ No such luck, you just have to be more and more accountable for every single move you make and you have to be ‘righter’!!
SLIPSTREAMING
One of the most effective ways of getting things ‘righter’ is to use the slipstreaming phenomena. Sometimes one of the parents has actually ridden at a reasonably high National level and then uses their experience to guide their kids past the interferences they experienced. This case scenario appears lots here in Australia as does an older sibling doing reasonably well and then paving the way for a younger brother or sister to kick on past and be brilliant. There are other slipstreaming versions which you will find Olympians of Tomorrow deploying with perhaps the most common being riders becoming a working pupil with a mentor or top competitor who is current and in touch with the sport at the edge. Even just basing yourself near other top riders and frequenting as many competitions at as high standards as possible and having regular lessons is another form of slipstreaming.
WINNING
You only get good at what you practice so it is important that Olympians of Tomorrow do in these final three years start to win fairly regularly. Not necessarily at the top but winning never-the-less. To win it will reflect your attack, not your defences. Everyone is slightly different and believe it or not, will have slightly different talents. To win you need to understand yourself and then build your attack around your strengths. At the end of the day, your strength will be your individuality and how that can blend with synergy into the partnership between both you and your horse. That’s not to say that you ignore your weaknesses which we all have, however winning is all about your strengths.
GENETIC DISASTER
All of us are genetically engineered to fail. That is the sad truth. Every single person has serious potential. Pretty well nobody ever realises their potential. Why? Well at the end of the day most of us are here to make sure the human race keeps reproducing and in so doing we contribute just a speck of a gene to the great evolution of mankind!!!
If everyone went to the Olympics who would raise the families? If everyone became household legends, who would mend the leaking hot water tap?? That’s why most of us are doomed to ‘Suburbia’ and ‘mediocrity’. It’s the only way the world will keep turning. So the Olympians of Tomorrow have to somehow defy things like ‘status quo’, ‘being a caring sharing member of society’, being responsible and pledging themselves to a career, living with the stigma of not having a proper job, often struggling to hold a proper relationship, understanding that an Olympic Team is made up of five riders for two weeks, once every four years and is selected from thousands of Olympic aspirants!!!
I mean if you do medicine or law at Uni, there are some 600,000 practitioners in each profession going hard at it 365 days a year. Pick the easy option! Most potential Olympians will break on these grounds and return to reproducing the human race.
EXCEPTIONS
Of course, there is always the possibility of an exception, especially with the odd more mature aspirant. What everyone needs to be really really aware of is that being an exception is also one of the common denominators of those that never-will-be.
FINALLY
Olympians are surprisingly enough not a collection of those who are most talented, rather just a few souls who cherish a dream so much that they just never give up.
Cheers,
Heath

Ryans Rave Index

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	AUSTRALIA'S NUMBER ONE EQUESTRIAN MAGAZINE
		MARCH 2004 Olympians of Tomorrow Lots and lots of Australians harbour secret dreams of wearing the Aussie Flag on their breast as they gamely lunge for the finish line to win an unexpected gold medal at the Olympics and the crowd goes wild and applauds the amazing heroism and dedication and wouldn’t that just be GREAT! Well in actual fact if you are a soul that will one day turn into an Australian Great and ride for Australia at an Olympic Games then the above dream and visualisation is 100% one of the common denominators in all Olympians, past, present and future. Interestingly there are quite a few common characteristics that all Olympians share and many common difficulties, which they all will need to overcome or defy. This is going to mainly reflect characteristics and difficulties experienced by the equestrian Olympian. Training a rider from scratch to Olympics would normally take a full 10 years. Most people however have quite an amount of prior learning either through Pony Club or bush riding, or riding on the farm, or at a riding school. So often a reasonable recreation rider gets to serious elite level within three years of training. Preferably these three years happens between the ages of 14 to 24. When a rider is in this age bracket their reflex reactions are at their best and are a wonderful conduit or catalyst through which the discipline of the intellect can train the body. Training these synapse reactions or reflex reactions is a matter of exposing them repeatedly to the appropriate exercises until it becomes second nature for the body to react in a classical and correct fashion. These exercises may be skills such as recognizing distances as you approach a fence on a cantering horse, or recognizing the swing in a horse’s back and how the tempo or activity can remain constant and yet the speed with which the horse travels can dramatically vary as in collected trot and extended trot. After the age of 24 disciplining the body to learn those skills becomes more difficult. I do however rush to add it is not impossible for older students to learn this, just more difficult. So bearing this in mind I certainly would encourage potential Olympians to study riding before they go to Uni. Whilst you are parking your bottom on a chair at Uni, the rhythm of life will gently waft out through the window to be lost forever – with it your best reflex reactions. On the other hand, while you are riding and shovelling manure, the rhythm of life does not take away your brain cells or your potential to perform outstandingly at Uni in years to come. In actual fact, mature age students can perform better at Uni than their younger counterparts. FIRST BID Many people do decide to just test the water and take a year off after school before going to Uni. Just to see how they go. One of the things you really need to be aware of is your first bid will always be your strongest. The fact is you are naïve, innocent and view yourself as a student trying to learn. This fact remarkably and unexpectedly makes for a very strong and very beautiful effort. Life and genetics are however pretty weird and the danger is that you make great progress in heading towards the Olympics and then something unexpected comes up. You run out of money, your parents really think you should go to Uni, a boyfriend or girlfriend arrives on the scene and you wants to spend more time together, whatever, as a result you either put on hold your efforts to go to the Olympics or you downgrade your efforts as your temporarily focus elsewhere. No matter how you explain this phenomena the ugly thing about it is this is a common characteristic of the never-will-be's!! This is what I call ‘breaking’. The problem with breaking is once you have done it once, it’s much easier the next time and the time after that you hardly even notice you are breaking. This is an early cross road where the Olympians of Tomorrow start to move apart from most of the dreaming population. PARENTS These people do tend to be the only real sponsor anybody can rely upon for any length of time, It is particularly interesting to study the parents of existing Olympians and they do represent a diverse lot in terms of background and just how much money they do or don’t have. What is however a standard characteristic is that at least one of the parents is an extremely determined supporter verging on the fanatical supporter. The support for an athlete going out onto their limits, throwing everything they have at an Olympic dream, has to be uninhibited. The athlete has to let go of all responsibilities, all considerations for all normal social considerations, for other projects and go for this with their soul. If a parent is hesitant because they are worried that little Susie might get so disappointed if she fails or that Buck will miss the butcher’s apprenticeship intake, then invariably the rider will break. At least one parent has to verge on being a fanatical, positive supporter just no matter what. ELITISM Elitism is a zone that the Olympians of Tomorrow have to move into. It’s not a matter of working harder or becoming a better and more skilled rider. Funnily enough once you are within three years of the Olympics, your riding skills will already be fairly awesome. You however may still be at pony club and by comparison with everyone else, very average. Elitism is when you start to become answerable for everything you do. I mean each minute, each second you are on a horse you are actually encouraging the horse’s development. This is of course focus or accuracy. No longer do you work so hard on improving your skills but work on how best to use your skills; to calibrate your ideas so that they have become the most effective. It’s possible to have an idea which is 100% right but apply it without enough intensity. Conversely it’s possible to have an idea which is 100% right but you apply it with too much intensity. In both situations progress is minimal and it’s like hitting your head against a wall. However there is intensity somewhere in between these previous two calibrations that opens up the next level of play and has a wondrous effect on the horse. This is called focus or if you like being ‘righter’. Traditionally people would say to themselves, ‘what I am doing wrong?’. Well once a rider enters the Elite world it would be just too easy if the real problem was you were ‘doing it wrong!’ No such luck, you just have to be more and more accountable for every single move you make and you have to be ‘righter’!! SLIPSTREAMING One of the most effective ways of getting things ‘righter’ is to use the slipstreaming phenomena. Sometimes one of the parents has actually ridden at a reasonably high National level and then uses their experience to guide their kids past the interferences they experienced. This case scenario appears lots here in Australia as does an older sibling doing reasonably well and then paving the way for a younger brother or sister to kick on past and be brilliant. There are other slipstreaming versions which you will find Olympians of Tomorrow deploying with perhaps the most common being riders becoming a working pupil with a mentor or top competitor who is current and in touch with the sport at the edge. Even just basing yourself near other top riders and frequenting as many competitions at as high standards as possible and having regular lessons is another form of slipstreaming. WINNING You only get good at what you practice so it is important that Olympians of Tomorrow do in these final three years start to win fairly regularly. Not necessarily at the top but winning never-the-less. To win it will reflect your attack, not your defences. Everyone is slightly different and believe it or not, will have slightly different talents. To win you need to understand yourself and then build your attack around your strengths. At the end of the day, your strength will be your individuality and how that can blend with synergy into the partnership between both you and your horse. That’s not to say that you ignore your weaknesses which we all have, however winning is all about your strengths. GENETIC DISASTER All of us are genetically engineered to fail. That is the sad truth. Every single person has serious potential. Pretty well nobody ever realises their potential. Why? Well at the end of the day most of us are here to make sure the human race keeps reproducing and in so doing we contribute just a speck of a gene to the great evolution of mankind!!! If everyone went to the Olympics who would raise the families? If everyone became household legends, who would mend the leaking hot water tap?? That’s why most of us are doomed to ‘Suburbia’ and ‘mediocrity’. It’s the only way the world will keep turning. So the Olympians of Tomorrow have to somehow defy things like ‘status quo’, ‘being a caring sharing member of society’, being responsible and pledging themselves to a career, living with the stigma of not having a proper job, often struggling to hold a proper relationship, understanding that an Olympic Team is made up of five riders for two weeks, once every four years and is selected from thousands of Olympic aspirants!!! I mean if you do medicine or law at Uni, there are some 600,000 practitioners in each profession going hard at it 365 days a year. Pick the easy option! Most potential Olympians will break on these grounds and return to reproducing the human race. EXCEPTIONS Of course, there is always the possibility of an exception, especially with the odd more mature aspirant. What everyone needs to be really really aware of is that being an exception is also one of the common denominators of those that never-will-be. FINALLY Olympians are surprisingly enough not a collection of those who are most talented, rather just a few souls who cherish a dream so much that they just never give up. Cheers, Heath Ryans Rave Index