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Great Trainers in the World of Dressage
Bernadette Faurie profiles the guru of the German team
Harry Boldt
Harry Boldt probably lays more claim than anyone to the title of 'trainers' trainer. From the years as team trainer of the unassailable German squad (now in a freelance capacity), Boldt has emerged in a unique position as not only able to help the riders, but to work with them alongside their regular trainers. Not only a mean feat of diplomacy from the man himself but a sign of remarkable respect from his peers.
For Harry Boldt, the essential ingredient for teaching is experience. 'One must have a great deal of experience to be able to identify with the problems a rider might be having. I am amazed when I see so many of the younger generation of teachers writing books on training - they think they know everything! Every horse has his own individual character, you need to have ridden an awful lot to be able to think back and draw on previous examples of a particular problem.'
Harry Boldt has a great deal of experience. His father, Heinrich Boldt, was a riding instructor and himself a distinguished rider. Young Harry hit the saddle aged four or five. "All my life I was around horses. We lived at a riding school near Essen. I started off helping my father, grooming at home and at shows. Later it was more and more riding."
From nine to fifteen years old, during the war, it was not possible for the family to have horses, but afterwards Harry's budding career accelerated.
He started showjumping, with great success at high level, yet dressage was always Harry Boldt's first love. "It was simply that in 1952 we moved to a new place which had formerly been a pure jumping yard. I rode and competed the horses until we had sold them all. I had a good time, but as a jumping rider if you do not have that real eye for a stride you may as well forget it."
His father was the most important formative influence on Boldt's riding career. The second was Kate Franke, who was a famous name before the war, not just in dressage but in showjumping, eventing and later driving as well. "She was a great influence for me on the stable management and organisation side and gave me the first guidance towards Grand Prix."
Later of course there were the team trainers, Bubi Gunther, General Stacken and Willi Schultheis.
However, Harry Boldt was never a professional rider, yet coincidentally it was another great dressage trainer who shaped his future 'non-equestrian' career. "I was always busy half and half with office work and horses. Later I had my own travel agency, which was Joseph Neckerman's idea."
"I knew nothing about travel, which was Neckerman's business, but he sent someone along every week to guide me and that was the beginning."
Two years ago Boldt's son took over the business.
Combined with work, Boldt always had five or six horses in training, renting part of a yard with staff to look after them. "I thought I would try and from the beginning was very successful. I was fortunate in that people brought horses to me so I never had a problem, I could select them. If someone brought a horse in for four weeks, I had the option to see whether it would be a horse to go further with."
There were plenty. Matador, St Georg, Remus, Golo and of course Woyceck.
"Golo, for example, was a horse you would never think of as a good dressage horse. He was owned by a young lady who sent him to me for a few weeks as he was rather difficult and very strong. Four weeks turned into three years as the owner enjoyed his progress. She would come and ride him for an hour on Saturdays, the rest of the time was for me to show."
In 1974, when Boldt was not actually on the team for the Copenhagen World Championships, Golo gave him the satisfaction of finishing fourth in the Grand Prix Special, while the competitive team member was eighth. "It was very good," he recalls.
Asked to name the best horse he has ever ridden, Harry Boldt awards this honour to Woyceck. "He was very tall and a heavy weight horse, but he was so easy to ride. He was not strong in the mouth, in fact it was always a problem to keep him up to rather than behind the bit, and he was very sensitive to the leg. I used to ride him at home with no spurs or whip. He had no problems in piaffe or passage and changes were easy for him. He was never spooky - no matter how many TV cameras you showed him! - he just liked to do dressage."
Harry Boldt nearly made his debut for the German team in 1963, when he was silver medallist and Reiner Klimke was fourth at the European Championships in Copenhagen. There was just one problem. At this inaugural event, where World and European Championships replaced the old FEI Championships, no one realised it was a team competition, so there were only two whole teams - Britain and Romania!
The following year at the Tokyo Olympics, Boldt confirmed what was to prove a silver edged career with runner up position on Remus to Switzerland's Henri Chammartin. Klimke and Neckerman contributed to bringing team gold to Germany, so laying the foundations for the nation's stranglehold on that honour - they have only been beaten once since, when the Soviet Union pulled twelve points ahead in Munich 1972.
Another Olympic silver and team gold was to come with Woyceck in Montreal 1976. Remus pulled in the silver at the 1965 European Championships, (where the Germans returned with a full team to take gold!), at the Berne 1966 World Championships and European bronze in Aachen 1967. Woyceck took over for European silver in Kiev 1975, St Gallen 1977 and bronze in Aarhus 1979. Boldt was also three times West German champion, in '66, '73 and '77.
"I was lucky to have a sponsor who bought Remus, then again, Woyceck was bought for me. Maybe I was lucky that people liked my riding."
"That is an important factor, that people like what they see. These days there is too much rough riding on the warm up arena. Of course there are sometimes difficult periods with a horse, and sometimes you have to let him know he is not the boss. At home it is the time to try another way to come through this patch, but it should never be seen in public. You now see sometimes riders who are not riders, but 'workers'. It is not a question of hiding things, it is that this is not real dressage riding."
"This worries me. On every warm up at major shows there should be someone watching who can say 'hey, cool down' if they see this happening. It has to be a respected person, such as a retired judge with a lot of experience, who has the authority to say it and be heard. It is the only way it will stop."
Harry & his most famous pupils Nicole and Remmi
Boldt has retained a fresh and evaluating eye on the progress of the
sport since his involvement began. The wisdom of experience is something
he brings home without any superiority or pedantry; for example in his
comments on the 'deep and round' method of working. "It is always
dangerous when a 'normal' rider sees what an expert is doing and tries
to copy it. That is the danger. Trying something out without full understanding
will end up going the wrong way."
"Thirty years ago, you would never have seen these young girls at the top of the sport. Take Gigolo, for example, he is a very big horse and for him to be under full control, he must be soft, so Isabell and Dr Schulten-Baumer have found a way for him to be soft. In my generation, we rode the horse always in the same position. For a girl like Isabell Werth, the horse would get stronger and stronger."
"Rembrandt is different, but it is the same principle. When he goes in for his test, he comes right up, so if before he enters the arena he is not a little behind the bit, then you are the loser! If the balance is there with the hand soft at the right moment, he is perfect."
"The difference and the art is, with Isabell and Nicole, that they are expert in being soft in the hand at the right moment. When any horse and rider are training in a fair way, it is wonderful. In the wrong hands, the neck shortens and the neck breaks in front of the withers. Anyone other than the expert in this technique should concentrate on learning and riding in the purely classical way, that is the basis."
"The greatest example is the jumping rider Alwin Schockemohle, who was the first to start this method. You only had to look in the warm up arena to see the lower level of riders trying it, thinking they were doing the same thing but purely pulling their horses' heads from side to side!"
From the years of experience, comes the psychology. Harry Boldt agrees that this has a big part to play in his exceptional position as team trainer. "The team is made because of the homework done by their own trainers. But when you see a rider every day, sometimes it is a case of 'rose tinted spectacles'. Alternatively, the rider may not be convinced by what their regular trainer says. You need overall eyes. It is amazing that the closer the big event looms, the more and more nerves are involved, then you are the one who has to tell the truth."
"Sometimes a trainer will ring me up and ask me to go and look at their horse and rider and when I make a comment about a problem, there is the trainer nodding furiously behind me and the rider rather red faced. It is just a question of another pair of eyes and sometimes it takes another person to say something before it sinks in."
Closer to home, the same psychology applies, even if nature makes it harder to effect. Harry Boldt's marriage to Australian rider Margo Lipa has led him to spend more time in one of dressage's youngest but keenest countries. Australia is like Britain was ten or fifteen years ago, there is great interest but without a tradition of FEI level dressage. Margo is approaching Grand Prix level with two horses.
"Yes, it can be difficult working with one's wife, when you tell the truth it can be harder to take!"
Retiring as German Championship coach after Atlanta, Harry will have more time to spend in Australia, but the travelling bug that bit through competition and profession will not let go. "I cannot imagine being in one place all the time and I would still love to come to England", (where he has become acclimatised not so much through the team visits but through regular training visits to help with Dr Bechtolsheimer's horses).
Boldt's nominee to take his place is Klaus Balkenhol, a man with similar experience who knows he is cast as heir apparent, but there are more bridges to cross before any decision is made. "Next year the German Federation elects a new committee so it depends upon what they and the riders want. 'Balkenhol himself has already made it clear that it is up to the riders."
Harry Boldt, at a fit and agile sixty six, will not be letting his experience stagnate however. "Working with horses is an eternal fascination for me. I have never been one for whom hacking in the fields appeals - I would rather turn the horse out in the paddock and let him have his fun on his own."
For a man who successfully jumped courses of 1.50 metres but rejected jumping because he did not feel he had the eye for it, Harry Boldt says only this in reply to the question, why dressage?.
"It is the greatest, I love it."