An interview with Bernadette Faurie  

Georg Theodorescu is a member of that elite band, the ‘great trainers’. Born in Romania - he represented that country in the 1956 Olympics- he started new life in Germany at the age of 31. At Warendorf alongside Willi Schultheis, Bubi Gunther, Fritz Ligges and Hermann Schridde, the erstwhile political refugee found friends, inspiration, education and success.

The Theodorescu barn in Westphalia has long been a mecca for riders from all over the world: the French, Italian and US squads have all benefited from Theodorescu’s eye as team trainer.
His wife, Inge, a former jumping rider and winner of the Hamburg Ladies Dressage Derby four years running, is now trainer and mentor to the Polish dressage squad. Their daughter, six times team gold medallist, Monica, now 34. has been at the top of dressage sport since her teens. One of Theodorescu’s greatest moments in his own competitive career, was in 1981 in Hamburg, when he won the Men’s Derby and Monica, the Ladies.
A learned man in many spheres, Georg Theodorescu speaks five languages fluently and his love of music, literature and the arts, is closely aligned to his love of horses.

What is your motivation as a trainer?
"To start a horse young and bring him up to see what he can do is the important thing. If you want to create something, like an artist, you take a young horse and make the sculpture yourself. I would not enjoy riding a horse that other people have trained. There is a big difference. After all, if you can’t paint, you buy a picture."

Is competition the most important part of that?
"Of course. Everyone can be a champion at home."

Monica is just introducing a new ride, Renaissance, to the top circuit. An impressive 10 year old Westphalian by Ramiro’s Son 1. Renaissance is one of the few mares on the top start lists - what is your opinion of the views that mares are more difficult to train?
"A lot of people are not prepared to take the time with mares. It is not the mare’s problem, there are a lot of good ones in eventing, showjumping and dressage. It’s a general myth that it is much easier to work with a gelding. Look at it like this..."
"At the 1984 Olympics, the German team were all men. Just four years later in Seoul, three members were girls. It all changes and it doesn’t mean that either men or girls are better at dressage. It does mean a trainer who says ‘no girls, no mares’ won’t get very far!"
"It can happen in sport, this sort of evolution from one Olympics to the next. It just proves that to make sweeping conclusions is bad. Who is to say that girls are better than men at dressage or that geldings are better than mares or mares better than stallions. All you can say logically is you cannot breed only girls, and that for breeding, a stallion is better than a gelding, or two mares."

 

How would you describe your philosophy as a trainer and rider?
"Everything in riding is logical. All the movements come easier to the one who devotes more time in himself to thinking logically. To think why a half pass is uneven, the rider has to think where the horse has to be in balance to bring his outside hind across. You can find out very quickly if you think a little, you find out why this mistake happens. But if the rider sits in the wrong place, the horse will be happy to go sideways - he tries very hard to do what you want - but if the horse goes to the right and the rider goes to the left, poor horse!"
"The horse is so generous, the best friend any of us could ever find, for life. They are born innocent. It is not his fault that he ‘won’t do something’. When you hear this horse has a temperament problem, or is a bad character, it is not true. A child is not born a robber or killer. Something has happened in his past or experience that he can’t find another way. It is the same with horses."
"One hundred and fifty years ago in the United States, without horse, where could they go? Now they fly to Mars. In Europe, if you were in Spain and wanted to go to Moscow, without a horse you couldn’t go. It was impossible to think about travel, let alone this distance across continents without horses."
"In the time before trains, cars and planes, through snow, rain and sometimes with only a pick of grass on stopping points, the horse was the most helpful friend man ever had."
"People talk about Arabs being more intelligent than other breeds. Throughout their early history Arab horses lived in tents together with the family and children, not in a stable 23 hours a day. Perhaps it is true because of such experience of being with people."
"The world would not only be less advanced without horses, it would not have survived without them."
"Horses never say ‘no’, they say perhaps ‘this is too much’. If you ask too much and the horse is not able to do it, the best and easiest way is to ask logically and find out why he doesn’t do it, there has to be a reason."
"If you are in a restaurant and want caviar and champagne, but haven’t got the money, you can’t order it, it is too much. If you pour coffee or wine into a cup or glass, and it overflows, it is because it is too much. It is not the fault of the cup or the coffee, or the wine or the glass, it is your mistake, you ask too much. Pouring it is about seeing when there is enough, because it is too much. It is the same with riding and training horses. Simple, but of course if you don’t think it through, it is very difficult."

Yet we all see examples of ‘pouring too much’, do you think perhaps it is about people recognising their limitations?
"Of course many people maybe have not the patience, or maybe the horse does not have the talent. The music professor can teach the pupil with a voice but cannot teach another who has none. In school, our music professor had a system to work with us. We were at that college for eight years and he started to teach us in the first year. He was quite a nervous, intense person, but for music he was such a patient teacher, with forty ten year olds."
"He made a ladder, very simple with two sides. He had sticks, rungs, in blue, white and yellow. Each colour represented do-re-mi-fa-so-la-te-do in a certain key."
"We have to be the same with our horses. If a horse is unlevel, he has a pain somewhere. If he has stiffness, he can’t continue to try his best. It is our responsibility to make a horse happy, and he can’t be happy if he feels pain. If a friend of yours has a headache, you’ll say ‘hey, come and sit down, can I get something for you?’, you don’t jump around and make a lot of noise. You have to try to see things from the other side with horses."
"When you like horses, then you can know everything. They can tell you. You have to find out what the problem is. Don’t be like a fish, talk to him. For me, that is the interest, to talk to horses and find out about them."
"I remember a man who was so hard on his horse’s mouth, his teacher must have told him a hundred times a day. Then an old trainer came to watch. He beckoned the man over to him. "The mouth of the horse is not a catapult," he said, making a sign as if to pray, "Please, as a Christian..." So gentle, not screaming, not mad, just sad."

Do you think some horses are born performers, in the way some people are?
"There are horses who have a will to present themselves at shows like an actor on the stage, there are racehorses that really want to win. There are others that would rather go home. Not every horse has the same desire but think of this, in every racing stable there is a pacemaker, that makes the running for his friend in the same stable. When the best horse wins, he can go home with a job well done. He is not a winner, but how very useful he is."

 

"The horse is always our friend."