Brett Parbery made a strong bid for Games selection at the first CDI of the year. After a somewhat disappointing 7th in the Grand Prix with his Olympic contender, Weltmieser, the pair improved to be second in the Special and first in the Freestyle…
This may have had something to do with the fact that in the run-up to the CDI, Weltmieser ended up lying on the arena, and Brett’s leg. The gelding got a fright as Brett was waving goodbye to the Farrier, and flipped over. For a while it looked as if Brett would not be able to compete at all, and it was a last minute decision to try to make it through the pain barrier. It meant that the horse came to the event seriously underdone, with Brett starting the show in a very un-Brett like chair seat which improved over the next few days, as did the leg…
A few months ago, in an article with Rebecca Ashton, Brett talked about the way he and a few friends in the Southern Highlands, formed an informal self-help group, the book club, as a way of improving their dressage skills. When the article was published, it attracted a great deal of comment from all over Australia.
Brett was a bit surprised when I told him what a stir he had caused:
“That’s interesting, I didn’t know that. I think people as a rule want to feel that they are part of something that is progressing, and actually enjoy it. Dressage itself is quite a lonely sport. You train. You get lessons. You go and compete. You have a time, you get a result, and you go home. To actually find another way to enjoy the sport and also feel that you are progressing, and enjoy the journey of other people – that’s a wonderful thing. It is really interesting to hear that a lot of people have got excited about the concept.”
“As you know we’ve been playing with the idea, and we’ve been learning too. We are not professing to be experts at it, but now the NSW Squad structure is that there are four mentors, not a coach, there could easily be five or six, but they went with four, there’s Rozzie Ryan, myself, Clemens Dierks and Matthew Dowsley. We just happen to be the ones who have been to Europe and done the most, Heath (Ryan) is involved too. The way it is going to work, is that you come along with your coach, and choose a mentor, and that mentor works with you and your coach on what you need to do to get better, what is your show plan… and then the mentor’s responsibility is to make sure this all progresses. The coach is giving the right information etc, it is a little bit like what Monica Theodorescu and Jonny Hilberath do with the German riders.”
“In March, Hans-Heinrich Meyer zu Strohen is coming out to Australia, and I want to talk to him how the mentorship works in the German system, because he’s been their young rider coach / mentor. In Germany they have a sophisticated way of getting information through to the right people and getting things happening.”
That always strikes me as the problem we have – over there when the riders arrive at a Squad school, they have come through a teaching system that is absolutely uniform, they all sing from the same hymn book, there is no-one with quirky ideas in the system, so they don’t come with any baggage. Anyone who tries to work with any group of riders in Australia, finds that there is all sorts of eccentric baggage that they come loaded with…
“Absolutely. We need to embrace a single structure, some form of framework is so over-due. The only way I can see this happening is through this mentorship, where you get a few people happening to get along, and respecting each other, to assume the mentorship and help that group, the squad, to bring out the best in everybody.”
“So we are trying the new structure with the backing of Equestrian NSW, we now just have to get the backing of the participants, and get everyone understanding how it works. Which is not easy either, because with change always comes skepticism.”
I thought it was interesting when you mentioned that dressage was a lonely sport, surely that is compounded by the fact that if you are a 100 metre runner and you train very very hard, and then you run 100 metres in 8.99, that’s it, you’ve done it, it is on the record books, but you can train very hard and bring your dressage horse to a competition and do what you think is a very good test, only to get very bad marks, or more confusingly, some very bad marks and some very good marks, for the same test… That introduces a dimension of psychological stress that the runner, or the weightlifter or the swimmer don’t have…
“Exactly, and in those other sports the areas in which you need to improve are very clear, whereas in dressage it can be so unknown. You are doing what your coach is telling you, what you think should be done, and you get a bad score. I love that way of putting it, a level of mental stress on top of the finances, and the routine, and the seven day week, 24 hours a day, and all the other things that go with horses. The other side of it, you do a bad test and you get a really good mark! That throws another level of uncertainty at you, it didn’t feel very good but I got a good score – so is that the way I am supposed to be riding?”
“We are also so isolated here. You do it in Europe and you have all these people around you to pick you up, and you can keep watching and stay on this plane going forward. It is very hard here in Australia where you are much more isolated.”
“Going back to the book club, the camaraderie really works, but it only works for certain types of people. Some riders want to train on their own, and want to look at everyone else as the enemy, which is fine if that works for them. I just know a lot of people get a lot out of the camaraderie. When you are riding in front of, and around, people who you know are on your side, and all your competing against is the actual test, it makes you take more risk, and with risk comes breaking new ground. If you are riding reserved, worrying about making mistakes or what people think about you, you’ll never get into the territory you need to enter.”
What I worry about is, the next level, and I don’t want to say Young Riders because we have had lots of schemes that have thrown money at little hot house princesses who disappear as fast as they appeared, but it does seem that a lot of riders who are using the second level of coaches are being mislead, these coaches may talk the talk, but it’s not really how they teach, how do we get these younger riders into a system so that if they do come to a squad school they have the basic tools they need…
“We’ve had discussion about this, but at some point, whether it’s now or in ten years time, we need to embrace an Australian Training System. It could be a complete photo-copy of the German training system…”
I can’t see why not…
“Well we know the German system works – but as long as we have a system that we call our own, and that is injected directly into the NCAS coaching system and the squads, and everyone starts to acknowledge that that is the coaching system and that’s the way we do it. Of course people are going to disagree, but move it two generations along, and the disagreements are all gone and they are all on the one page. I think that is the only way – a labeled Australian Training System.”
I was looking with interest at Wellington in Florida this week, where they had two young rider squads, dressage and jumping, with their Robert Dover / George Morris Horsemanship Days – top trainer / riders, and vets and feeding experts, shrinks, nutritionists, and with young riders with their trainers from all over America. Something like that might work here…
“Absolutely I agree and like you said, Horsemanship, because at the end of the day, that’s what this is. That is getting lost all over the world, horsemanship. I’ll never forget standing with Tineke Bartels at a young riders warm up in Holland, she looked at me and said, Brett what am I going to do with this? Look at this, it is dreadful riding. She was so angry with what she was seeing, she said I can’t get these people to adopt a horse friendly system to then build up. They want to immediately go to the extreme system. She was frustrated as to how it was going to happen. We really need to keep horsemanship as first-and-foremost in the Australian system, and have it being sold by people who are successful. I think the High Performance squad could be involved in putting on displays, working with the coaches, getting everyone working together.”
“It’s funny, there is a big wheel here with all these cogs, and to get the thing going forward, all the cogs need to work together: NCAS, High Performance, Breeding program, it all needs to work together.”
This article first appeared in the March 2016 issue of THM.
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Like many others I was very interested in what Brett and others were doing with their “book club”. What I am surprised by is the fact that there should be any comment on it. Other fields of endeavour regularly get together to swap ideas, chat about problems, look out for each other and teach it other. It is a concern that the dressage fraternity in Australia is unfamiliar with the concept of collegial support and oversight, and perhaps goes a long way to explaining our lack of success in improving the competitiveness of the sport in general.