Dressage Rider Mandy Schofield

Blind Dressage Rider Making Waves In UK

A BLIND dressage rider is hoping to canter to victory – with a little help from her friends.

Mandy Schofield started riding in 2002 after a friend recommended her to try out horse riding.

Now, nine years later, she wants to compete in her latest three-day national competition in Gloucester.

Mandy, who has never had her sight, also struggles to hear and has hearing aids in both ears.

Without her sight she relies on her instructor Anna Taylor.

The pair practise three times a week at Middleton Park Equestrian Centre.

Mandy has to visualise the routine in her mind, while Anna stands in the middle, directing her towards different points.

She guides her round the arena telling her through a loop the letters she is approaching.

At each letter Mandy guides her horse Ben through certain moves including 20m circles and 10m circles.

But for Mandy, 38, it’s more than a hobby.

“It’s like having my sight when I’m riding,” said Mandy, “It’s great. I love it.”

This is her ninth year competing, and she has titles in both disabled and able-bodied competitions.

“Ben and I have worked closely together and we have got a bond with each other. He’s a bit silly sometimes but I know what he’s like,” she said.

To get to her latest competition, Mandy needed help to raise the £200 to cover stabling and accommodation costs. Her friends at the Queensbury Singers group dug deep and organised a baking sale during their Friday night rehearsal.

“They’re a fantastic group,” said Mandy, who has been a member since they started in April 2010 years ago.

“They’re really supportive and they have done everything they can to help me.” She hopes to defend her title with two routines.

Her four-minute freestyle routine will take place to a medley of the Can Can, Pink Panther theme, The Entertainer and Singin’ in the Rain.

Inspirational Mandy is hopeful for victory. “I’m going to try to win,” she said.

Source halifaxcourier.co.uk

By Pippa Cuckson

A senior equestrian official recently berated me for not reporting Laura Bechtolsheimer’s four wins at an early season dressage show in Europe.

But Laura is a multiple world and European silver medallist and, in the absence of many other big-hitters, the only newsworthy thing would have been her failure to sweep the board that weekend.

Dressage, it seems, has not fully registered that the dynamic has dramatically changed following Britain’s rapid evolution from under-horsed get-rounders to dressage super-power within the space of a single Olympiad.

On current form, British dressage seems even more of a nap for a medal in London than eventing, especially as the two main rivals, Holland and Germany, are marginally weaker too.

After the World Equestrian Games last October the Dutch lost top-scorer Moorlands Totilas in a lucrative but perhaps cynical sale to Germany. Seven months on, “Toto’s” new rider Matthias Rath has yet to compete internationally with the equine star, never mind prove that they have gelled.

Heightened expectations will put unusual pressure on the British dressage squad at the 2011 European championships in Rotterdam and at Greenwich next year, but they are up to the challenge. In previous eras, the dressage quartet tended to pick itself and was resigned to languishing around seventh or eighth out of 10 participating teams.

Nowadays a dozen British horse and rider combinations are capable of scoring around the 72 per cent needed to stay in touch of a team medal.

Aside from our 2010 world silver medal-winning squad of Bechtolsheimer (Mistral Hojris), Carl Hester (Liebling II), Fiona Bigwood (Wie Atlantico) and Maria Eilberg (Two Sox), both Bechtolsheimer (Andretti H) and Hester (Uthopia) have second strings stepping up to the plate; former dual European bronze medallist Emile Faurie (Elmegardens Marquis), Germany-based Emma Hindle (a choice of three or four) and Anna Ross-Davies (Pegasus MK) are on target with new equine partners and there is excitement about the relatively untried Nikki Crisp (Pasoa) and Charlotte Dujardin (Valegro), who in January became the first Brit to score 74 per cent on her debut Grand Prix and has since beaten Hester, her boss and mentor.

It’s ironic, therefore, that the 2012 team can only contain three riders, with no scope to discard a low fourth score as in the past. The reduction in participants arises from the International Equestrian Federation’s (FEI) determination to keep this esoteric discipline accessible to 21st century audiences with a declining attention span.

Other format changes such as the freestyle test to music drew a younger generation of riders and uber wealthy horse-owners into dressage; innovation could now be working to the slight disadvantage of the talent pool it helped create in the UK, though team management still hopes to get a fourth rider into the individual contest.

A more radical change for the Olympics is that the team medal will be decided by the combined scores of two set dressage tests – the Grand Prix and a modified Grand Prix Special – fought out over three days.

Historically, Grand Prix has decided the two-day team contest, with the Special only ridden by those progressing to the individual final.

This may provide further dilemmas for selectors, as some horses are better suited to one test or the other; equally, some brilliant but excitable horses ‘blow’ on the first day of a championship, but settle by the third day and start scoring big marks.

Whether the penny has dropped amongst spectators also remains to be seen. Amid all the speculation about ticket ballot success, the big question for dressage fans is whether they correctly identified the podium day in the first place!

The Bramham International has always been a reliable step-up for future Olympic eventing horses; last year’s winner, Redesigned, went on to finish fifth with Pippa Funnell, just two penalties off a medal, at last year’s world games on his debut championship appearance.

This weekend’s running (June 2-5) has even more resonance as riders scramble to get Olympic eligibility qualifications in the bag. No matter who you are, everyone had to start from scratch on January 1; seventy-seven horses run in Bramham’s principal three-day event, 36 in the under-25s and 41 in the supporting one-day international, which can also count.

To some this urgency may baffle, as riders only need a maximum of two 3-star international results per horse and the cut-off point is June 17, 2012. But as this week’s injury scare with the Queen’s Derby hope Carlton House has shown, anything can go wrong with the most cosseted of equine athletes. An ancient equestrian adage says there’s always another day for a horse, but reality is different.

William Fox-Pitt rides two at Bramham and if they complete without error it will bring his total of horses already qualified for London 2012 to six and a half – a staggering achievement for this stage of the season, even by the ambitious standards Fox-Pitt sets for himself.

Meanwhile, Mary King has qualified four, thanks to good Badminton placings and a historic one-two at the Kentucky four-star the following week. She can now turn her attentions safely(ish) to increasing her series lead in the lucrative HSBC Classics. With this sort of equine arsenal behind them, this evergreen duo must surely have already bagged their berths at Greenwich?

Source blogs.telegraph.co.uk

Paralympic Dressage Competitor Back On Track

Recently reported by the bbc.co.uk, a Warwickshire paralympic dressage hopeful has told of her delight at finding a new horse to train with, after her own dressage horse became lame.

Ruth MacCarthy, 26, of Wellesbourne, has been unable to train for the 2012 Games since January after her horse Whisper ruptured a ligament.

An owner has now given her his horse on a long-term loan.

Conquestadore, nick-named Carlos, has been flown over from Germany and has completed his first week’s training.

‘Really panicking’

The 12-year-old is owned by David Marsh, from Lewes, in Sussex.

He contacted Miss MacCarthy after she was featured on BBC Midlands Today.

Miss MacCarthy said: “Of course I’m delighted. I was really starting to panic and worry that I would never find a new horse in time, but at the same time I didn’t really want to believe that.”

Miss MacCarthy, who works as a paralegal, has been riding since she was four years old but broke her back, hip and pelvis when she was 19 when the horse she was riding fell on top of her.

She no longer has the full use of one of her legs but was back in the saddle within 12 months – before she was able to get out of her wheelchair – and hopes to compete in the grade 4 Paralympic dressage.

Her horse ruptured a ligament last July while not being ridden and is now pregnant and due to give birth within the next two weeks.

Miss MacCarthy said Carlos had only been ridden by able-bodied riders before but had competed at the advanced level in dressage.

She said he was adapting well.

Guest Author: Ron Petracek

Twenty years ago, when a western reining trainer admitted that he took dressage lessons to improve his horse’s reining, his fellow cowboys thought he had lost his mind. Some 20 years later finds several hunt seat instructors actively using aspects of dressage in their training.

Christy, a hunt seat equitation instructor, commented that if you look at the old hunt seat equitation videos and photos of students instructed by George Morris and others, the horses are in a training level dressage frame.

Celine, a hunt seat/balanced seat instructor, noted that dressage is the basis of all riding. “Classical dressage has its roots in cavalry riding in war; whereas hunt seat has its origins in long cross country rides across fields on a hunt. Hunt seat was adapted for the show ring,” she said. She noted that combining the elements of hunt seat and dressage brings balanced seat.

Christy uses the rider-based training that she received from her dressage instructor for her hunt seat students.

“At their first lesson, I put them right on the longe line and take away stirrups and reins immediately,” she described. “I spend a lot of time helping them build independent hand, seat and leg in exercises on the longe line before I have them ride on the rail.”

Christy has found that by doing so, the riders have feel and balance more quickly. “Beginner issues like steering just seem to fall right into place even though they’ve spent their first several lessons on the longe line.”

Celine also likes to apply dressage concepts early on in hunt seat education. “I start right away with rhythm and balance, teaching the student how to sit with balance. Then I address how the horse moves and how to find the horse’s natural rhythm. When you apply the concepts of dressage early on, students have greater ‘feel’ for their horses.”

She noted that in everyday hunt seat, she sees horses just going around the ring in the gaits, walk, then trot, and then canter. “The riders barely understand how to circle correctly. In many cases, you see trainers just focusing on jumping. Flatwork just becomes a term meaning getting the horse warmed up enough to jump,” she said. “When I go to some of the large local hunt shows, I’m amazed that riders aren’t balancing their horses, or even riding them correctly through a turn.” She described watching strung out ponies in a hunter class. “They got over their courses by the grace of God.”

“I was aghast by the strung out, unbalanced approaches to jumps and the rushing and diving over each fence,” she said. She finds that dressage helps her riders gain a balanced and rhythmic approach to fences.

She described one hunt seat student she had recently met who had no concept of getting the horse to work back to front or flexion though she had her own horse and was taking lessons with her instructor for five years.

“When she sat in on other lessons her friends were having with other instructors, she felt she was missing out on a world of education with her horse. She said her lessons just revolved around her instructor who called out ‘heals down,’ ‘shoulders back,’ ‘posting trot,’ etc.”

Celine uses dressage to focus on the points of the ring by keeping the horse correctly between and in front of the rider’s leg. “How do you get your horse from point A to point B, not A to D?” she explained.

“When you focus on riding every stride, as in dressage, your hunter or equitation horse will always know what you want,” she explained. “You can circle, go straight, change gait, jump and make it look so easy, balanced and fluid. Riding hunt seat this way gives the horse the correct muscle development, impulsion and work ethic.”

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