Hi this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and today I wanted to take a moment to talk about the 2012 Olympic games. At this point in the competition we have seen the 3 day events and the first two days of the dressage, and it’s been a very interesting Olympic games for everybody who is concerned about the welfare of the animals and I think we are finally seeing a little change in everything this year.

First I want to congratulate the British team, and Carl Hester especially, for showing us the way back to some kind of sanity in the horse business. Here we see a man that is training his own horses from the beginning, developing them classically and now winning on the Olympic stage. It is so wonderful to see someone who is doing it right, showing that these practices such as the Rolkur and these types of abusive practices that have become so prevalent in our sport that are really making a mockery of our sport are unnecessary. For years now people at clinics have asked me who they should watch, and it used to be Klaus Balkenhol and Ula Salzburger but they are gone. But for the last couple of years we have had nothing but hollowed backed horses which is the result of Rolkur out in the ring or just expensive horses that have been purchased for millions of dollars buying their way into the sport. So happily, we finally have these examples in Carl Hester and his students and really the whole British society which we need to compliment. I lived in Britain for three years and I was always struck by their love of the animals. I really believe that is why they are beginning to come out on top of all this because the sport finally reached a point where is was not going to be sustainable any longer with the kind of practices that were beginning to happen.

We have seem this sport become cheapened and cheapened by wealthy people just being able to go out and buy up every good horse in the world for themselves and leaving little behind. Now we have finally reached a point where we have a dressage type breed horse that we have kind of settled on, and I think we are seeing that in Carl Hester’s horse and a quite a few others that have very similar movement and breeding. For the last twenty years, it’s been whoever could afford the cutting edge moving horse was the one who was winning. The sport became more and more about who could afford the most expensive horse, regardless if they were completely hollow in the back, broken over in the neck, or other things that were being done to them. Whoever could afford the best flashy moving horse was the winner.

Now these types of horses are getting into the hands of more and more riders, and the kind of riders who really make horses. People ask me all the time what I think about this person or that person, to me it really comes down to whether they make horses or not, for someone to call them self a trainer, and that’s what dressage is, the word means training. The sport lies in the day to day development of the horses. So because people are able to buy horses for millions of dollars and buy themselves a ticket to the Olympic games, this has only cheapened the sport. Happily we are beginning to see the consequences of that when it happens. More and more people are waking up to the fact that horses ought to be lasting years and are thinking wait a minute, these horses that people are spending millions of dollars on are finished in a year or two. They burn them out and move on to the next one. That just proves that it is not “dressage” riding going on.

So once again when thinking about all of that, I want to thank the British team and Carl Hester. Ask everyone to please follow these petitions online to ban the Rolkur. Go to the FEI Facebook page where hundreds of people have written in about the outrageous things we have seen at the Olympic games, we actually had someone come in second in the first two days who Rolkured their horse right in front of the judges and no one said a word about it! We have seen it going on in the warm-up ring and pictures have been posted and FEI comments “Oh it’s just a moment in time”, well they took many pictures of those moments of time at many differnet moments of time. I think it’s time for us all to get behind these petitions that are going on online and show the FEI what real riders think about this and where we want to go with the sport.

This is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and thanks for joining us. Enjoy the rest of the Olympics and keep watching those riders who are trying to do their best to do it the right way for themselves and their horses.

Carl Hester classical foundation Educating The Rider's Eye FEI Olympic Dressage Olympics 2012 petitions Rolkur San Diego Horse Training. Will Faerber