Horse & Hound Magazine 3rd March 2016 Vorige editie

ANNA ROSS: OUR SCORING SYSTEM IS FAILING US
Olympic dressage is under threat and action needs to be taken. One of the reasons dressage is under threat is because the scoring is difficult to understand. Judging is hard. There’s no doubt about that. I have the utmost respect for anyone who judges. I’m still emotionally scarred from one of my first experiences judging unaffiliated prelim: my first competitor fell off and I hadn’t revised the rules for acts of God so in my efforts to ensure fair play I left her face-planted in the arena surface while I scrabbled for the rulebook. The next competitor made no attempt to canter as the horse “wasn’t ready”. By the end, I was in utter turmoil as I’d over marked the first ones so much in my efforts not to destroy their confidence that my winner ended on a world record-breaking score.