A movement-by-movement look at Steffen Peters's Paris 2024 Grand Prix dressage test—and why it's important that our sport remains willing to look at itself critically
By Jennifer O. Bryant
Some dressage fans on social media took exception to yesterday's report on the second day of the Grand Prix competition at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, in which I stated that the final US rider to go, 2021 Olympic team silver medalist Steffen Peters on Suppenkasper, had a difficult ride and an uncharacteristically poor performance.
In Tokyo 2021, Peters and "Mopsie" earned a Grand Prix score of 76.196%. Yesterday their Grand Prix score was 66.491%—far below what we've come to expect from this incredibly talented pair whose six-year international record speaks for itself.
Some readers felt that reporting what happened during the test was unsupportive of Steffen's legacy and his record as a great rider and a great horseman. I actually think the opposite is true, and I'd like to explain why.
Let's start by saying that we're all human. Whether you're an Olympian or a pleasure rider, everybody likes a word of encouragement now and then, especially after a setback.
But Steffen is also an elite international athlete. An athlete does not climb the ladder to the world's biggest stages without stumbling along the way. There is no rider in the history of the world who has sailed from Intro Level to the Olympics on the wings of perfect scores. Even the highest scores currently being achieved in dressage—the top score in the Grand Prix here in Versailles was a little over 82%—are by no means perfect scores. As the faculty members in the US Dressage Federation's own L program for judge education point out, any mark of less than 10 means that a portion of the total possible points for that movement is being removed. In other words, that field-topping score of 82% means that the Paris Olympic dressage judges felt justified in taking away nearly 20% of the total possible points—and that was for the pair they thought performed the best of the entire field.
Interestingly, there has been little criticism of Steffen's actual Grand Prix test score, which of course reflects the judges' opinions of his performance. Let's go through the test and look at the scores, movement by movement, so we can see what the judges thought as the test progressed.
Scores for Mopsie's entry, halt, and move-off ranged from 6.0 to 7.5 from the five-member ground jury (which included US FEI judge and USDF L program faculty member Michael Osinski). The marks for the trot half-passes were solid, with quite a few 8.0 scores.
The marks went down for the halt and rein back. One judge gave it a 6.0, but two gave it a 4.0. Scores went back up for the extended trot and for the first piaffe-passage tour, generally ranging from 6.0 to 8.0.
"Mopsie" was rattled and wired in the stadium atmosphere, as Steffen himself said afterward, and it showed in the scores for the extended walk, with lows of 4.0. The collected walk fared a little better, and then it appeared Steffen had gotten his mount back on track, earning marks in the 7.0-8.0 range for the next piaffe-passage sequence. They maintained the momentum through the two-tempi changes, the extended canter, and the half-pass "zigzag." The marks for the one-tempi changes did not score quite as well, earning marks ranging from 5.5 to 7.0. The left canter pirouette scored higher than the right pirouette, and then the collected trot earned several marks of 8.0, followed by 7.5 marks almost across the board for the final extended trot.
At the end of the test, for the movements down the final center line, Mopsie's scores took an unfortunate nosedive. The first passage scored OK—from 6.5 to 7.5—but then the piaffe was disastrous in terms of the overall score, with marks including two scores of 2.0 and three scores of 3.0. This movement has a coefficient of 2, which made the low scores even more costly. The scores for the piaffe-passage transitions were even lower, and Mopsie's final halt received scores as low as 2.0.
A careful review of the marks makes it clear that this test was a combination of some very good moments and some very unfortunate moments. It's also clear that the judges used the full scale of marks, as they are taught to do.
Anyone who competes in dressage has to develop something of a thick skin. We literally pay to have someone criticize us. When something goes wrong in a test, it goes wrong in public—and the higher up the levels you go, the bigger the audiences and the more intense the scrutiny. Elite athletes have a tough job: They give it everything they have, and when they have a bad day, their performance not only gets critiqued by both experts and "armchair quarterbacks," but they must also discuss the issues in public by talking to reporters, which is probably the last thing they want to do.
Nevertheless, it all comes with the territory. Athletes either learn how to deal with it or they won't be able to handle the pressures of elite sport. The ones who have been in the game for a while, like Steffen, also learn that next time out they may find themselves exulting over how wonderfully their horses performed while everyone fawns over them. After all, that's horses: One day you're on top of the world, and the next day you're not.
One of my favorite movies is the 2000 film Almost Famous, a lightly fictionalized account of writer/director Cameron Crowe's start as a teenaged rock journalist for Rolling Stone magazine. In the movie, the real-life late legendary rock critic Lester Bangs takes aspiring young writer William Miller under his wing. Cautioning Miller not to become starry-eyed around his idols and to write the truth about their music, Bangs says something like: "You want to know how to be a real friend to them? Be honest."
In this reporter's opinion, being honest about the performances at Paris 2024 is the only way to be a real friend to both the competitors and—even more important—to the sport of dressage. Horse sports are under unprecedented scrutiny, and transparency is a must. Not to tell the truth as objectively and fairly as possible about an aspect of our sport, whether it's a performance or a witnessed incident, is not doing our sport, or the horses we love, any favors.
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