Medal Reflections (no pun intended!)

I am just sitting in the Air Canada lounge waiting for my departure for a week in Germany, where I am teaching two Saddle Ergonomist courses back to back. I am torn between writing a blog about a recent experience with one of my endurance riding clients or putting some of my thoughts down on paper about our recent dressage team at the Pan Ams.  I think the latter is more timely – I will write the other story next week (it’s still in the process of resolution anyway, so I’ll probably have more to tell you by then!)

First and foremost of course – congratulations to the team for achieving their silver medal and of course to Chris von Martels for his individual bronze and to Belinda Trussell for being oh-so-close in fourth place. These Games are proving our absolutely most successful in history – only half over and we have already achieved more medals than for the entire games in 2011! Schleese is also happy to have had riders on both the Gold Medal (US) and Bronze Medal (Brazil) teams.

Last night as part of the Horse Experience events, I took members of my staff and guests to the Orangeville Fair Grounds for ‘dinner and a movie’ – the showing of the documentary “Power of 2” by Wendy and Lewis Manne of Zap Productions. We were lucky enough to be part of the premiere of the movie back in November 2014 at the Bell TIFF Lightbox, were many of the ‘hoi polloi’ of the equestrian world were also in attendance. Schleese is proud to have been involved in this movie as one of the sponsors and we are thrilled that in the meantime Lewis and Wendy have won several creative awards at various Indie Film Fests for it.

For those of you unfamiliar with the movie, it was filmed in 2010 and 2011 in preparation for the Guadalajara Pan Am Games and followed the dressage team members around for the weeks and months before hand (Jaimey and Tina Irwin, Crystal Kroetch, Diane Creech, Tom Dvorak, and reserve Roberta Byng-Morris). If you recall, Diane’s horse had to be pulled pretty much at the last minute and Roberta stepped in to substitute in the experience of a lifetime and the culmination of years of training. It is truly a lovely film and will hopefully soon be available for general purchase on DVD.

However – what I really wanted to talk about was the short clips that were shown at intervals during dinner before the movie began. These were taken during the various dressage tests by this year’s team members and played while we ate. What was discussed was the fact that the clips themselves were almost embarrassing – empty stands, no spectators, and no commentary to enlighten the audience. Coming from Europe, where even weekend horse competitions at all levels bring out the masses of fans, as well as professional videographers and commentators, this made me feel almost sorry for the riders. Okay, maybe people had to work and timing may not have been great – but really? Or was the lack of mainstream promotion outlining the schedules, venues, and events to blame? Or the expected bad traffic out of the city and poor signage pointing the way?

I would really love to hear your thoughts on this – as well as some ideas how ‘in the future’ this can be helped. That is the reason why dressage may have such a lack of huge money sponsors: nobody wants to throw money at an empty stadium. Who sees the ads and banners if nobody attends? What can we do to fix this? Our equestrian athletes have worked too hard, spent too much money, made too many sacrifices to be rewarded in this way. Unfortunately none of the team members was in attendance (as had been promised by the organizers) as Friday night happened to be their night for the medal ceremony at Nathan Phillips Square. Another boo-boo; I’m sure several guests in attendance were there specifically to actually meet one or the other of these top level riders. My daughter (a professional dancer) is actually part of these daily medal celebrations as one of the dance team honouring and celebrating the medallists, so she at least is getting her fill of meeting the winning athletes – in all sports!

I hope you have a chance to go out and see at least one event in the upcoming week – even if it’s not riding!