USHJA has selected EquestrianLife.com as its media partner for the inaugural International Hunter Derby to be held August 21-22, 2009 in Lexington, Kentucky at the new outdoor arena at the Kentucky Horse Park.
So we're going to talk about, a little bit, dressage tests, and how they work because dressage is still fairly new to most spectators, a lot of people don't quite understand how we do get our scores, so I'm going to talk about that a little bit. So in every dressage test, we have a certain amount of movements, and every movement is marked out of ten. It's very similar to figure skating that way. And at the end of the test, we average those numbers together, and you receive a percentage. And the highest percentage of that class wins the class, so we're not looking for low scores, we're looking for high scores. And of course, the ideal would be a hundred percent, because that, every movement being out of ten, at the end of the day, you would want to have a hundred percent. It's not realistic in this sport, actually, because basically, a score of in the sixty percentages would be very good, seventy percent is fabulous. So, I think we've had, at the most at the Grand Prix level in the Olympic sport, in the mid eighties was the absolute highest, by one of our top, top best ranked riders in the world. So, if you're getting in the sixty, seventy percent range, that's excellent. Definitely, judge wise, the lower levels, you would have one to two judges, and also at the higher levels, moving up the the Grand Prix level, at the international caliber, you would have up to five judges, and those are five international judges, and every judge is from a different country to make it fair for all of the riders competing. So it's very diverse, and you have, of course, a lot of politics involved, but it can be very interesting, and the judges should judge what they see at that moment in time, not who is in the ring, and which horse is in the ring at that time.
