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2005 Global Dressage Forum
Platitude at the 2005 Global Dressage Forum
November 3, 2005
 When Eurodressage wrote its report "Global Dressage
Forum: Yap Yap for the Elite?" on the 2004 edition
of the Global Dressage Forum (GDF), it caused a big
stir. The Eurodressage article carried several indictments.
The forum's so-called
mission was to discuss training methods and techniques
and help the sport progress, but to us it seemed
all talk and no action, it looked like a social gathering
of the dressage 'creme de la creme,' while journalists
were ostracized or
forced to pay the 500 euro entrance fee for participation.
Joep Bartels, organizer of the GDF, replied in person
to our article
telling
that for the
2005 edition they would invite more journalists through
the International Alliance of Equestrian Journalists.
Bartels kindly invited Eurodressage to join
the 2005 forum on October 31 and November 1, 2005,
without paying. We gladly accepted this invitation and drove to Hooge Mierde, The Netherlands, with much eagerness to discover and critically evaluate the GDF.
There is no need to mention that our expectations
for the 2005 Global Dressage Forum were extremely
high. To us, this trend setting convention, which has
to push the dressage sport forwards, needed to be ground
breaking,
thought provoking and polemical in order to fulfil
its reputation. With St.Georg's controversial "Dressur
Pervers" article still quaking the dressage world,
the GDF would have been the perfect platform to openly
discuss rollkur versus classical dressage amongst riders,
trainers, judges and other dressage experts.
 Unfortunately
this was not the case. Any mention of rollkur, or riding
behind the vertical was hushed and swept under the
carpet by the speakers' panel. It seemed as if the
topic was complete taboo and not to be discussed at
the forum. This is a great pity. This year's GDF should
have been totally devoted to that debate and should
have included a thorough discussion on the current
judging system, which completely derailed at the CDIO
Aachen
in August.
None of this happened and instead we had to listen
to platitude and commercial statements that lacked
guts. Fortunately, three sessions saved the 2005 Global
Dressage Forum and those were the ones conducted by
Cees Slings & Victor Kerkhof, Dr. Hilary Clayton and
Kyra Kyrklund.
Text
copyrighted Astrid
Appels/Eurodressage.com, Images copyrighted Dirk
Caremans -
No Reproduction allowed without explicit permission
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