How to spot a potential top-class dressage horse

Horses are expensive, and if you choose to buy a horse with a well-defined lineage in any sporting discipline, it is not unusual to pay in excess of R100 000 for an unbacked filly or colt. But what should you be looking for before making this kind of investment? Janine Ryan reports.

- Janine Ryan

In October 2010, the Dutch Warmblood Totilas was sold to horse breeder Paul Schockemöhle for an estimated €11 million. Calculating for inflation, this is around €14,15 million today (about R292 million).

Totilas, a dressage superstar, stood at an impressive 17,1hh, and is widely considered one of the best dressage horses in history. He was the first horse to score above 90 in international competition.

He retired from competition in 2015, and was used for breeding until his death in 2020. While Totilas’s career was not without controversy, with some claiming that his paces were not a result of natural ability, but rather the use of harmful training practices, such as the use of rollkur – or flexion of the horse’s neck achieved through aggressive force – Totilas remains an excellent example of a highly skilled and naturally talented dressage horse. Indeed, Schockemöhle thought so highly of Totilas’s natural ability that he hit the record-high for a dressage horse when he bought Totilas in 2010.

The question then is, how do you determine the natural ability and potential of a talented dressage horse? Considering the cost of top-line genetics and horse maintenance, it is essential that potential buyers assess candidate purchases with the utmost care.

GAITS

Sophie Baker writes for the International Federation of Equestrian Sports (FEI) that seeing the dressage potential of a young horse can be difficult, particularly if it has not competed before or is not schooling well.