Dressage stars will shine in Sweden this weekend

“We want to [bring clarity] to the sport and more glamour and festivity to the audience,” says Swedish rider and World No.10 Patrik Kittel, who will be competing in the Swedish capital but is also one of the main organizers of the event. “Our goal is to present the very best the sport has to offer.”

The Top 8 riders in the FEI World Dressage Ranking as of October 31, 2017 were invited to Stockholm, including one (best-ranked) Swedish rider regardless of his/her position, and two Wild Cards. Indeed, the Dressage Top Ten is modelled on the Show Jumping Top Ten at the Geneva International Horse Show, where the highest-ranked riders in that sport face off in the Swiss city each year.

Despite having had big stars like Great Britain’s Charlotte Dujardin and her mount Valegro, however, Dressage has never received anything like the sponsorship seen in CSI 5* Show Jumping, and often less than top-level Eventing as well. The Saab Top 10 Dressage competition is aiming to change that somewhat, and organizers hope the prize money will rise to €250,000 in 2018. The world’s best riders in the sport are certainly pleased with the trend.

“We have talked about a Top 10 for dressage for many years and it’s fantastic that it is now a reality,” says World No.1 Isabell Werth of Germany. And as for the setting, the Sweden International Horse Show — which bills itself as having the largest indoor audience in the world for an equestrian event — is a logical host for the competition, given the Scandinavian country’s strength in the sport. That strength is reflected by the makeup of the entries list for the inaugural edition:

Isabell Werth, Germany
Therese Nilshagen, Sweden
Patrik Kittel, Sweden
Cathrine Dufour, Denmark
Helen Langehanenberg, Germany
Severo Jesus Jurado Lopez, Spain
Inessa Merkulova, Russia
Tinne Vilhelmson Silfvén, Sweden
Anna Zibrandtsen, Denmark
Rose Mathisen, Sweden

At the same time, it can be noted that top-ranked Dressage riders like the United States’ Laura Graves and Great Britain’s Carl Hester are not coming to Stockholm this week, and it is not uncommon in the Dressage world for elite riders to not attend all the most prestigious events so as to provide more varied fields of horse-and-rider combinations for judges.

As described previously on Eurosport, the history of Dressage is said to go back to ancient Greece, where military officers trained their horses how to manoeuvre in battle. In Dressage, different ‘tests’, or series of movements are judged using criteria corresponding to the difficulty of the techniques, as in figure skating. The movements, with names like the ‘Passage’ (a rhythmic trotting motion), the ‘Pirouette’, ‘Flying Change of Leg’ and ‘Half-pass’ are rooted in the centuries-old training system of the Imperial Spanish Riding School of Vienna, established in the 16th century.