2004 Olympic Games - Dressage

Two Bronze Medals Announced Today
Dressage Wins By Points – Events Win By Overturned Ruling

You Can Help

At the dressage press conference we discussed a number of things and among those was the fact that some of the top placed horses made obvious mistakes. One of them bucked but still got a high mark. And the question to one of the judges was how are we going to get the understanding of the spectators when they see something like that – how can they understand that even with a buck that horse could win and deserved to win.

The judges spoke up saying to us – the media – you can help. Instead of putting in your stories that the judges gave that horse a too low or too high mark you can explain that we have 48 movements which we give marks to and when you add them up even if one movement gets a 5 the other movements can be so good that the overall score is very high.

The other topic of discussion was the fact that in dressage a 7 is considered a high mark whereas in so many other sports, such as figure skating, they get 9s and 10s. To this it was commented that in our system 5 is average and anything above 5 is good. Therefore if someone gets a 6 that is one point above the average.