Asian Games, equestrian: As India win historic gold, understanding what dressage means, and how horses travel from one nation to other

The medal means India have now claimed three gold medals so far at the Asian Games in Hangzhou. The Indian’s men’s air rifle shooting team and the women’s cricket team had also claimed the coveted medal on Monday.

https://twitter.com/SonySportsNetwk/status/1706620585177206859 https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

But what is dressage?

Equestrian riding has three disciplines: dressage, show jumping and eventing.

Think of dressage as the equivalent of figure skating, or horse ballet. The horse and rider have to exhibit a series of predetermined movements. The horse will walk, trot, gallop and canter as music plays in the background. The discipline, contested on a flat 20×60 metres patch of ground, demands complete precision and harmony between horse and rider.

Dressage has its roots in the writings of Greek military leader and philosopher Xenophon, who discouraged the use of force in horse training. The dressage is a discipline that shows the camaradarie between rider and steed.

Dressage has also grown from the influence of French riding master Francois Robichon de La Gueriniere’s ‘Ecole de Cavalerie’ (School of Cavalry), who in 1733 espoused the ways a horse could be trained without being forced into submission.

What’s the difference between walk, trot, gallop and canter?

A trot is an active, two-beat horse’s gait.

A canter is a controlled, three-beat horse’s gait.

A gallop is a fast, four-beat horse’s gait while a walk is a gentle, four-beat horse’s gait.

What about the other two disciplines?

Show jumping is a discipline where the rider and his steed negotiate an obstacle course of sorts with the horse having to jump over multiple fences — which lead us to the inevitable comparisons to sports like pole vault, high jump, hurdles or steeplechase.

Eventing is best described as an equestrian triathlon. It’s a complete test of a horse and rider’s ability across three formats: dressage, cross country and show jumping.

So how do riders transport their horses from one country to another?

India has 10 riders competing at Hangzhou across the three disciplines. This means there are also 10 horses. So how did they get to China? The simple answer is just like the riders did: by flying.

The complex questions though are: how do you make a horse, which weighs around 500kg, fly? And do they need passports like humans do?

The trick to making a horse fly is to board them into stalls, which then get loaded into cargo holds of large cargo airplanes. The stalls are equipped with hay or haylage and water so that the steed is well nourished.

While the riders don’t fly in the same planes as the horses, the four-legged athletes are accompanied by grooms, whose job it is to take care of horses, and veterinarians, in case they get sick mid flight.

And as far as passports are concerned, horses do have passports, but theirs has details of markings and where the horse was born among other things. The passport also has to list the vaccines the horse has taken, from flu vaccines, to tetanus shots.