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Finding the Horse of Your Dreams

• Doesn’t care what distractions there are in a jump.

• Does his best to not touch the jumps.

If you want a dressage horse, make

sure your horse

• Has good moves.

• Is always willing to learn more.

• Understands your orders very well.

• Doesn’t panic so easily.

Don’t let these myths influence

your decision

MYTH #1 “Bigger horses jump higher than smaller horses”

This myth was believed until around the 1970s when the difficulty of competitions
began to increase, and the quality of horses began to improve (Brand, 2013). Riders
started to realize that what determines how high a horse can jump is not the horse’s
height when small sized horses, such as
Jappeloup (15.2 hands/1.58m) and Touch
of Class (16 hands/1.62m), began to stand
out at the highest level. In the beginning,
people did not believe in those horses be-
cause of their small size. However, Touch
of Class was the Olympic Champion in
Los Angeles in 1984, and Jappeloup was
the Olympic Champion in Seoul in 1988.
Nowadays we can say for sure that size
does not determine jumping ability. Fac-
tors that can determine how high a horse
can jump are (Marks, 2015):

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