One of the most interesting and exciting stories this year in eventing has been the resurrection of Tipperary Liadhnan’s show jumping. We all know the story of Kim and “Paddy’s” disastrous show jumping rounds this spring, their hard work with Katie Prudent over the summer, one rail in the last two horse trials, and finally selection to the US team for the WEGs. I recently asked Kim to explain how Katie’s teaching philosophy has helped her so much. Let’s start by looking at Kim and “Paddy’s” show jumping round at Rolex 2010.
As Kim explained to me, Paddy was jumping great over the first three Rolex fences but at the fourth jump she got him to a “gap” distance but didn’t have enough leg for Paddy to jump. A “gap” is a purposefully long distance used to give the horses more time to pick up their front legs. The risk of intentionally “gapping” is that if you miss by being a little too long to a gap distance, you are suddenly standing really far off the fence.
So, that is the “before makeover” picture, if you will. Now let’s look at how Kim and Paddy got to the beautiful “after makeover” picture. Kim explained to me that Katie focused on 3 major points:
1) You need to know the number of strides between every single jump. And Katie means between every single jump. Whether jumps are two strides apart or twenty, Katie expects you to know every single stride on the show jumping course. Kim said that one big advantage of this strategy is that it tells her what to fix after the first two fences–if the distance turns out long she immediately knows she needs to ride more forward, etc.
2) You must get a good spot to the jumps–you cannot be wrong. Anyone who has ever show jumped can imagine that this “just be right all the time” mentality feels like Michael Jordan handing you a basketball and saying “just dunk.” For Katie, you must know where you are, if you don’t know where you are then you must figure out how to know where you are, and being wrong is not an option. Kim said that this type of accountability completely changed how she looked at distances: “when I would be wrong before I would suffer through it, now I feel like I have to fix it.”
3) Simplicity–every time you ride, ride the horses to ride clean. Kim said that Katie doesn’t advocate getting the horses too deep in training, dropping the horses on takeoff, or any other popular tricks. Katie teaches the horses that you want them to jump clean and that you will help them do that.
After working on these three points with Katie over the summer, Kim and Paddy had just one rail at Richland:
Kim’s position: Katie has been working hard with Kim to keep her elbows moving. These moving elbows in conjunction with rein-backs have helped Paddy to accept the connection and let Kim help him over the fences. Kim also said that she has been trying to stay with Paddy more on the takeoff but still support him with her leg–a technique that Kim says makes her feel more like a show jumper.
Kim is one of the most focused and hardest working riders in eventing, and it was fantastic to see all of her hard work result in a double clear at the AECs. You can see in the video that Kim and Katie are still using a longer distance, but Paddy is much more in front of Kim’s leg.
I’d like to extend a big Eventing Nation ‘thank you’ to Kim for taking the time to explain Katie Prudent’s genius. Please share your thoughts from the videos on how you think Kim’s show jumping has changed this year in the comment section. One thing I notice is that Paddy seems to be working with Kim a lot more in the recent videos. Go eventing.
