"Falling for Fallacies. Misleading Commonplace Notions of Dressage Riding"
(Concurrently published in the German translation: "Auf dem falschen Fuß. Kritische Betrachtungen der modernen Dressur")
N.B.
The following introductory remarks were written before the sad untimely
demise of Jean-Claude Racinet (please use the link to the Eulogy
in the right column). I have decided not to change the
present-tense expressions in the hope that the sense of how present
Racinet is - even if regrettably only through his texts, now -
will be clearly felt.
The
work of Jean-Claude Racinet is well-known to riders and readers. The importance of his
life-long contribution to the articulation of what, in his perspective,
constitutes the true essence of French riding, on the one hand, and of his
ardent clarification of the differences, particularities, and respective
fortes of Latin and "German" riding, on the other, has recently culminated in the prestigous Prix du Cadre noir being awarded to him. This, his recognition "at home", his teaching in Europe (and specifically in Germany), and his renown in the Anglo-saxon world of riding, all bear witness to his eminent
status both as a theoretician and as a Master of the practice of
horsemanship.
Racinet
has never ceased to "push
the frontier", his research has not relented and this, his latest text
shows how his thinking and questioning, based on themes already
presented in previous works, evolves and which orientation he presently
considers to be the most promising and urgent: A scientific approach,
he
suggests, is necessary for the verification of numerous "ideas", many
of them misconceptions, prevalent in riding and training, in particular
the use of knowledge from the fields of anatomy and biomechanics,
together with the tools of empirical methods, i.e. replicable
measurement. He focusses specifically, for example, on the (for
some riders problematic) issues of neck position(ing), centre of
gravity, and "flexion of the lower jaw", as proned by the Baucherist
school. With these fundamentals, hitherto unparallelled in their precision
(including the English or German discussions informed by these fields
of knoweldge), Racinet proceeds to add to his well-known discussion,
now grounded by the said data, of the prevalent and in his opinion
"misleading" canons of riding and training and argues that the approach
of the French school, the riding in Légèreté, has every reason to gain
its place, given that denial of its validity can hardly be sustained,
unless for purely dogmatic reasons, in the face of the scientifically
proven facts he presents.
This latest work by Jean-Claude
Racinet must be counted as a seminal contribution to the "school
discussion" in which he has been one of the major
voices for so many years. There were times when he was a "lone caller in the
desert", and now again, when the topic is finally "in", when many try
to add their grain of wisdom and much is said and written which
disguises a lack of solid content behind a barrage of popular words,
Racinet points the way. And he does so with the calm of his knowledge
and experience and age, yet with unbridled enthusiasm and verve and
conviction.
It is difficult to
imagine who in the community of riders - of whatever "school" affiliation or specializing in
whichever discipline etc. - would not profit from this masterly work.
Racinet was, for the later 20th century, one of the prime "movers"
furthering knowledge in the field of equestrianism; with this book he
now, at the beginning of the 21st century, once again details what a
valid future of riding and for the riding horse ought to be.
