*Exclusive* The history of hyperflexion in dressage training – and how the sport can move away from it

“Science-informed decision-making” is the way ahead, the FEI announced at its general assembly (10-13 November 2024), when revealing new strategies to sustain horse sport’s social licence to operate and, specifically, to win back public trust in dressage. But where its starting point is for new research into hyperflexion is unclear.

This, along with the topic of blue tongues, are the two issues that most upset dressage critics and welfare advocates. But how does the FEI commission studies into blue tongues (aka cyanosis) or hyperflexion, never mind how and if they are connected, when the FEI or its stakeholder groups barely acknowledge their existence?

The FEI “condemned” hyperflexion in 2010, but you won’t find the words hyperflexion (or blue tongues) anywhere in FEI dressage sport rules, nor in FEI veterinary and general regulations, or in the online FEI dressage judging manual.

Reference to hyperflexion in the warm-up arena does appear in the FEI dressage stewards online manual, in a single sentence that is light on instruction: “Long, deep and round riding is accepted, unless used excessively or prolonged (hyperflexion of the neck). There is a danger when copied by unskilled riders. There is a fine line between training and overtraining!”

FEI judging guidelines, which are only available as a hard copy book, stipulate that hyperflexion should be penalised, because the horse would be judged to be over-bent. But judges are tasked with marking what they see in front of them, not what they suspect was done at home to achieve it.

In a previous article looking at the debate around using double bridles, David Hunt, president of the International Dressage Trainers Club (IDTC) and a member of the FEI Judges Supervisory Panel, commented: “Judges do not overlook problems with contact or self-carriage, but must score the totality of the exercise. However problems with head carriage or contact are always noted in the comments.”

Photograph evidence of horses behind the vertical or with open mouths during a dressage test is often disregarded as depicting “a moment in time.” At a recent press briefing, IDTC secretary general Linda Keenan cautioned against conflating with abuse any performance that did not meet the perfectionist objectives of dressage.

At the same briefing, Klaus Roeser, representing the International Dressage Riders Club (IDRC), said: “Limited knowledge will come to limited answers by people who have no real understanding of how to look at the horse as a whole; at what is warm-up, what is stretching, what is ‘easy’ riding and what is aggressive riding. To say ‘the horse is behind the vertical, that’s bad’, is totally stupid.”

An impasse of this magnitude is not where the FEI and its dressage stakeholders need to be at this critical moment for equestrianism.

How did hyperflexion become so popular?

The technique of training a horse in an exaggerated, rounded outline with the neck low and head tucked in towards the chest has ancient roots but was re-popularised by Dutch team trainer Sjef Janssen in the 1990s. His partner and pupil Anky van Grunsven took three Olympic individual golds (Sydney 2000, Athens 2004 and Beijing/Hong Kong 2008) and multiple world and European golds with Bonfire and Salinero.

Janssen did not sit on a horse until he was 28, but went on to ride dressage for seven hours a day. In 1999 he gave an interview to Australian journalist Chris Hector. Janssen said: “Number one, I am for classical dressage, the way it is supposed to look in the FEI rules. But my philosophy of training is different; I treat horses like athletes, instead of using the classical training methods because I don’t think they work any more.

“The horses are different, there’s way more Thoroughbred in them, so you have to approach them differently, also mentally. The horses in the past were those really heavy horses, and you didn’t need to train them much in the lower frame because they were very difficult to bend and flex.

“When you show a horse you bring it up in front, and show it in its full glory, on its haunches, light in the forehand – but I think if you try to train a horse that way every day, he will not be able to physically stand it. He will get a lot of back pain.

“A lot of people think we over-bend the horses and that will hurt the neck and the back. But two professors … have proved that riding the horse always up, is very dangerous for the horse, and riding them deep is very good for the horse, especially the neck and the flexibility.”

History does not relate if the professors mentioned published their study.

Is it rollkur or hyperflexion?

The term rollkur was disparagingly coined by Professor Heinz Meyer in top German magazine Reiten St Georg in 1992, but in that pre-internet era articles deemed controversial were scarcely read outside the publisher’s country.

Fifteen years later, St Georg editor Gabriele Pochhammer noticed that other top horses suspected of being trained with rollkur were tense, nappy, even refusing to start. Pochammer called out rollkur. The German and Dutch dressage teams were arch rivals – but it was notable that St Georg criticised German practitioners, too.

In 2006, a FEI workshop concluded that hyperflexion – rollkur’s new, softer name – had implications for respiration and mental stress, though was unlikely to cause “lasting damage” in professional hands. But in 2008 a FEI welfare subcommittee denounced it as equine mental abuse.

In 2010, the FEI redefined it as flexion of the horse’s neck achieved through “aggressive” force. Diagrams in FEI manuals showed a difference between aggressive riding with the head tucked in, and the more elongated posture known as “low deep and round (LDR)” which is acceptable for short spells in the warm-up. The terminology still confuses observers. The FEI “condemned” hyperflexion and “did not support it” in 2010, but did not unequivocally ban it in the rulebooks.

What does the research say?

While the FEI is now urgently funding its own welfare studies, an incredible 58 peer-reviewed, independent studies into hyperflexion already exist around the world (peer review means they have been assessed by other scientists in order to be published in a bona fide academic journal).

In Australia, the much decorated veterinary researcher Professor Paul McGreevy and colleagues last month published a meta study of all 58. Just one – by a single Dutch researcher – found hyperflexion potentially beneficial, in a 2006 study comparing elite dressage horses with recreational ones.

The vast majority concluded hyperflexion had welfare “implications”, with 28 saying welfare was impaired. Of 14 concentrating on equine behaviour, at least five noted “frequencies of reported conflict behaviours, such as tail-swishing and abnormal head and mouth movements, were significantly greater in horses ridden behind the vertical”.

According to the meta-study, hallmarks that a horse has been so trained are decreased stride length, increased elevation of the hindlimbs and increased dorsoventral oscillation of the lumbar vertebrae.

The meta-study said hyperflexion provides a competitive advantage, because judges reward the results, despite being counter to what is required in the competition itself. The meta-study had a little sympathy for officials: “Stewards in the warm-up arena are expected to make assessments of rein tension or a horse’s state of stress and/or fatigue without empirical data.

“This is problematic, given that trained judges have difficulty detecting rein tension as an attribute called lightness, and equestrian professionals cannot concur on manifestations of stress in the ridden horse.”

Campaigns against hyperflexion

The stop-hyperflexion campaigner Dr Eva van Avermaet is a recognisable figure around the warm-up at major CDIs in continental Europe. Though a full-time vet, this year she attended Amsterdam, Lier, Aachen, Fontainebleau, Compiègne, Ermelo, Lyon and Stuttgart CDIs and some national shows in France.

She says she has been threatened many times, including once when accompanied by a journalist whom the organisers mistook for an “activist” and tried to manhandle off the showground; and another when a trainer’s associates tried to seize her camera.

Eva says about half the stewards take her seriously. The others either laugh or “talk down” to her. “Those ones react to me in exactly the same way the riders react to them. So I’m very well aware of the difficulty [for stewards] and the courage it takes to keep on stepping-up to make sure the rules are enforced.

“A few young riders do try to do things differently – I can see that, and I’m happy about that; they know I am. But the elite riders are not becoming better riders. They are becoming better hiders.”

Eva’s interest in hyperflexion began when she joined an equine practice in France. All her new clients were riding behind the vertical – contrary to what she learned in her native Belgium.

“It became clear it was a method used as a short cut, a quick fix, to control horses, to produce spectacular movements,” said Eva. “It was this ‘false collection’ my instructors had told and warned me about. And the elite riders were massively using it and being rewarded. What was going on in the warm-ups of the high-level dressage competitions was outrageous.”

In 2018, Eva was “shocked, disappointed and angry” to witness several Cadre Noir écuyers (riders) and students using hyperflexion, and took to Facebook. “They are supposed to be the guardians of classical French equitation, not copycats of competition riders,” she told H&H.

After a meeting with the Cadre Noir in 2020, Eva and other attendees found the impetus to set up the Collectif Pour Les Chevaux and widen their campaign. Once depicted as a “crazy” vet, she is now regularly invited to address international veterinary conferences on hyperflexion.

It was a particular coup when the 1976 Olympic dressage champion Christine Stuckelberger spoke at the Collectif’s spring 2024 conference. Mrs Stuckelberger said she noticed another negative evolution of hyperflexion when spectating at Aachen last year. “Now, the riders don’t want to show the judges that they are still rolling [sic], so now they have the head more up, but still very tight.

“You see some horses’ heads in front of the vertical, but when the neck is so much higher than the poll it is a sign it has been ridden in rollkur. It is sad to see it in young horse classes; something else has to be behind the building-up of this neck so high.

“Many riders in the old times experimented too, but found the horse could not function. The horse is always the same – he must be happy in his body.”

The Collectif’s goal was to “end hyperflexion, over-tightened nosebands and brutal aids” by the Paris Olympic Games. “We were extremely naïve,” Eva reflects.

● What are your thoughts on the current use of hyperflexion? Write to us at hhletters@futurenet.com, including your name, nearest town and country, for the chance for your letter to appear in a forthcoming issue of the magazine

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