When judges get it wrong

Before I delve deeper into this article, I ask the question, have you ever experienced judges, judging you and your horse in any discipline, getting it very wrong?  Whether it be the fence judge marking you down for not jumping their particular jump, giving you a stop when you know you jumped it, or saying you went into a black flag area when you know you did not, it seems these things happen all too often.  Why?  Perhaps you'll be thinking we are all human and everyone makes mistakes.  I am aware this sport runs on the commitment of volunteers, who we are all incredibly thankful to for their support, however, this is an issue in the sport that needs to be corrected.  There is now, rightly or wrongly, too much money, blood, sweat and tears involved for it to any longer be acceptable that your chances are ruined by a judge who should have 'gone to spec savers' some time before the event. 

With every mistaken call made by our judges, a can of worms is opened and this is completely avoidable and unnecessary.  Too often, competitors and officials wind up protesting their sides of the story.  How do we eliminate these errors from occurring?

At the most recent Gatcombe (UK), an event you spend months preparing for, and squillions of dollars on, a horse with a very good chance of success, was warming in around the arena waiting for their bell, when the judge ‘accidently’ bumped and blasted the horn while the horse was directly in front of the vehicle.  This unfortunately upset the horse resulting in a very unsettled test.  I spoke to the owner of this horse and she informed me that for the next event the horse was unsettled passing the vehicle, and performing at that end of the arena, thus impacting his dressage test yet again.  The costs of these mistakes are huge.  You spend a great deal of time, effort and money preparing your horse for events and to have the horn blasted in front of you is unfair, regardless if it’s accidental or not. Following this unsettlement you are then judged on your performance in the arena, with the potential for no consideration for the previous perturbing.  Meanwhile, the judge has been more careful in not bumping the horn for the next horse passing the vehicle.

It doesn’t just happen in dressage.  There have been uncountable times on the cross country, where a fence judge has incorrectly marked a stop or an incompletion of the jump, causing serious uproar.  There was a case at the most recent Taupo Spring event in class 7B.  Amanda Illston had been eliminated after supposedly not jumping a jump however, she was adamant she had.  Leaving the grounds, believing she had completed the course successfully, it was only later she discovered she had been eliminated.  Unfortunately, because she had already left, she was unable to protest the elimination and therefore is left with the dreaded E next to her name, being visible forever more on her record.

Sometimes however, when the judge gets it wrong it works to your advantage.  A couple of years ago, I watched someone fall in the ditch element of the coffin at Taupo (I swear not every judge’s mistake happens at Taupo!).  After galloping off, the horse was retrieved and the rider re mounted and cantered away in good spirits.  Upon checking the scoreboard later in the day I noticed there was no ‘fall’ by the rider but rather a tonne of time faults, yet the horse clearly landed on the ground and the rider undeniably fell off!  Why then were there no fall penalties applied?  It would be interesting to know what they classify as a ‘fall’ if this wasn’t a fall?  Or perhaps somewhere through the grapevine they had miscalculated and mistakenly left out the fall penalties? Perhaps technology is the bane of our existence.  Or rather perhaps technology could be better implemented to the benefit of recording precisely what horse and rider are doing.  Do judges need to be better briefed and more qualified?