help make a rounded person. Even if you want to be an English major in college, you still have to study science. You can specialize once you get to grad school but you need all the other prerequisites along the way. Training a horse is much the same as educating a child:
you have to start with the basics and build from there. And the more I learn about how human nature works the better I learn how to train a horse. A five-year-old horse is the same as a kid; they behave the same. They try denial and manipulation. They bargain with you and they ratio- nalize. Trainers—and parents—have to remain firm and calm. Riders, too, want shortcuts. Too often, everything to-
day is about instant gratification. By contrast, great riders know exactly what they want and they work at it until they get what they want. You don’t come out with a piece of marble and a sledgehammer and get Rodin’s “The Thinker” —you chip away at it. Riders don’t consider that Rudolf Zeilinger did who-knows-how-many thousands of 20-meter circles before he became the rider he is today. My most successful student rider right now is Alison
Brock. She’s well on her way to heading to the Olympic Games in Rio next year. I coach her here in the United States and Richard White and Kyra Kyrklund coach her in Europe. She said the first time she went to Europe, they
put her on a Grand Prix horse and she spent six months on a 20-meter circle. She cried every day. Boy oh boy, though, all those circles are sure paying off now! Building good basic skills becomes the foundation for
everything, whether you’re raising kids, building a house, getting married or training a horse. It sounds nice, that you need the basics, then you age and mature and sud- denly you ‘get it.’ You realize how important those basics really are. I lost a Grand Prix class because my horse didn’t walk properly, not because my horse couldn’t piaffe! In the end, success (or not) comes down to the
strength and depth of the foundation. The sooner you embrace that, the more successful you will be—in and out of the saddle.
An FEI dressage rider/trainer of Long Valley, New Jersey, and Loxahatchee, Florida, Michael Bari- sone has a thriving training business and several horses winning at Grand Prix, including HF Victor, Urbanus and Lauren Sprieser’s Ellegria. Michael was reserve for the 2008 Olympic team riding Neruda. He and his wife, Vera Kessels-Barisone, a Dutch native and Grand Prix dressage rider, purchase foals in Holland each year and produce all of their own Grand Prix horses.
66 May/June 2015
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