The best riders in the world with the best horses make it look so elegant and graceful. When you watch it done well, it looks so easy that it's difficult for the public to understand how hard this really is.
I used to be a keen rider. Sometimes I could sense what a horse liked or preferred to do.
...Vaulted with such ease into his seat, As if an angel dropp'd down from the clouds, To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus, And witch the world with noble horsemanship.
The trainer trains the docile horse to turn, with his sensitive neck, whichever way the rider indicates.
It's going to be hard to ever have a horse to replace Valegro. He is a professor. I think he read the dressage book and learnt it all before he ever did it.
Give me the handling of a horse for twenty minutes, and I'll tell you what sort of a groom he has had.
But my method of the pillar, as it throws the horse yet more upon the haunches, is still more effectual to this purpose, and besides always gives him the ply to the side he goes of.
Horsemanship through the history of all nations has been considered one of the highest accomplishments. You can't pass a park without seeing a statue of some old codger on a horse. It must be to his bravery, you can tell it's not to his horsemanship.
Oh! if people knew what a comfort to a horse a light hand is.
I've always ridden horses.
You can always tell a novice rider; they aren't comfortable in the saddle and have to hang on.
Now being upon the haunches (as he necessarily must be in this case) is it impossible but he must be light in hand, because no horse can be rightly upon his haunches without being so.
