Dressage matters in eventing because it builds the balance a horse and rider spend over the next two phases. It is the first test, judged movement by movement, each marked out of ten, and it shows whether the pair can stay calm and connected under pressure. Cross country gets the crowds. Dressage sets it up.
Why is dressage the first test in eventing?
Eventing asks the same horse and rider to be right in three different ways across one event: the control of dressage, the nerve of cross country and the precision of show jumping. Dressage comes first, and it is the phase where balance is most on show.
At the 2025 Scone Palace International Horse Trials, two of the four days were dressage, ridden in the main arena below the palace in Perth. I filmed both of them for Balance, our ten minute film about the event. One of the riders put the case for the phase more plainly than I could: “I think dressage is the most important with the balance, just because in there it’s just you and the horse. No one’s there to help you. If you make one wee blip, the horse can feel it through, and then the judge can feel it as well.”
That last point is the important one. In dressage there is nowhere to hide a mistake. The horse feels it first, and the judge sees what the horse does next.
What is a dressage judge looking for?
Balance, connection and a horse that is going forward of its own accord. One voice in the film, speaking from the judging side, set it out: “The horses should be up in good balance and have more of the weight on the hind legs. And they’re going to be in good balance. The rider has to have a very soft and nice connection, and the horses are moving forward by themselves.”
The same answer ends with a line that explains the whole phase: “And that will also gain them for the cross country.” Dressage is not a separate competition bolted to the front of the event. It is where the work for the next two days is either shown to be in place or shown to be missing.
How does dressage carry into cross country and show jumping?
Directly. The film’s narration puts it in one line on the second day: what you built in the dressage, you spend out here. Cross country at Scone was twenty odd fences in six minutes or so, and every one of them asks for the same thing the arena asked for, a horse that arrives balanced and engaged.
Another rider in the film made the point from the training side: “The cross country is the biggest weighted bit, but for me, you know, teach them horses for the dressage, and that they’re on your aids, and that will really help you throughout all three phases.”
Show jumping comes last and closes the loop. On the final day you are asking for the precision of day one from a horse that has done day two. One unbalanced stride, one pole on the floor, four faults, and everything that went before is undone. Nobody wins a three day event on the cross country alone. They win it by holding the balance from the first movement in the arena to the last fence.
Why is the mental side of dressage so hard?
Because the horse reads the rider’s state through the saddle. A main arena with a judge, a crowd and a palace behind it is not a quiet place to ride a test. One rider described it exactly: “It can be quite tricky when you go into a main arena like that. And you get a bit startled and the tension, the horse can feel it through the tension. So you’ve just got to keep your cool.”
Another put the cause and effect in one sentence: “You can’t have physical balance without mental balance, I feel.” A tense rider makes a tense horse, and a tense horse cannot carry itself the way the judge is looking for. The mental balance becomes the physical balance, and that is as much what is being marked in the arena as any single movement.
What does dressage have to do with quiet eye theory?
It is the same problem in a different channel. Quiet eye theory describes the final steady gaze an expert holds on a target before a decisive movement, and one of its clearest findings is about pressure. As anxiety rises, the gaze tends to dart and hunt for threats. A held quiet eye is what resists that.
Dressage tests that kind of composure, but it is not measured through the eyes. It travels through the rider’s seat and hands into a second animal, which reacts to it before any judge does. That is why the phase is so revealing, and why we keep returning to it. The communication underneath it is the subject of our next film at Scone Palace, set out in What is feel between a horse and rider in eventing?
How did we film dressage for Balance?
I had not filmed eventing before the 2025 Trials, and I did not know who the big names in the field were. So I filmed everyone with the same attention, and the film is built from many combinations rather than one pair followed through the event. The voices in it are five riders, Ian Stark, Wills Oakden, Douglas Crawford, Gordon Murphy and Cameron Swales, and the dressage judge Christina Klingspor.
Four days of material went into a ten minute edit. What survived was mostly faces, the riders in the moments when things were not quite in balance. The full account of the shoot is in How we made Balance across four days at Scone Palace, and the film itself, with its complete transcript, is on the Balance film page.