Q&A with DiAnn Langer
Cynthia
DiAnn Langer is with us to give us her impressions of the current situation, how it's affecting our sport and may continue to do so going forward. Diane, how are you?
DiAnn
I am great, thanks for having me on.
Cynthia
So I wanted to ask you, what is your impression of this strange situation?
DiAnn
Well it's difficult for all of us and it is actually a moment to pause here and analyze where we're at. It seems like many times we’re going so fast in our sport we really don't have the chance to take a moment to reflect, whether it's a good direction or a bad direction or we need to make some corrections so while this is happening, it's been an opportunity to kind of look forward and look back and say ‘what do we need to do for our sport?’ How are we going to make it inviting? How are we going to make it inclusive? How are we going to develop our young horses? We can take a moment to just analyze where we’re at.
Cynthia
Could you please do me the favor of sharing exactly what your different roles are?
DiAnn
Okay. I do have several hats. I am first and foremost, the USEF youth chef d'equipe and technical advisor for jumping. I am also the USHJA show jumping technical advisor and I also have a farm. We mostly do breeding, young horses and some retired horses here close to Aiken. Along with that, I judge and teach some clinics now and then, so I am busy all the time.
Cynthia
We all know that it takes quite some time to develop a horse into a performance sport horse. Can you talk to us a little bit about how this is going to give us an opportunity to do that better?
DiAnn
It's an interesting time. It is very difficult to get a rider to do young horses. In the last two weeks I've had more people call me looking for a job. On one hand, that is good for me, on the other hand, it shows you where our industry is at the moment and it's in bad shape. I feel that no one wants to take the time to develop, and that it is very expensive to develop in the United States. We have no history until you go back at least 40 years of people developing horses. It’s all about the moment and that doesn't work for young horses. It takes time. You have to really enjoy the process. You have to be happy with what that young horse learned. Maybe he learned one thing and you should be excited about it. It has always been an exciting moment when I got done with the end of the day and I said, ‘well, we really accomplished something here today.’ But I find that our riders nowadays are really about competing. And then it gets down to how many of our riders are really horsemen. Are they just riders? Are they trainers? They don't know how to start a young horse. They don't know how to bring them along. They don't know how much to ask.
I just returned from Spain, just in time, from the Sunshine's tour and I was so impressed with how many young horses they had for every age group.
In other words, the 5-year-olds had ground lines for verticals and brush boxes for verticals. One day you were on the turf and the next day you were in the ring and every single day you went to a different ring with your young horse. What a luxury, that a horse can learn so much in one week. Also, the cost was not as expensive. It was around £300 for everything. So that alone was fantastic. They also allowed a 6-year-old to jump in the 5-year-olds just to get around and get a clear round, to get experience and then go back up to the 6-year-olds. They weren't so strict about their specs that they said, ”I'm sorry if you can't make it around this course, I guess you can't go, go home.” They didn't do that. They wanted to give a good experience. That was a different feel. All day long, they had a clear round ring when, where you go and raise the jumps or lower the jumps, whatever you needed to do, and school your horse. I found that the experience was really about development and not about competing.
Cynthia
Our point of view at Classic Champions is exactly the development point of view. It's like with anything that takes time. Children take time to develop. Children take time to be educated. The horses are no different. I liked the idea when I was in Europe, that the horse was at the center of sport, not the client.
DiAnn
Yes, yes, I absolutely agree with that. The joy of developing a horse, which, my generation and even the next generation and before, enjoy being with a horse, developing the horse, making him into something other than a horse off the track. It was really quite fulfilling. We gained so many skills for our ability to then go on and make more of other horses because we learned so much developing a young horse. It was quite, quite a nice time. And, and of course at that time, there was always a time off. We always had downtime. We didn't have shows every day of the year. We didn't have great rankings that we had to stay competitive with or standings we had to make all the time and strategize on how to get wherever we want to go.
Unfortunately, it is a bit of a horse race now at the shows. We go from show to show to show because we have ranking points we must earn and we have those standings in order to get into a championship or in order to get into a premier show. So, it's changed. Our industry has changed and how to put that young horse in the middle of it, frankly, as you're doing or other managers are starting to do, we need to make it affordable. But then it has to be friendly. It can be affordable, but if it's not friendly, you really haven't achieved anything. And as you know, you worked very hard yourself to make sure that you have proper course designers. I think that is a big issue for us in the United States because our course designers have to set the biggest class of the day, maybe they have 1.35m or 1.40m class at the end of the day. The course designer sets for that first and then he works backwards to the first class, which is usually a 5-year-old class. I think you and I would really agree that your young horse and that 1.35m horse course are not compatible at all. We are now so competition-centric. All we think about is compete, compete, compete. It really makes it hard for a manager to find a place in his show to slow it down enough to make it friendly for a young horse.
Cynthia
I've thought a lot about this and I was wondering to what degree you attribute management's decision making about making numbers each day as being part of the reasoning?
DiAnn
I have to say back in the day, we weren't as concerned about the material that we jumped on. We jumped on dirt. That was not a problem. And our horses stayed sound for a very long time. That was more than likely because we didn't compete them as hard. We were able to show, take a few weeks off, show, take a few more weeks off. We were not on the road all the time. The industry has changed to the degree to where the show has become all things to all people.
It's expensive to run that kind of show. It's expensive to have VIP. It's expensive to have the current top- of-the-line footing in every ring. It's expensive to build permanent stabling. It's expensive to have your shows in the middle of some of the most elite and special cities in the world, but definitely in the United States– all that comes at a cost. So, does he have to keep his numbers up? Absolutely, a manager has to keep his numbers up. Certain managers have a lot of dates and they become like silos, to where many times a manager can actually act like a horse show association because people don't have to go anywhere but to their shows, so that brings out all new problems. So, there are some issues that we have to recognize and come to terms with and correct if we can.
Cynthia
I think that in our country, what's surprising to me is we have such a great opportunity for young people to be joined up with these horses and enjoy what is the development of a relationship. Your position as the coach, the chef d'equipe for the young developing riders, you have a unique perspective. I feel as though that is a sector which has not quite yet realized in this country. There are only a few people who will ever get to the Olympic team and then rest can be very useful and have productive careers, but they need to learn horsemanship. They need to have the passion for the horses. They need to have the patience.
DiAnn
Right. Patience I think is hard to find. Everybody wants to get there. Everybody wants to go to the show. Young juniors coming out of the junior ranks are having to make decisions about becoming a professional or to go back to school. I think that they're not giving themselves time to experience all the things they need to experience to become a top horseman. I know that all the clinics that we give, we stress young horses and we stress, pedigrees and proper breeding and responsible breeding and breaking and development and the importance of it to their skillset. Few- very few out of the dozens that I see in a year are doing a young horse. It takes time, but it is in fact the only avenue that many people will have to getting a top horse for the sport.
Buying a horse now is, as you know, as most people listening here, seems like it's going to be completely unavailable to even the very best riders, unless you're extremely fortunate. So that being said, and my passion is about being inclusive in our sport, it really is necessary for those young riders to start seriously looking for ways to learn about how to ride and wait and develop a young horse. Unfortunately, in this country, we don't have a lot of people to teach them. That's another problem. And perhaps it's about finding a way to work with European professionals that will take some of our riders and teach them. I've had a couple of top riders come here to the farm to ride and they're afraid of falling off, getting bucked off a young horse. They don't want to take that chance because everything is on the line. And I can understand that. I understand it completely, but a lot of them would not be in trouble with a young horse if they had learned to do it at a young age. They would be able to anticipate the pitfalls. Anything could happen to any person on a horse. We know that, that's a given. But, being afraid to ride a young horse because you're afraid of a potential accident. Have you ever seen the warmup areas at a horse show?!
Cynthia
Absolutely. And one element that is very different in our country from the European countries we've been going to to purchase these lovely animals, we have a phenomenon here of distance that they do not have. They have shows that are usually within a three hour trip from the stable. And when I lived in France for 20 years, what I would see is my professional would develop these young horses very effectively by taking them out every other week until they qualified for the championship, which is just a certain number of clear rounds. Then if they were going to be the best they would ever be at four, they would go to the final. If they were going to be the best they were going to be later, we would save them. So, it's all about the longevity of the career of the horse.
DiAnn
Yeah, that's right. I totally agree. And you know, I had a large business in Los Angeles and I sold that and I came here (Aiken, South Carolina) and purchased this piece of property because I am just that. I am two hours from Tryon and two hours from Atlanta and six hours from Kentucky and six hours from Ocala and two hours from North Carolina, Charlotte area. So it was, with the idea that hopefully we could develop something like that. I know I was a dreamer, I still am.
And I really believe that as a horse community, we can build bigger communities within that two to six hour range that focuses on young horses. Even people that are not going to do young horses, but would buy a six year old, can go into those areas and see 10 people within six hours driving time and look at horses and look at young horses and find what they're looking for. My thought was that this was a prime area to develop our young horses. They have great farms down here. We have eventing. We have dressage, we got I think five hunts and a dozen or more polo fields. It's an incredible horse area and it's far reaching.
Cynthia
To what degree do you feel this is a cultural difference? This is a very young country, we don't have a culture where breeding is centuries old. I saw a great deal of evolution in the approach to breeding our sport horses in France. Right. And so, I was just curious, is it truly a cultural difference or, what is it?
DiAnn
It’s more than a cultural difference. Back in the 60s 70s and 80s we relied totally on the Thoroughbred industry to breed those horses. Well at that time, in my opinion, they bred for distance and the distance horse proved to be an outstanding jumper in most cases. Speed horses not so much. But that proved to be great. But unfortunately, as you mentioned earlier, it's not so much the horse any more, it’s about competing. They are into competing and going to the shows and being with their friends and competing for bigger and bigger prizes. It is no longer about the horse.
Cynthia
I want to know if it's more about the rider or more about the “client”.
DiAnn
The client pushes the professional to do more. It’s a huge investment to have a top horse.
There’s a huge investment to keep him every single day. It's a huge investment to pay the entry fee, to shoe it, the shipper– huge investment. And the client of course wants results. It used to be you could buy a nice horse and you could enjoy him for local shows and, for me it was in California, you could go to a state show.
They now push our professionals to do more, do it faster, get results faster. At the same time, our professionals, because of our championship qualifying processes, compete more. So, during certain times of the year you’ve got to go to the show, you have to be on the road and that has been in my opinion a detriment to the horse. It is difficult not to be on the road and then charge your client and not get points for that horse show. So, it's just what we have made our sport into.
And now, we're turning around and saying, “how did we get here?” It was an interesting direction because more and more, I heard the word, “unrated.”
Unrated should be a good way to go. But then you get into all kinds of issues: safety, medication rules, arbitration– you're missing that element of protection for the horse and the rider and the client. That protection is gone. So, you're on your own. That in itself is not healthy, but it wasn a word that was coming up a lot from a lot of people. A lot of managers that would like to get dates, a lot of people that were tired of paying the high entry fees and the high cost of stabling and training. There was that groundswell that was starting to happen. So now it will be interesting to see what happens going forward. It'll be interesting to See if that sort of thing does happen and young horses can then take advantage of it, if you will. Or if we are able to, get those young horse circuits or tours, like the Sunshine Tour, to where you knew where you were going to go with your young horse and people actually believed in the development of the young horse, number one. Number two: see its importance because they could do a young horse well, and three: they had a different lifestyle and were no longer on the road all the time. They could choose how fast or how slow they want to go with their program.
And, in fact, they can even have that nice family life and live a great life because they have a farm and they do young horses and they have respect from our most elite riders because they do it so well. That’s what I'd like to see happen here in the United States.
Cynthia
I'm with you on that. Diane, I guess we'll just have to keep trying!
I can't thank you enough for being here with us today. I hope to see you again soon in the future.
DiAnn
I appreciate all that you do. USHJA is going to have their Young Jumper Championship in 2021 and we're hoping to start trying to bring all of these different programs together so that we can highlight each and everyone’s effort to make the young horse a reality in the United States.
Cynthia
Well, I'm all for it as you know.
DiAnn
I thank you for all you've done.