In addition to making sure that the horses don’t go forward or backward, or side to side, the judges will keep track of the number of steps (twelve to fifteen), their height (as high as the cannon bone on the foreleg as high as the fetlock on the rear), and insure that they are not, in the somewhat baroque language of the sport, “unlevel.” Then they will score each piaffe out of ten. Next week, in Rio de Janeiro, seven judges around an arena, known as a manège, will evaluate the piaffes of the four-day dressage competition. Instead of going anywhere, it jogs on the spot, three-quarters of a ton of moving muscle, feet rising and falling in the same four hoofprints like an animation in a flip book. A horse in piaffe defies what horses otherwise do. The piaffe is probably the most demanding and exquisite movement in the Olympic sport of dressage. Photograph by Tereza Červeňová for The New Yorker Dressage is the only Olympic event that can claim Xenophon as its first coach.
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