Dressage scoring is always an area of speculation and debate. At Land Rover Kentucky last week we saw that there was no trend to increasing scores on the first day of dressage but that scores were higher and increased with order of go on the Friday. There are a number of reasons why this pattern may have occurred and, of course, riders with two horses choosing to ride their better horses on day 2 may be one of those.
What we can see from Badminton 2022 yesterday (first day of dressage) in Figure 1 is that there was a trend (based on simple linear regression) for scores to decrease throughout the day by an average of 5% from first to last horse. However, using a different type of trend analysis (a 6° polynomial fit) we can see more detail and there were clusters of higher scores in the morning and in the afternoon and a period of lower scores between the two (Figure 2).
In Figure 3 we can see the variation between judges’ scores over the whole first day: generally there was good agreement between the judges although the judge at B scored lower than the other two. This can also be seen clearly in the next Figure. If we look at the difference of each judge’s score for each rider from the average of all three judges (Figure 4) we can see that the greatest difference was for Christoph Wahler riding Carjatan S between the judges at C and B with over 6% difference.
Looking forward to today’s dressage and further analysis!
