Clinic CONVERSATIONS ON TRAINING
Be Your Horse’s Mentor For Olympian Sabine Schut-Kery, correct training is all about communicating with the horse in a way that he can understand By Beth Baumert Photographs by Meg McGuire Photography
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abine Schut-Kery turned heads all over the world with her performance aboard Alice Womble’s Sanceo at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, where the US won a team silver medal. But Schut-Kery’s road to this pinnacle achievement was long and flavored with a career of extraordinary exhibition riding. Indeed, the first time I ever saw Schut-Kery was in the late 1990s at
Dressage at Devon in Pennsylvania, where she wowed the spectators with a riding and driving demonstration in which she drove one Friesian while riding the other. I had never considered such an extraordinary possibility and was beyond impressed. Schut-Kery was classically educated as both a rider and a driver in her native Germany. She moved to
EDUCATED: Jami Kment rides Gatino Van Hof Olympia, her 11-year-old KWPN gelding by Apache, in a lesson with 2020 US Olympic dressage team silver medalist Sabine Schut-Kery
18 May/June 2022 | USDF CONNECTION
the United States in 1998 to be the head trainer at Proud Meadows in Texas. There, she competed horses of all ages, from young horses to Grand Prix, and she became well known for those fabulous exhibitions. She’s no stranger to appreciative crowds! In 2005, she moved to California, where she trains and competes horses of all levels. In 2015, she was a member of the gold-medal-winning US team at the Pan American Games in Toronto. Soon thereafter, she was awarded The Dressage Foundation’s prestigious Carol Lavell Advanced Dressage Prize two years in a row, and she used the funds to take Sanceo to Europe for training. Today she continues to advance her education under the brilliant eye of Olympian Christine Traurig. Schut-Kery’s own boutique dressage-training business, as you will read below, prioritizes quality over quantity, and her approach is based on a superior understanding of horsemanship. Beth Baumert: In your teaching, I love how you distinguish between schooling your horse and educating him. Sabine Schut-Kery: Yes, I think of educating the horse so that the rider acts as a mentor. When the horse makes a mistake, the rider should actually tell him—in a supportive way—what went wrong and how he can do it better. For example, if the horse loses his bend in a movement, be sure to mention to him that he lost his shape. That’s very fair. If you take action in the moment, he can
