The Show Jumper

A show jumping horse produces mechanical power on the order of 59,000 watts in the fifth of a second its hind legs spend pushing off the ground. Then it lands, and a single foreleg absorbs up to twice the animal's body weight.

Everything else in this sport is downstream of those numbers.

The Show Jumper is built on one argument: a jumping horse is an athlete, its physiology and psychology impose hard limits, and competence consists of understanding those limits and working inside them. Once a horse leaves the ground, the arc of its jump is fixed - it was decided by the canter that arrived. The canter was decided by training, training by soundness, and soundness by how the horse is fed, shod, housed and handled. Almost every problem in this sport is treated further down that chain than it arose, which is why the same faults return to the same yards every winter.

This book follows the chain back. It is written for the rider moving from beginner to competent - learning to jump, jumping small courses, or competing at eighty centimetres to a metre and finding that the fences have stopped getting easier. It assumes intelligence and no prior knowledge.