In vaulting the back is a piece of apparatus

Vaulting is the only discipline in which people stand on the horse. What that means for the girth area, the back and the mane, and what to check before every session.

There is one discipline in which the horse’s back is not a seat but a piece of apparatus. In vaulting somebody stands up there, pushes off, lands again, sometimes three at once. You look after that back not out of affection but out of arithmetic: whatever rubs today comes back tomorrow as tension.

Here the back is a working surface. You treat it like material that has to last another twenty years.

A vaulting surcingle does not sit like a saddle

A vaulting surcingle has two fixed handles, usually loops as well, and it sits on a thick pad. For twenty minutes hands pull on those handles, from above, from the side, at the moment of the vault with a whole body behind them. The pressure stays in the same place throughout. Which is why the girth area on a vaulting horse is the patch you know as well as your own face.

• Lay the pad flat, no wrinkle, no grit underneath.
• Smooth the hair in the girth area with the coat before you do the surcingle up.
• Run a flat hand over girth and saddle area: heat, lumps, bare patches.
• After the session do more than untack. Look again.
• White hairs in one spot are an old record, not a coincidence.

The same rein and the same circle, every time

The horse works on the lunge, in canter, on a circle of around thirteen metres, on the left rein in competition. That is one-sided work and it stays one-sided, however good the lungeing is. So the counterweight belongs in the plan rather than in the extras: the other rein, hacking, straight lines, poles, days without a surcingle.

Mane, handles and the matter of shine

The mane lies exactly where the hands go. A strand of hair under a handle means a pull on the mane crest, the same pull at every swing up. Plenty of vaulting horses therefore wear the mane short, in plaits, or firmly on one side. And anything that makes hair slippery stays in the grooming kit that day: handles and girth area want grip, not silk.

Calm is part of the job

Music, applause, eight children at the edge of the circle: a vaulting horse has to be boring, and reliably so. That calm is not built in the arena, it is built in the aisle. Ten minutes of grooming in the same order, every day, is training for the exact moment when somebody stands up and nothing is supposed to happen.

A horse that stands still to be groomed stands still on the circle.