Longevity of Dressage Grand Prix Horse Careers: An Introductory Study

As an adult amateur rider aspiring to someday achieve Grand Prix level dressage with my own young horses, I wonder and worry about how I can keep my horses sound and happy in a high level of training.  As we all know, it can take many years of training to have a horse ready to compete successfully at the highest levels of the sport and the goal also is to ensure the horse can last for many years beyond that time.

I am someone that likes to see real data to make conclusions and so I embarked on a study to determine the average longevity of the careers of horses competing at Grand Prix and see what factors may impact their careers.  I chose the year 2019 to study because it was before the pandemic and so there was a good number of horses and horse shows active that year to collect data from.  The sample population is all horses that competed in a USEF rated show in 2019 that achieved a score of 60% or above at least once in the Grand Prix regular class (not freestyle or special).

There was an impressive list of 386 horses in this sample population meeting this criteria.  Data was collected on their breeding, age they first competed at Grand Prix and how many years they spent at Grand Prix level.

The first observation is the relatively short timespan of most horse’s Grand Prix career.  Of this population, 60% had a career span of less than 5 years competing at Grand Prix, with 31% only showing 1-2 years at Grand Prix.

I further started looking at this data set to see if there are any patterns in the population of horses with longer Grand Prix careers with breeding.

The sire and dam sire foundation lines had some common patterns but it is unclear whether this is correlated to longevity or whether these sires happen to be popular sires for dressage horses and would show up more often in any population:

Among the entire population of horses studied in 2019, there is also not a clear pattern of sires in groupings of horses compared by the length of their Grand Prix careers:

The next aspect of the data reviewed was whether the age the horse first started their Grand Prix career affected the longevity of their Grand Prix career.  Here, the data shows that horses that started Grand Prix earlier tended to have more runway and opportunity for a longer career at that level.  This however also may be skewed by the fact that horses that started early at Grand Prix may have had access to better professional training on basics at an early age that facilitate their long careers:

When reviewing the average age horses last compete at the Grand Prix level, the overwhelming majority are between the ages of 15 - 20:

What is disappointing to see is the below chart that shows the age when horses completely retired from USEF rated competitions:

The most common age was 17 with a larger than expected amount stopping competition between the ages of 13 - 16.

Although as shown in the previous chart indicating that horses that start GP earlier have a longer runway and opportunity for a longer GP career, the chart below indicates that there is a correlation between starting early and retiring early:

After reviewing this data I am still curious to know why some horses end up being such outliers in longevity in their upper level careers and why others do not.  What are the owners and trainers of those competing well into their late teens and even 20s doing right?

I will be publishing a series of articles based on interviews of owners of Grand Prix horses that competed for 9 years or more at that level to analyze further what trends and lessons we can learn from their experiences.  Stay tuned for the next set that will be published over the coming weeks.