Dressage Penalties: Understanding Their Impact
We strive to ride a perfect test but mistakes happen, even at the very top level. So when mistakes occur, what’s the real impact of a penalty? Does it spell the end of your chances?
The short answer is in lower level tests you likely to lose about 1% for your first mistake and at higher level about 0.5% and that may not be enough to alter the placings. But it depends…
Typically, a rider incurs 2 penalties for their first mistake. A second mistake brings an additional 4 penalties, totalling 6. A third results in elimination. While this is a common pattern, the FEI have adopted a percentage-based penalty system for some tests that is deducted from the final score.
We will focus on the more common case where the final score is derived from the total marks, subtracting penalties, and dividing it by the maximum possible score.
Score % = (Sum of (Marks * Coefficients) — Penalties ) / Maximum Score * 100
It is important to note that the significance of a penalty varies. It’s inversely proportional to the available score: the higher the potential score, the smaller the relative impact of each penalty.
Let’s look at two examples:
Dressage Ireland Intro B — Start Level
15 Movements
2 Doubles
Total Available 170
USEF Fourth Level Test 3 Advanced Level
Ridden Movements: 22
9 Doubles
Total Available 360
In this advanced test, because there are so many more movements and marks available, your first penalty will cost you 0.56% and two mistakes will bring you down only 1.66%
So is it easier to win an advanced class with a mistake than at training level?
For this we will look at some results data from https://skor.ie, the dressage show organiser and big brother of DressageCalculator. The data is skewed towards the lower levels as we are only including data from competitions with at least 6 placings and higher level competitions may not have enough entries to be included.
We will take the average differences between each placing at the different levels down to 6th place. You might expect that there is a wider gap with the lower level riders, while the higher levels are more competitive?
For the sake of comparisons, we will group the UK,IE and US levels like this.
Start Level — Tests with Introductory, Training or Preliminary in the title.
Mid Levels — Tests that include Level One, Level Two, Novice and Elementary
Advanced Levels — Medium, Level Three and up
The height of the bars represents average difference in marks, while the vertical bar shows variation.
At a start level, the average winner was over 2% ahead of their nearest rival and overall there was 1.41% separating the places.
At Mid and Advanced levels the placings were closer with an average of 1% separating the placings.
So at Start level, the 1.18% deduction for 2 penalties in the example above would not have cost you a place, while ad the Advanced Level with two penalties costing 0.56% in our example could also get away with not losing a placing.
Interestingly, the FEI’s introduction of percentage-based penalties — 0.5% for the first error and 1.0% for the second — mirrors this observation for Mid and Advanced level.
One intriguing pattern in this data is the average difference between 1st and 2nd being significantly higher than between subsequent placings. This will be, at least in part, because the data for this chart was filtered for competitions with a minimum of 12 entries meaning most of the competitions are lower level with a mix of abilities, but worth further investigation.
But working from averages does not tell you how it’s going to work out on the day. It depends on the judge, your fellow competitors, the conditions at the venue etc. But the take away from me on this was not to be too afraid of getting one penalty. Mistakes happen, ride on, all is not lost.
To find more information, including the marks to percentage for each test, checkout https://dressagecalculator.com/public_list/ — you will need to signup but it’s still free.
Best of luck for your next competition and may it be penalty free!
