The Casual Olympic Viewer’s Guide: Dressage

Anky van Grunsven riding Salinero at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Not all Olympic events are as familiar as basketball or as straightforward as the 100-meter dash. But that’s no reason not to check something out during the Games. Throughout the Olympics, we'll outline the basics of various sports for viewers who may not know what they're looking at. Today: dressage, explained.

The equestrian discipline of dressage, an Olympic sport since 1912, has received considerably more attention than usual in 2012: As you might have heard, the horse Rafalca, being ridden by a member of the U.S. team, is partially owned by Ann Romney, wife of England’s least favorite Republican presidential candidate. Mitt swears he can’t be bothered to watch his wife’s horse compete, but if the idea of “horse ballet” contested by men in top hats and tails has piqued your interest (and there are nonpolitical reasons to be interested), here’s how this sport works.

Event Format
Olympic dressage events consist of three rounds, taking place on four different days spread out over a little more than a week. These rounds, called the Grand Prix, Grand Prix Special, and Grand Prix Freestyle, act as both the team and individual competition, and both male and female riders compete in the same event. The Grand Prix is a preliminary round for team and individual competition; the Grand Prix Special is a medal round for the team event and a second qualifier for the individual medals; and the Grand Prix Freestyle is the medal round for the individual event. There are 50 qualified riders for the individual event, and countries that have qualified three or the maximum four riders also compete in the team event.

Competition Area
Olympic dressage is contested in an open riding paddock 20 meters by 60 meters surrounded by five judges. Letters marking points on the edge of the paddock and a center line provide the basic outline for the different routes the horses make around the course.

Equipment, Horses, and Attire
Unlike thoroughbred racing horses, which are usually only a few years old at their fastest, world-class dressage horses are typically in their late-teens when they reach their peak, as it takes years of training for a horse to bond with its trainer and master the moves required. Training a world-class dressage horse is fantastically expensive, and the horses themselves are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The horses must be ridden with an English saddle. Rules for the dress of the riders are extremely strict. The Monopoly man get-up is not optional: top hats, tails and white gloves are mandated by international equestrian rules. Considering the expense of training a top-level dressage horse, it’s not exactly out of place, either.

How Someone Wins
In the Grand Prix and Grand Prix Special, all of the horses are put through a preset series of maneuvers called tests that last about six minutes without music. These tests are always the same and consist of 33 discrete sections in the Grand Prix and 36 in the Grand Prix Special. In these sections, the horses need to demonstrate varied speeds (walk, canter, and trot) and execute “passes” between specified points as well as moves like prancing in place and pirouettes. The performance of every horse is graded by section on scale from one to ten, with particularly difficult sections multiplied by two. The rider’s goal is to make the “test” appear effortless, moving as little as possible and communicating with the horse without audible commands. At the end of the test, the performance of the rider is rated one to ten. Final scores are calculated as a simple percentage of points earned for both the horse and rider; the highest scores are typically in the 70s.

The top seven teams in the Grand Prix, as well as the top eleven individuals not otherwise advancing (plus any other riders tied for eleventh) advance from the Grand Prix round to the Grand Prix Special. The Grand Prix Special is the final round of the team event: Teams are ranked by the cumulative scores of their top three riders over the first two rounds. The eighteen top preforming individuals in the Grand Prix Special, plus any ties for eighteenth, advance to the final round, though only three riders from a given country may advance. They compete in the Grand Prix Freestyle, which decides the individual medals. Unlike the first two rounds, in which every horse performs the same test, the horses perform a unique routine set to music with more room for creativity and difficulty than the preceding rounds. Some sections remain mandatory, but horses are also judged on the more holistic categories of rhythm, harmony, choreography, difficulty, and musical interpretation, which are weighted four times a typical section. Individual medals are awarded to riders based solely on the Freestyle score.

When To Watch
The Grand Prix takes place on Thursday and Friday, August 2 and 3. It begins at 6 a.m. New York time both days and will stream live on nbcolympics.com. It will also be broadcast both days on MSNBC on a tape delay at 12:30 p.m. (Politicos take note: Rafalca is competing on the first day.)

The Grand Prix Special takes place on Tuesday, August 7, starting at 5 a.m. New York time and and will stream live on nbcolympics.com. The final 45 minutes will be broadcast live on the NBC Sports Network, starting at 10:45 a.m.

The Grand Prix Freestyle takes place on Thursday, August 9, starting at 7 a.m. New York time and will stream live live on nbcolympics.com. The final two hours will be broadcast live on the NBC Sports Network, beginning at 9 a.m.

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Volume of mobile tweets at Games so high it interfered with Olympic broadcast

Irony of ironies – after encouraging fans to tweet copiously, the International Olympic Committee requests London 2012 attendees limit their output only to “urgent” status updates. The problem – mobile updates from some attendees have clogged a mobile network used by official TV data suppliers.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Twitter have worked closely in recent weeks to promote the microblog service as a means to engage with athletes, competitions and London 2012. But mobile social media users are proving so voluminous  at some Olympic venues that they are now interfering with mobile networks on which the games themselves depend, the IOC says.

During Olympic cycling road races this weekend, television broadcasters say they were let down by a lack of official timing data supplied by the Olympic Broadcasting Service (OBS). One BBC commentator relied on his own stopwatch.

IOC communications director said (via Guardian.co.uk): “From my understanding, one network was oversubscribed, and OBS are trying to spread the load to other providers.”

Adams did not name the underperforming network. And his plea to tweeters, in the circumstances, goes against the social media project the IOC had tried to create: “We don’t want to stop people engaging in this by social media and sending updates, but perhaps they might consider only sending urgent updates.”

What constitutes an “urgent” Olympic tweet is anyone’s guess. But the request is ironic in light of the IOC’s own social media commitment. That Twitter has undone coverage in this way is even more delightfully ironic for those onlookers who enjoy comparing the relative fortunes of each medium. Unlike the TV data issue, consumers do not yet appear to have experienced mobile signal issues during the games.

The UK’s five main mobile carriers had banded together with the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) to plan out 3G signal requirements around London well in advance.

“The demands that will be placed on the networks will be like having four royal weddings per day for 17 consecutive days,” Stuart Newstead, chair of the Mobile Experience Group, which represents TV and internet broadcasters and mobile networks at the games, told Bloomberg. “Like any of the athletes, we’ve prepared as well as we could and whatever happens, happens.”

Before the games began, I asked each network their plans to guarantee sufficient coverage – here’s what they said…

Everything Everywhere (Orange and T-Mobile):

“We’ve been preparing for London 2012 since before Orange and T-Mobile merged to become Everything Everywhere (mid-2010), investing millions of pounds to ensure a good experience for both British and international visitors to the Olympics…

“Our network specialists have looked to previous global and national events, and analysed sites around the UK where we expect additional demand over the course of the Summer – including tourist attractions, transport hubs and sporting venues, and upgraded hundreds of key sites to cope with additional demand.

“We’ve also increased measures in place to maintain service and operational stability during the games. Additional field maintenance resource in the areas of the country most affected are in place, alongside dedicated incident managers to ensure a very rapid response time to any service-affecting incidents.

“The Joint Operators Olympic Group (JOOG) is also providing as much capacity as possible using external mobile base stations in the Olympic Park to support the number of visitors expected each day. The operators have built 30 sites across the Olympic Park including 14 in-building solutions. At off-park venues, a further 17 temporary sites are being provided to add additional capacity.”

O2:

The company referred us to COO Derek McManus’ September 2011 blog post, in which he said:

“As an industry, we have been planning for over two years and O2 alone has invested £50m in London 2012 – increasing capacity on the current network and building new temporary sites across the country. The mobile industry is expecting to cater for 80 million mobile phone users in 100 different event locations.”

Vodafone:

“We are investing in excess of £1.5 million per day in our network this year and have weighted that investment towards the first half of 2012 in preparation for a busy summer.

“We have accelerated network upgrade and deployment work and are in the process of optimizing our network in London to ensure our customers have a great experience. We are also putting in place extra coverage in public spaces such as Hyde Park and other areas where we know there will be a large number of people.

“We expect to see high demand for all services during the Games as more and more customers use smartphones to access the internet and social network sites. On an average day, we handle upwards of 45TB (terabytes) of data, 90 million calls and 155 million texts. Obviously we are expecting a significant increase on that level of demand, but we are experts in forecasting demand and optimizing our network – in real time – to cope with high usage.

“We have an elite team of engineers dedicated to preparing for special events. Recently, for instance, they ensured that visitors to London were able to call, text, tweet and upload pictures during the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations.

“Meanwhile, our Network Operations Centre (NOC) at our headquarters in Newbury gives us real-time visibility of traffic and enables our team of engineers to dial up capacity when and where we need it. For example, on New Year’s Eve 2011 our network was comfortably handling 12,000 texts a second and we saw well over a million people log on to Facebook, through their phones, in the space of a couple of hours. Volumes of texts were up 25% from the previous year, as was data traffic.

“We’ve also been working with our colleagues in New Zealand and South Africa to take on board the experiences from other recent large-scale worldwide sporting events.”

Three:

“We have worked in partnership with JOOG (Joint Operator Olympic Group) to build additional and dedicated capacity at the Olympic venues in London and across the country. This work has coincided with our on-going network improvement programme both in the capital and UK-wide

“We’ve upgraded sites at around 500 different locations and have also upgraded most of our sites nationally to the very latest and quickest 3G technology (HSPA+). Later this summer, we will move to Dual-Carrier HSDPA equipment, potentially doubling the speed customers can currently get.

“In addition, we have been busy installing Ethernet backhaul across our entire network to ensure that the cables which carry traffic from sites to our core network are not only quicker than ever before, but have more capacity both now and in the future.”

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