Breaking news! Judges are humans! That’s right, judges are humans. And you know what? Humans make mistakes. So, if judges are humans, and humans make mistakes, then, OH NO, judges must make mistakes!
This may be a revelation to many of you. Some competitors hold judges in such high regard that they think we are immune to such lowly human characteristics such as making errors. But we do. It’s a sin of course, and we NEVER like making mistakes. But they do happen. And all we can usually do is acknowledge that it happened and that we’ll work harder to try to prevent those same mistakes from happening again.
At one show, a relatively large open show. The show had a reining class. While I’m well versed with reining it’s not often that I get to judge this class at an open shows. I’m always excited to see it on the show bill. At this show, there were at least a dozen competitors. A few local trainers brought their barns with them for practice. It was great!
It was also pretty apparent that most of the riders were simply schooling. They were over spinning, blowing the pattern, two handing, everything. But there were a couple of riders that were actually showing. One rider came in and was doing a good job that I was able to score. When the spins started I zoned out for half a second. That half a second was long enough for me to lose count in her spins. Had she done 3 spins or 4? That moment of realization was horrifying for me. I literally froze for a second, replaying the spins over and over in my head trying to figure out if she did 3 or 4.
I couldn’t do it, couldn’t remember.
OK. When in doubt you give the nod to the rider. So I scored the ride and didn’t disqualify the rider.
When the score was announced you would have thought I had made a major blunder at the NRHA futurity with thousands of dollars and a title on the line. The other exhibitors were furious. Apparently, they all thought the rider had only completed 3 spins instead of the required 4. Lesson learned for me. NEVER zone out during reining spins!
HUMAN?? WHAT??
Parents are human also… I told my boy it was a 45 degree spin and it was 450…
Bad mom
Not a bad mom at all. Just a human mom! It happens to the best of us. I’ve seen some of the top trainers run the wrong reining pattern in the NRHA futurity. I’ve seen top rated jumpers take the wrong fence. It happens.