In 1984, at the Los Angeles Olympics, Reiner Klimke rode a victory lap after winning the individual gold medal. The crowd responded to dressage as something they felt. A Dutch businessman named Joep Bartels was watching. He decided dressage needed more of this.
The World Cup and the Kür
In 1985 Bartels created the World Cup, with its freestyle Kür as the centrepiece. Initial opposition was fierce — traditionalists argued he was destroying the art form. But the Kür drew crowds. Television liked it. And when the IOC threatened to remove dressage from the Games in 1992, citing poor spectator appeal, the Kür became the sport's most powerful argument for its own survival.
In 1996 at Atlanta, for the first time, the Kür decided individual Olympic gold.
The Incentive Structure That Changed Everything
The scoring model the Kür introduced — Artistic Impression multiplied by Degree of Difficulty — created an incentive structure that had not previously existed in competitive dressage. Difficulty was rewarded. Spectacle was rewarded. The Dutch, who had built their warmblood breeding programme around horses with naturally extravagant gaits, were extraordinarily well positioned to exploit this. Anky van Grunsven and Sjef Janssen optimised their training and their presentation for the Kür's scoring criteria. They won everything.
The Causal Connection to Rollkur
The Kür also incentivised what became rollkur. A horse trained in hyperflexion develops a pattern of movement that, in the show frame, appears extraordinarily elevated and expressive. The neck springs up dramatically when the head is released from the deep position. The hind legs move with what looks like tremendous energy. The scores are extraordinary. The welfare cost is concealed by the equipment.
Bartels saved dressage's Olympic future. He was not wrong about that. But the mechanism that saved the sport also selected for a training method that the welfare science would later document as causing measurable physiological distress. The Kür and rollkur are not coincidentally related. They are causally connected. Change the scoring incentive and you change what training culture selects for. The incentive selected for spectacle. Spectacle was most efficiently produced by horses trained in hyperflexion. The rest followed logically.