Mr. Holler, allow me to use your own language to express my feelings: you are widerwärtig. You were invited to be a member of the ground jury at the 2015 World Cup Finals in Las Vegas, and in return for a nice all-expenses-paid trip to Sin City – where I don’t doubt you were treated like royalty, along with the other ground jury members – you accuse your hosts of being amateurish and the competitors (the very people whom you could not be a ‘judge’ without) of boring you with their ‘annoying background noise and loud sonic mush.’ I’m so sorry you had to suffer at the hands of these merciless people who were trying their best to put on a great event and to perform to the best of their abilities.
I have one question for you, Herr Holler. Did you find these dreadful freestyles less loathsome when you appraised them at the several World Cup qualifiers you judged during the season? Because surely not too many of these riders used brand new programs that you had never seen or heard before you parked your cranky derriere in a judge’s chair in Vegas. When you judged at s’Hertogenbosch you assessed the freestyles of not fewer than five of the finalists who were in Vegas. Did the music sing more sweetly to your ears which were fresh from a shorter commute than the long, arduous journey from Deutschland to America? Did the cold, damp English air appeal to your sensitive nature so much more than the harsh desert sunlight of Nevada that the half dozen eventual World Cup finalists you judged in Olympia seemed to dance on gossamer rather than pound inelegantly around and jangle your nerves in Vegas?
Or, Mr. Holler, is the real truth that you, being interviewed in German by a German publication, simply thought you could get away with being a bit of a rotten old ubermensch type, grunting superiority for your countrymen while throwing the crass Americans under your bus? Well, I have news for you, Mr. Holler. We have Google translate. And we have Astrid Appels. In future, you might wish to filter your verschlagung, because in this era of the World Wide Web, your nasty little slagging is highly visible to everyone, including the people you have insulted.
I notice, while making a great and not entirely successful effort to push the word ‘nationalistic’ to the far corners of my mind, that Herr Holler made the notable exception to his sweeping condemnation of everything Vegas. “”Isabell Werth has it as one of the few who managed with their freestyle and her own charisma, to let the sparks fly to the audience.” Few? Really? But you name only Isabell? On one point I do agree, and I have already said as much during my WC blogging. Isabell’s performance was crowd pleasing and filled with her own genuine enjoyment of the moment. But I am afraid that our German judge has fallen into the trap of perpetuating the belief among oh so many fans of the sport that national favouritism is not only alive and well among some judges, but it is so deeply ingrained that those who suffer from it are not even aware of their bigotry.
Until I saw Astrid’s story on Eurodressage yesterday, I was going to conclude my World Cup blogging with just a mention of the fact that Jessica and Unee BB did in fact perform both right and left pirouettes (I wasn’t actually wrong, since she did twice do left pirouettes in her program – what I hadn’t remembered was the right one she did right after her initial halt), so the judging in that respect was above reproach. But now I’m feeling a bit like picking on someone, so I’m going to let fly.
Firstly, I need to come up with a nickname for our dear Mr. Holler. Snuggle Bunny has already been taken, but I don’t believe I’ve called any judges this before: The Hand Biter. Yes, that seems about right. Holler the Hand Biter. Now let’s take a little peek at how our Hand Biter fared in his seats at B and M in Vegas. First, the Grand Prix. No big surprise – given the obvious affection betrayed in the quote above – that Isabell received her highest rank result from her compatriot. Holler placed her fourth, while the other six judges had her sixth through tenth.
How about those freestyles then? What I find rather unheimlich is that even though Mr. Holler later claimed to be bleeding from his ears from all the awful music, he was not once the low judge on artistic marks for any of the top ten combinations. He was, on the other hand, either alone or tied with others as high artistic judge on three performances, including the one freestyle that even I called out as being musically problematic – that of Inessa Merkulova. I also notice that Mr. Holler seems to have a taste for horses of the short necked variety. He was the high judge on both artistic and technical for both Edward and HP. In English we have an expression known as ‘talking out of both sides of your mouth’. The evidence – Hand Biter’s judging statistics do not match his comments in the German media, which leaves me unable to conclude anything but that this particular five star judge thinks perhaps more about his audience than about honesty and integrity. Or maybe he just had a headache on April 18th.
Some of you are going to accuse me of splitting hairs. The scores at this World Cup were uncontroversial, if a bit stratospheric – but that’s nothing new, and who of us hasn’t taken a generous score and slept with a smile on our faces that night? The truth is I find Peter Holler’s comments offensive, and I’m not even American, nor did I have a ‘horse in the race’; none of the freestyles was created by me. Finally, as they say in the political realm, his attitude is unbecoming to someone in his position.
The only other thing I have to say is I hope Mr. Holler isn’t on the jury in Omaha two years from now. If he hated Vegas so much, what on earth is he going to say about Nebraska?
