Sjef Janssen came to horses late. He was 28, married, on his way to play tennis, when his daughter was attracted to a foal in a paddock. He bought it. One thing led to another — a riding school that went bankrupt, which he then bought, and a partnership with Anky van Grunsven that would produce nine Olympic medals and change competitive dressage irrevocably.
Seven Hours a Day in the Oliveira Tradition
Before any of that, he spent two years at a school in Belgium whose teachers had studied at the Spanish Riding School and with Nuno Oliveira. Seven hours a day in the saddle. Horses that could piaffe and passage in genuine collection. He described what he learned there as giving him a feeling for how it really should look, and how it should feel.
This is the detail that makes Sjef's story so interesting and so uncomfortable. He began with the correct foundation. He knew what genuine collection felt like under him. He had felt piaffe and passage and pirouette in horses that were doing those movements because their bodies had been correctly developed to do them, not because they were being managed into performing them.
The Transitional Tool That Became Permanent
And from that correct foundation he built something else.
The deep, round, behind-the-vertical position that Baucher used briefly to dissolve resistance — the transitional tool that was always supposed to be followed immediately by elevation and lightness — became in Sjef's system a sustained working frame. The 30-second exercise became the training session. The temporary became the permanent.
His justification was sports science. He treated horses as athletes. He used interval training principles — periods of intense physical demand followed by recovery. He believed, and may have been partially right for limited durations, that brief intensive hyperflexion followed by release developed suppleness in modern warmbloods in ways that conventional methods couldn't match.
The Copy Without the Release
The problem is that brief moments of 10 to 20 seconds became minutes, became warm-ups, became publicly visible training sessions that were photographed and filmed and copied by riders who had neither Sjef's feel nor Anky's talent, who did not release, who did not understand that the method as described and the method as practised were not the same thing.
Sjef built rollkur on a half-remembered Baucher and a sports science framework that ignored the thing Fillis understood in 1890: the vertical is not a stylistic preference. It is a physical law. And the sport, hungry for Dutch gold medals and spectacular Kür performances, chose not to examine the gap between the claim and the reality.