Riding a dressage test with a broken noseband

The alarm went off at 4:15am, which is normal for a horse show weekend. Archie had been clipped, plaited, and loaded by half past four, and we were on the M1 heading north by five, bound for a one-day event at a club ground about three hours inland from Sydney. The truck's fridge was full of carrots and a thermos of coffee, my test was printed and folded in my coat pocket, and everything felt organised. I had remembered spare gloves, a clean number bib, and a can of leather conditioner that I never actually opened. What I had not done, as I would find out roughly twenty minutes before my bell, was check the actual state of his bridle.

I rode a Preliminary test that morning with a crack running through the centre of his crank noseband. The buckle held, the stitching looked fine at a glance, and the leather was supple and well-oiled from years of weekly conditioning. But the underlying structure had given up somewhere on the float down, probably when the bridle swung off its hook and cracked against the partition. I did not feel anything unusual in the warm-up. Archie felt the same as he always does: a little looky at the warm-up arena mirrors, eager at the canter poles, and willing in the contact. It was not until the judge rang the bell and I picked up the reins to walk down the centre line that I noticed the noseband shifting under my second finger.

Tacking up at the truck park

I had tacked Archie up in the truck park as usual, with the bridle balanced over my knee and the noseband pre-buckled on the offside. There was a small group of us from the same training club camped under a row of gum trees, and we were doing that familiar dance of sharing hoof picks, comparing ground lines, and checking whether anyone had remembered the dressage arenas were on grass. The weather had finally turned; it was the first cool morning after weeks of that sticky late-spring humidity that sits over the coastal strips north of Wollongong, and there was still a thin line of fog across the back of the grounds. I should have been in no rush.

The bridle itself is a favourite. It is a decent mid-range Australian-made dressage bridle I picked up years ago from Horseland, with a padded crank noseband, a flash I had removed, and a plain browband that I swap out depending on the season. I had cleaned it the week before, conditioned it lightly, and hung it on the bridle hook inside the truck. When I went to put it on Archie, I checked the cheekpieces, the throatlash, and the buckles, but I did not run my thumb along the underside of the noseband where the crack had opened up. I have done this a hundred times without issue, and the previous weekend the bridle had been on and off four days in a row at home.

The warm-up, and what I missed

The warm-up itself was unremarkable. We worked long and low, did our medium trots, popped a few canter transitions, and Archie felt connected and forward. I noticed the judges walking to their cars, the warm-up steward giving the two-minute call, and a friend from the same eventing squad calling out good luck as she passed. I remember the smell of the grass and the distant thump of a car radio from the car park. What I did not register was that every time I adjusted the noseband, the crack was opening slightly further under the pressure of my finger.

I had a small voice in the back of my head that morning, the one that says check the tack again before you mount, and I waved it off because the bridle was relatively new and had been recently inspected. That voice is usually right, and I should listen to it more often.

Riding the test on a half-broken bridle

When I walked into the arena, the judge smiled, Archie threw his usual half-spook at the flower boxes by C, and we began. The first centre line felt ordinary. The free walk on a long rein felt ordinary. Even the trot work, where I usually have to be careful with his tendency to curl behind the bit, felt ordinary. The crack in the noseband was not affecting the buckles yet, and the shape of the leather was still holding pressure evenly around his muzzle. I think I felt something around the circle, a tiny give under my finger, but I put it down to my own tension and kept going.

The canter work was where I noticed. I ride a slightly unconventional test plan because Archie finds the canter-trot-canter transitions harder than the other way around, and I always add a half-halt before asking for the medium canter. On the first medium canter, the noseband shifted, and I felt a slight give on the near side. I steadied Archie, finished the movement, and continued. I could feel the leather deforming under the pressure each time I took a contact, and by the second canter transition I was holding my breath, waiting for the buckle to fail completely.

It never failed. The test ended, we halted, I saluted, and walked out on a loose rein. Archie shook his head the way he does when a piece of tack has been rubbing, and I glanced down. The crack had opened to nearly a centimetre wide, and the stitching on the inside was just visible. I unbuckled the noseband entirely before the next rider went in, and I held the bridle in my hand, looking at it as if it had personally offended me.

The drive home and the inspection

By the time I had changed, packed the truck, and loaded Archie, the morning fog had burned off and the day was turning into one of those bright, hot, fly-blown afternoons that the southern tablelands seem to specialise in during November. I drove back towards the coast with the windows down and the radio off, thinking through every movement of the test. My score was, to my surprise, quite respectable: a 28 in the Preliminary, with a 7 on the medium trot and a 6 on the rein back. I had clearly ridden the test well enough that the broken tack had not shown up in the marks. Whether that was luck, Archie's good citizenship, or the judge's generosity, I am still not sure.

When I got home, I tipped Archie out into his paddock, made myself a strong cup of tea, and brought the bridle onto the kitchen table. I had been half-thinking about kitchen reno ideas for weeks, scrolling through articles on mixing metal finishes at midnight between competition entries, and the bridle landed next to a pile of cabinet hardware samples I had been comparing. I sat there with a torch and a magnifying glass and traced the crack. It ran the full length of the noseband, starting from just under the buckle on the offside and ending at the top of the crank. The leather had dried out from the inside, even though the outside was well conditioned, and a single hard impact had finished it off.

I went through the rest of the bridle with the same attention. The cheekpieces were fine, the browband was fine, the reins were fine. I cleaned everything, re-oiled the good pieces, and put the broken noseband in the bin. Then I sat down and wrote a list of every place I check tack before a competition, and every place I clearly do not.

What I changed afterwards

The first thing I changed was the bridle hook inside the truck. It was a flimsy plastic thing that came with the partition, and it let the bridle swing freely when we went over bumps. I replaced it with a fixed stainless bracket bolted into the partition, and I now loop the noseband over the crownpiece so the bridle hangs flat against the wall instead of swinging. It was a five-dollar fix, and I wish I had done it years ago.

The second and third things I changed were about routine. I now run my thumb under the noseband, along the inside of the cheekpieces, and around the buckle tongue every single time, regardless of how recently I cleaned the bridle or how good the leather looked from the outside. I do it at home before we leave, I do it in the truck park, and I do it again in the warm-up. It takes ten seconds, and it has already caught a small wear mark on a different bridle that I would otherwise have ridden on. I also reorganised my spare tack: a small labelled bag in the truck now holds a backup noseband, a spare browband, spare reins, a multi-tool, a small torch, and a tube of leather glue. The bag gets opened and inspected once a month, and every strap in it gets conditioned on the same schedule as the bridles in the tack room.

The fourth thing I changed was how I think about the warm-up. I used to treat the warm-up as a space to school Archie, not to check the tack. Now I treat the first two minutes of the warm-up as a tack inspection, and I trot on a long rein before I take any contact. If something feels off in the bridle, I would rather scratch and live to ride another day than push on. The same logic shows up elsewhere in eventing: most of the avoidable mistakes I have seen happen because someone skipped the obvious step. I wrote about that in this water complex post, and the principle is the same whether you are looking at a sunken log or a piece of tack that you really should have looked at twice.

The last thing I changed, and this is the one I am most proud of, is that I now ask a friend to check my tack before I get on. Our training club has a small WhatsApp group, and we have a standing rule that whoever is last to mount at a show does a final bridle check on everyone else. I have done it for others, and I have had it done for me, and it is one of those tiny habits that costs nothing and prevents exactly the kind of avoidable mistake I made that morning. Archie is a good egg, and he carried me through a test on a bridle that should not have held together. I do not intend to test his good nature like that again.