Fiona writes in a comment to my web log: “What you're calling the 'Flip' is something we've been teaching for several years as the 'Ketschker', named after a German who accidentally discovered it. It is a movement that is used quite a bit at the higher levels of competition (e.g. FCI WCs) in mainland Europe. And yes, we use it for much the same reasons as you describe, pulling the dog off the wrong obstacle while being able to maintain handler and dog speed (the RFP aka False Reverse Turn slows both down considerably). In fact, the Ketschker can considerably accelerate the dog's speed on a turn, so much so that it is even useful on an ordinary Simple Turn.”

It looks like Fiona’s take on the movement is pretty much the same as mine. What she describes are the attributes of the movement. Part of the difficulty in the United States is a kind of mindless and frankly ignorant objection to the Blind Cross. Consequently a combination movement that incorporates a Blind Cross would be hard to incorporate into a handler’s repertoire. Americans can be gifted dog trainers. And at the high levels we tend to invest everything in the talent of the dog. But to borrow words from Herb Brooks (coach of the 1984 Lake Placid Olympics American Hockey Team), as handlers we “don't have enough talent to win on talent alone."

Masters Jumpers

It’s a great pleasure to judge in northern California where some of the top handlers in our country play the game. This means my course was graced by a number of very fast & agile dogs, well trained dogs, and gifted handlers. And yet, the qualifying rate on this course came in around 30% which was a cool 6% lower than the qualifying rate on my gamblers course.

I would love to do a blow by blow of how this course ran, but I should take a moment to remark on the irony of the fast dog. Most of the errors on course by fast dog handlers are caused by the handler being to early, by giving cues too soon. Isn’t that ironic?

The failure of many handlers to move well on this course struck me. About the weakest kind of cue or signal the handler can give a dog is verbal speech. I was quite surprised about how many tried to talk their way through this course. And it almost never worked.

In the opening it is one of my favorite riddles to rotate the opening jump to test if the handler doesn’t see the opening line. Well, it didn’t fool many in the bunch from California. All but maybe 3 or 4 of the 100 some odd that ran the course lined their dogs up to slice through jump #1 in a straight line to jump #2 (with dog on right).

Almost everyone got themselves trapped in this opening into a Back Cross at jump #5. It’s not really a bad solution but caused too many dropped bars at jump #5 and refusals at that same jump. Had the handler taken a lateral path lead-out (which as I’ve commented before is very rare in the American repertoire) then it would have been an easy matter to do a landing-side Front Cross at jump #4 which would make tightening the turn back to the pipe tunnel at #6 a simpler matter and removed much of the risk of dropping the bar at #5.

A number of refusals were earned at jump #7 mostly because the handler anticipated the turn too early and failed to support the dog all the way to the jump. And, frankly jump #7 was a jump that had the bar down too often as handlers called the dog into the turn before the dog actually jumps the jump. Most dropped bars are caused by the handler cheating the turn.

For the most part handlers were trapped into a Back Crossing strategy at jump #9. A commonly successful strategy was for the handler to press forward off the dog after jump #7 into a Front Cross. However this was a matter of whether the handler could actually outrun the dog. The handler can’t do a Front Cross if he’s not actually in front. Equally elegant was the handler who drew through the double at #8 into a Tandem on the landing side predisposing the dog to turn to the left after jump #9.

Overview

I found this a heady back-crossing kind of course with a lot of speed-building to technical moments. I truly believed that the qualifying rate would be greater than it was and it would have been… were the dogs slower and less keen to attack the course than most of the dogs that ran under me in Madera, California.

This course has me rethinking designing for very fast dogs. Mostly I believe I would be more thoughtful about softening the turning radius for dogs. I could argue that handlers could be more thoughtful about pre‑cuing the turn; on the other hand, testing whether the handler knows how to make the game safe for his dog shouldn’t be a central riddle posed by the course designer.