The non-professional riders I met showed me that they often shared what I felt. I went on working on dressage with my partner; we performed in shows, we schooled horses and we taught.

It was in the field that we put our project in place: to free the horses' bodies, so that sporting performance would serve an emotion and not be an end in itself.

For that, the integrity of our horses had to be respected; yet we were observing systematic problems in our pupils' horses, at every level of competition. Many of our pupils had horses showing forelimb or hindlimb lameness, and the osteopath often had to relieve upper or lower cervical problems in the horses we came across.

Anxious to improve our pupils' performances, we first looked for where these injuries came from — because although they seemed chronic in working horses, they did not seem nearly so frequent in horses living out in a herd. It seemed to us that the exercises, or the riding technique, might be the cause; and no rider wishes to make his horse suffer in order to perform.

I had to begin my research by drawing up a review of the literature that brought together data from physiology, osteopathy and equine traumatology.

And there I was, plunged into veterinary medicine textbooks.