Five Thoughts About Eventing

In 2010 at a horse trial, I was sitting outside of Tucker's stall when a volunteer let my neighbor in stabling's horse back.  His rider had fallen in stadium and been taken to the hospital.  They'd been running Training, too.  A couple barnmates and I took the horse, removed his studs and braids and settled him back into his stall until someone from his team was able to get there.  We didn't know the rider, but that's what eventers do.

Later that day, I was in the cross-country warm-up when we heard there was a hold on the course and then that there had been a fall and a rider injury.  We did the math on who was out there and who had come back, figured out that the rider in question was an excellent regional pro and friend to several of the folks in the warm-up.  We waited, and wished good things, and got off our horses and waited some more.  Eventually the event started back up again and we went out there and got it done, because that's what eventers do.

I'd known it in the abstract before, but that was the first day that I really understood that you could be good at this sport, smart and careful and skilled, and it might not be enough.

In many ways, I think that is a good thing.  In many ways, I think that's just life, and better to recognize and grapple with it than to pretend that it's not.

In other ways, not so much.

I love the purity of horse racing (the sport, that is, not the business) with every fiber of my being and I walked away from it because the cost:benefit ratio just seemed to me hopelessly skewed.  My reasons for ceasing to event, at least for the time being, were more numerous and more complicated and my relationship with the sport is vastly more ambivalent -- but part of it is that I simply cannot anymore with reports like those out of Luhmulen and Nunney.

Still and all.  I wanted to get a few of my thoughts about eventing in ahead of the usual discussion that follows this sort of carnage -- and can we talk about how horrified I am to even be writing a phrase like, "this sort of carnage" -- for whatever they may turn out to be worth.

1) Lower-level eventing is safe.  Not, of course, safe as in "no harm will ever come to man or beast."  Nothing is that safe.  Not your horse sport, gentle non-eventing reader, and not the rest of your life.  Accidents happen, mistakes are made, and yes, it's even true that not everyone is smart and careful and skilled.  But this pattern of awful is an upper-level phenomenon.  Upper- and lower-level eventing, from a risk assessment perspective, may as well be two different sports.  My story at the top of this post, about two accidents in one day at Training (and both riders recovered and were, last I checked, back out eventing), is noteworthy not only because it made me stop and think but also because those are the only two ambulance-involving accidents I'm aware of having been on-grounds for during the many, many events that I rode, volunteered, groomed, or spectated at during my career.

2) The obvious "solutions"...aren't.  Every time the eventing-safety conversation kicks back up, people start talking about, "Clearly they should just slow down," or, "I don't understand why they don't just make the fences fall if you hit them," and so on.  The trouble is that if it were that easy, we'd have done it years ago.  A lack of impulsion to a big fence is as dangerous as an excess of speed.  A piece of the fence becoming a moving part of the system is not always going to be helpful.  And so on.  Even if you remove direction-of-the-sport from the equation, please understand that willful stupidity is not the reason these things haven't been implemented.  There are good and smart (and careful and skilled) people hard at work on this problem; it's part of why I've stood behind eventing for as long as I have.

3) Speaking of direction-of-the-sport.  Eventing has always been dangerous.  I am, as mentioned on this blog in the past, a big fan of the long format and of "classic" eventing.  But the good old days in which every rider looked like a Maclay winner over every fence and every horse was 100% fit and sound did not actually exist.  Military origins did not necessarily build welfare of the horse into the very fabric of the sport and those vet checks and the stadium-last format were not developed because every horse held up to the work.  Many old event photos feature death-trap fences and if you've ever spoken with someone whose horse broke down on steeplechase (or washed out during the training and conditioning at home), well...  Again: I like the long format.  But please let's not fool ourselves; it was not a cost-free exercise and its resurgence would not save us now.

4) I hear you.  Okay, wiseguy.  If those aren't The Answer, what is?  And -- I don't know.  I wish I did.  I do think that eventing as a whole takes this problem seriously and wants very badly to fix it.  I do think that we've made some admirable advances and that we'll continue to make more.  I think, for example, that we will eventually figure out what's up with horses having cardiac events on the cross-country course.  But catastrophic falls related to jumping efforts?  I just don't know, and honestly I'm starting to think that maybe we haven't figured it out yet because there isn't The Answer -- that maybe this is just what it is and what it's going to be.  I hope not.  That would make support of the upper-level sport simply a bridge too far for me, personally, and that would make me deeply sad because I still think eventing is wonderful, and I think that some important pieces of what makes eventing wonderful are lost if the upper levels go away.  But I am honestly afraid that this may simply be the nature of this beast.  I want to be wrong about this.  May the passage of time prove that I am wrong about this.

5) In the meantime, what to do?

 Be safe out there, you guys.

And smart, and careful, and skilled.

Lucky, too, if you possibly can.

Ride good horses and pay attention to what they tell you, and pay attention to what you tell yourself, and make your mistakes going forward, and be never too proud to grab mane or ask for help.

King Oak Farm HT, September 2010.  Used with permission of the photographer.