On the eventing situation.

Eventing has a problem, and if that’s a statement that you disagree with, you seriously need to reevaluate your opinion.

It’s been difficult for me to admit to myself, really. I’ve loved eventing since I was introduced to it when I was in middle school. I’ve daydreamed about it, been determined to be successful at it, and even as my dreams have gotten more realistic (though still somewhat out there) and my situation has changed, my passion for the sport has never disappeared.

Eventing is what I know. Eventing is what I love. Eventing is a brilliant and exciting sport that I find considerably more interesting than most things. Eventing has also long displayed symptoms of a much larger problem that has become an epidemic in recent years.

I haven’t been in the sport long enough to speak to what it used to be or what impact the changes to the format have had on it—all I can say is that I’m really sad that I’ll probably never get to ride a long format event in any capacity. What I can speak to is the fact that it’s getting personal. Actually, it’s been personal. The injuries, the deaths, are personal, because they could be me. They could be the trainer who introduced me to this sport, or the friends I have in it, or the riders that I personally follow and admire.

Admittedly, they probably won’t be me—I haven’t jumped a cross-country fence in over six years (a fact that saddens me to this day). When I finally make it out on a cross-country course again, it will be as someone playing with Beginner Novice and Novice fences, and then Training once I find my footing again. I don’t know if I’ll ever make the move up to Preliminary. When I was younger, all I wanted was to ride at Rolex. Now all I want is to have fun on a horse that loves its job, and if that means never competing higher than Training level—never schooling anything but show jumping fences and dressage tests above that level—then so be it.

I value my fun more than I value the prestige and difficulty of the events that I’m competing at.

That’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? We all got into this sport because we wanted to have fun, didn’t we? Sure, most kids who get into eventing probably dream of riding at Rolex or being on the Olympic team, at least in the beginning, but that’s not why we’re interested in the sport—we’re interested in it because it’s fun.

I got hooked on eventing for one simple reason—I love cross-country, and when I say that, I don’t mean I love jumping the fences, though that can be a great time. What I love about cross-country is testing our fitness and our teamwork, galloping the long stretches, and being able to maintain speed and balance well enough that my horse can figure out every obstacle that is put in our path. 

Beginner Novice and Novice and even Training level cross-country courses are fun because the questions aren’t technical. Sure, it’s nowhere near as fast as upper-level courses are, or as long, but you still have your “gallops” in between jumps. You have long approaches and easy curves (well, that one I had to ride around a cluster of trees wasn’t exactly easy, but there were no jumps to be had on it and all I had to focus on was keeping us balanced and moving). Combinations are straightforward and don’t ask you to prove that you can show-jump on a cross-country course. The most difficult parts of the course are the fences that your horse may not have seen before. 

To paraphrase an article that I’ll link below (I’ll link several below, actually), technical questions on any cross-country course shouldn’t be asked more than once and they shouldn’t be so complicated as to turn your cross-country round into a show-jumping test. The abilities of the horses must be taken into account when designing turns. Eventing is a sport meant to test rider and horse, not just rider. Make curves a little longer or a bit more shallow. Ask an accuracy question once, not seven times. Make the fences welcoming and change their faces so that they’re more forgiving and make rotational falls less likely. Develop more forms of collapsible fences. Make it so that horses have time to get an accurate read of the jumps rather than having to rely on their rider.

I’d always thought of cross-country as a test of endurance, not technical skills. Yes, you have to know how to pace your horse. You have to know how to come in and out of the canter and gallop so as to correctly take fences. More than that, though, you and your horse should be fit enough and capable enough to gallop a four-mile course and still have enough juice left over to show-jump the next day. The excitement of cross-country is in the distance and the gallops and the impressive fences, not combinations that require teams to slow down to show-jumping pace in order to properly navigate them and then have to run like mad to make up the time. 

Impressive doesn’t necessarily mean big or complicated either. It just means that they’re interesting, that watching a horse and rider combination go soaring over them is fun, that you can ooo and ahhh over them and know they provide enough of a test without having to worry about someone getting seriously hurt (or only have 64% of the combinations make it through—I’m looking at you, Badminton).

I was at Rolex in 2010 when Oliver Townend went down. I didn’t see it happen (we’d moved on at that point), but I remember hearing about it. I remember that being the first time I went “People could die in this sport.” I knew that people—and horses—got hurt, sometimes seriously so, but I’d never really stopped to consider that my sport could kill someone anymore than any other equestrian event (I spent much less time on the internet in middle school and was much less in the loop, which is why I didn’t think about it sooner). Yes, he was fine and his horse was too (at least in the long run), but there were a few hours where he might not have been.

I don’t want to be in that situation again. I don’t want to be at a competition and hear about a horrible fall, watch more people get hurt, have it be another weekend and another major event that is either considered a great success because no one was seriously injured or a terrible tragedy that everyone forgets about a week later, because that is not what eventing should be. That is not the sport that I (and so many others) signed up for.

Unfortunately, I’m not a member of USEA or FEI and my money can’t speak for me. I can talk about the issues and question them all I want, and that’s the way that I can attempt to bring about change.

I can keep the conversation going. I can get other people into it. I can educate myself on the history and the changes. I can support the events that are doing it right (however few there may be) and make sure that I understand how to build good fences so that my own are well-designed. I can call for a shift in mindset, help to bring it about for others around me, make it so that the next generation of eventers gets a different experience than the one people are having right now.

I don’t know what the right questions are, or the answers. All I know is that we have to do something because I’m tired and my response to tragic news shouldn’t be “Oh, another one.” I shouldn’t be resigned to this. We shouldn’t be allowing this to happen. We have to take eventing back and make it good again, because I don’t want to lose the sport I love to something that we can change. I don’t want to lose people I care about.

Accidents happen, but these aren’t accidents anymore—not with the frequency at which they’re occurring. This isn’t about starting a witch hunt, because that accomplishes nothing. This is about starting a dialogue, bringing the masses into the conversation, getting enough of a voice that someone finally listens. I don’t know how long it will take, but all I can do is keep pushing.

Some light reading for anyone who's interested:

It’s Time to Change the Conversation on Eventing

Eventing Lives in the Balance

A brief extension on the above article

The Problems in the Eventing World Today

I'll add more links as I encounter them.

On bruises.

There are a lot of things that I am at least moderately competent at in this world. I can play three instruments reasonably well, and I know how to play around on two others. I can draw, I can write, I can sing without being completely off-key, and I was a decent actor once upon a time. I know how to use a table saw and run lights during a show, and I can time track events with reasonable accuracy, amongst other things.

The vast majority of those things have required a lot of patience on my part, and endless amounts of frustration as I attempted to master one thing after another. I wouldn't say that I have a true mastery of any of those things—I haven't been doing any of them long enough to have a true mastery of them—but I've certainly learned plenty about them and about myself in the process.

The thing that has required the most dedication from me, though? The thing that has commanded the most frustration and caused the most tears and resulted in more annoyance and discomfort than I can even begin to measure?

That's horseback riding.

I've faced plenty of frustration in my musical endeavors. There have been measures that I just couldn't quite play properly on the piano no matter how hard I tried, or chords that I can't reach correctly on my guitar, or notes that I just can't hit when I sing. There are work-arounds for all of that, though, and with enough time and enough patience, I can get just about anything done in music (except hitting those high notes. Vocal range, why do you hate me?).

With horses, things are different. With horses, you can't be frustrated and just give up and walk away and tell yourself that you'll come back to it later. Every ride has to end on a good note, no matter how small, because otherwise you're setting yourself up for a bad ride the next time you get on. Your confidence gets knocked constantly and more than once, you find yourself wondering if you ever even knew how to ride at all—this is a conversation that my roommate and I have had on many an occasion—because ride after ride is filled with mistakes and you don't know how to fix them.

I have screwed up so many times in the saddle. I've screwed up on the ground. I've face-planted and gotten rope burns and been concussed. I landed on my tailbone twice in one day because we just couldn't find our distance to the jumps and I kept getting popped out of the tack. I've had the wind knocked out of me from hitting the ground, landed smack in the middle of a giant pile of branches when I fell off on trail because my horse went one way and I went the other, ripped my palms open on hay bales, been soaked to the skin from riding through a rainstorm, and I have gotten bruises in more strange places than I would care to count.

I bruise easily, admittedly. I'm quite pale and bruises show up no matter how light they are, so I'm always sporting a fun collection of them (usually on my legs). With most of them, I don't even know where they came from, but it's usually a pretty accurate guess to say that they came from something at the barn.

I almost got the skin ripped off of my hands today. I'm sporting a lovely rope burn on my wrist and a couple of slightly torn-up fingertips because one of the horses didn't want to let me take his halter off before he tried to charge away (looking back, I should've put gloves on. I know he's an asshole about turnout, but I'm an idiot, so there you go). Is that going to stop me from getting on again tomorrow (or whichever day my next ride is)?

No, it's not. I put up with discomfort at the barn unless I'm physically incapable of doing so. I'll clean up the rope burn and bandage it, put band-aids on my fingers, put on my gloves, and go, because that's just how it works. That's how it works when there are bruises on my legs from the stirrup leather buckles, when my ankles are torn up from a new pair of tall boots, when I'm sore and tired and just want to be done, because you don't become a better rider if you don't ride.

You don't become a better rider if you don't ride. You don't become a better rider if you can't put up with getting bruised and scraped and cut up, or if you can't handle being bitten and stomped on or hitting the dirt over and over again. You don't become a better rider if you can't learn to put up with the discomfort so that you can step into that barn, get to know your horse, and figure out how to fix yourself, and the discomfort isn't always physical.

I have learned to put up with frustration because of riding. I have learned to deal with being uncomfortable, with doing things the wrong way over and over again until the time that I finally manage to get it right, with nailing that distance or getting that lead change and hearing "Good—now do it again." I have learned that you never stop learning, that when you hit the dirt you just have to pick yourself back up and get back on, that nothing is impossible as long as you're willing to put up with and work through all of the things that are going to get in your way.

Denny Emerson likes to talk about how you can't become a good rider if you don't have patience—he wrote a book called How Good Riders Get Good (and I highly recommend it) so you know he's serious—and he's right. You have to have patience. You have to have patience to get through the days when your horse's head isn't in the game, and the days when yours isn't. You have to have patience to deal with the fact that sometimes your mind gets ahead of your body and you understand what to do but aren't physically capable of it.

You have to have patience to deal with bad distances and botched lead changes, screwed-up courses and the fact that you can't sit the canter like you used to (I'm so ashamed, Kim), injuries and rides that are just plain terrible. You can't be good if you aren't willing to put up with the bad days, and sometimes there are more bad days then good ones. Sometimes there are weeks—months—of bad days, and the good riders are the one who get through them, the ones who take the frustration and learn to work with it and come out better in the end.

Sure, you can buy a fancy horse that somebody else made for you, and you can ride it, and you might win on it, but you won't be able to sit a buck or a rear like that person who started with a problem horse. You won't know your horse like that person who bought something and had to work with it to really become part of a team. You won't know how to get a horse in shape when it's been out of work for a while. You won't have the ability to get over the little obstacles in your riding because you'll have never seen a big one. You won't be able to deal with the scrapes and the bruises that come with learning how to be a real equestrian, not just a person who hops in the saddle every now and then.

I've discussed bruise collections with a couple of friends—there's a few of us with sports that have given us some pretty interesting ones—but the thing about my collection is that I always have them. I've got marks all over me. Right now my legs look like I got in a fight with someone—I didn't, and I don't know where the current collection came from—but so it goes.

That's just the way it is, though. I will never not have marks all over me, just like I'll never really get the dirt out from under my fingernails or stop gravitating towards the horse world, and I've accepted that. It's just part of the deal, and it's a part that I'm willing to work with.

I have learned so much from being an equestrian, from having to deal with failure after failure, and sure, sometimes things build up and I want to quit, but I never truly do. There's too much good to go along with the things that aren't so fun.

Really, the bruises are a small price to pay for learning how to stand back up every time you fall.

(They're also a small price to pay for the fact that I can be tackled by one person, have two more people trip and land on top of me, and respond with "I'm okay!" which literally happened during a game of Ultimate once because three teenage boys landing on you is nothing compared to hitting the ground after you've come off the back of a moving horse.)

Until next time x