I want to avoid disagreeing with you. As I have said, you are right. Waiting is better.
That said if Emporium were a person, a public figure-ish athlete in an international competition whose life or death is considered public information, we would expect the hospital/vet clinic to provide an immediate assessment: critical, satisfactory, dead. These athletes are public figures. Every single one of them. To act otherwise seems a little bit precious and not great for the sport…
I was also at the HOL when Emporium fell and I am overjoyed to hear that he is alive. I did not believe that was going to be the outcome based on what I saw (although I didn’t post that on social media).
It was ridiculous to sit there staring at a curtain for 30+ minutes, listening to the stupid announcers reading ads. It should have been silence.
We were so shook about it we stopped watching the rest of the day and went into the trade fair. Sounds like that was the right decision based on what I’ve read here.
But human athletes in major sports have a lot more ability to update the public. They have more of “everything” from staff to press coverage. Even in something as high profile as the NFL, you may not get any more info than “the player was taken to the hospital for evaluation/treatment, he will not be returning to the game,” which is basically what we got in this instance. It may be several hours or even the next day before you get the whole report.
Yes!!! We aren’t entitled to minute by minute updates. Human or Equine. It’s like people expect a camera to follow the horse to the vet live streaming the whole way to satisfy people who think its their business. We don’t do that for elite human athletes. You hear about the injury hours later or the next day.
There were a few moments on the live stream showing a tween girl on the grass with her head between her knees with the announcers prattling on as if absolutely nothing had happened.
That’s horrible, PRAVDA-level, reporting, and, my mantra lately, it’s bad for the sport.
Jeez, we can do better than the NFL, can’t we?
I mean we’re not usually intentionally driving anyone’s head into the dirt in the horse world.
Also, the vet clinic is all-hands-on-deck this weekend. Someone is (wo)manning the phones.
If a public figure is injured or sick, reporters call the hospital as soon as possible expecting an assessment.
There are freedom of information rules in place for this kind of news reporting to avoid this exact situation.
And, “No comment,” is always interpreted as bad news.
Again, I agree with you. Waiting is better. I wish we lived in that world. I remember it fondly.
The freedom of information law does not cover your right to have minute by minute updates on a horse injury.
I don’t even know what I’d do if someone expects a vet office to have someone staffing the phones to answer a random person’s "right " to know about my horse before I’ve even had time to process it myself.
The reason people thought the horse died was because that happens often enough that we saw a pattern (the silence, the lack of updates, etc). If you are putting a horse in mortal danger to compete or broadcasting the sport, you should expect that people are going to worry deeply when something like this happens. I imagine they didn’t know he was fine until the sedation wore off and he could stand, but you can’t fault people for speculating and bracing for the worst when it happens so often.
Yep, you are right. The horse hung a leg which caused the fall, then was tangled following the fall and was unable to get up. Kind of a shame that the story is spreading as “the horse was tangled” and not “the horse hung a leg and then got tangled.” The horse was not jumping well for quite some time and I am very disappointed that it was not pulled up earlier by the officials. Those of us watching the stream could see this fall coming from several jumps out. The horse was leaving legs and twisting and running into deep distances and just jumping dangerously on multiple occasions.
It also rubs me the wrong way that usef network cut out almost all of emporiums round out of the 5* replay. They left in the awful jump at the water early on and a few others but the rest of the awful jumps were cut out. Hate the lack of transparency and the lack of accountability for a preventable accident. Seems everyone’s more focused on “faulty tack” rather than the hung leg that actually caused the fall in the first place.
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Exactly.
That’s why reporters for reputable organizations like the USEF, CoTH, Sports Illustrated, etc. are not “random people.”
PS, I’m not talking about FOIA or FOAA specifically. More generally I’m thinking of the laws covering things that can be written about public figures.
My marker remains: is it good for the sport to play the national (or Chamber of Commerce) anthem rather than address a possible injury, even catastrophic loss?
It opens us to more critique when we cannot face our flaws.
For those who aren’t here in person, I feel the need to point out that there is absolutely NO cell/data service available if you have Verizon at the KHP this year for some reason. AT&T and T-Mobile users seem to have fewer issues, but those of us with Verizon can barely send text messages, especially in the areas around the stadium and cross country course. So part of the lack of communication from spectators, vendors, and even riders is coming from the fact that some of us can’t communicate with ANYONE until we leave the show grounds.
I have no idea what the deal is with that, but, as a vendor who has a QR code set up for customers to fill out a coupon form, it’s been a frustrating experience, to say the least. This was particularly “fun” at lunch time on Friday when the food trucks couldn’t run credit/debit cards because the service was too poor to support their payment systems…
And it is a breach of the v-c-p relationship to hand out information on someone else’s animal.
I’m sure you wouldn’t like it if any random person were updated on the condition of your hospitalized horse.
USEF Network coverage of XC is horrible. They obviously have too few cameras and whoever is directing/producing have really no idea how to cover a sports event. How many times do you want to hear that someone had a problem on some part of the course and they don’t show a replay?
Come on, there are only 3 horses or so on course at a time.
Then when they put up the individual rides, they are not edited. You can to spend time watching trees, crowds, etc. but not the rider.
They need to hire a production company that knows what they are doing.
The Freedom of information law does not cover your right to have minute by minute of someone’s horse at a vet clinic, even if a reporter calls the vet clinic to ask. Hagyard does not have someone manning the phones all day for this purpose. As Ghazzu said, this is a violation of the vet client privilege as well.
As far as the coverage, it’s free, it’s live, I’m not complaining.
I haven’t been down there in a few years but I went every year from about 2012-2018 and I have never had Verizon service on cross country day. I assume the local tower(s?) get overloaded with 35,000 people on the grounds. It’s super frustrating but it’s not new or unique to this year.
The problem is it reflects badly on the event and the sport. The sport of eventing is a minor minor sport in the US and in its biggest event the broadcast is amateurish. If someone watched that that was not a die hard eventing fan, they’d probably turn it off and go watch something else instead. I’m really surprised that the sponsors like Land Rover don’t push for it to be improved.
This. This right here. And quite honestly, it pisses me off because every BNR, official, smurf, etc. after Katharine Morel’s death said we were ALL collectively going to step up and say something when a horse was fatigued or rider was riding dangerously, to take preemptive action before that tired horse became a fatality.
We have been “fortunate” to not have any U.S. horse or rider casualties/major injuries in quite some time, and I feel like USEA/USEF/FEI has had this this laissez faire attitude of “Well, it hasn’t happened recently, so it must be fixed!” Just because we have MIM clips and collapsible tables and better course designers who don’t create crappy trappy courses (coughcough CMP) doesn’t mean the human element has been addressed.
There will always be riders with get-there-itis who unintentionally keep going when they should pull up, and instances like Emporium are a perfect example of where the officials need to step in and do their damn jobs. They won’t be popular, but at least the horse and rider will come home alive at the end of the day.
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