I’m assuming when you mention liability here you might be thinking of some kind of sanction or revocation of credentials if riders you approve were struggling after the move up. Sadly the scenario I think it’s more concerning is that a professional certifies someone, they are severely injured and then the professional gets sued by the injured party/family for certifying the rider before they were ready.
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@Texarkana I think this is an excellent point and I agree with you 99% of the way. I think what the rules committee is trying to address is how much the sport is changing and making sure riders keep up with it.
I felt in love with the sport we have now. I never watched or participated in a long format. I’ve only ever ridden the technical questions on cross country of modern eventing. The cross country of 2010 is not the same cross country as 2021 across all levels. Heck, intro/starter is far more common than it used to be for that exact reason. I think the intent of a time limit of when the MER’s fall off was to address the exact issue.
The way it was originally written was 2 years to obtain 10 MERs. Now it is written 8 years to obtain 8 MERs. I do think that is more obtainable but I would like it to have a lower limit as a pair. Such as 8 MERs over all and 4 MERs as a pair for unlicensed riders. The double bonus there is more riders would qualify for the classic format.
I did find DW tone a bit dismissive but I understood and respected where he was coming from. I don’t think he fully understands the challenges of training and competing outside of eventing hot spots. However I do think he is coming from a good place and is just exasperated and frustrated with the community’s reaction.
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Can you clarify what you are trying to day here?
I read it as you are saying that intro is more common now because people are realizing that the higher levels are harder than they used to be.
I think intro is more common now because - well the same reason most rated hunter shows now include lots of not rated low level classes that are usually very popular. Not because people are thinking that moving up is harder so we have to start here but because the market needed more places to get revenue and having the lower level classes allows them to attract people who previously never would have shown/competed.
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I guess what I was trying to say is that in the last 10 years beginner novice was considered the intro level. Only one or two shows in the area that I invented had intro / starter. It wasn’t a USEA recognized division at the time. also when I started beginner novice you didn’t have to have a USEA membership to compete. Sometime in that time period beginner novice now requires both horse and rider to be registered.
A theme that keeps coming up on the eventing forums is the do you remember when x level was the lowest level offered. It started with preliminary, then went to training, then novice was introduced, then beginner novice, and now intro / starter. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with offering lower and lower levels to allow more people to enjoy the sport and give them an opportunity to compete. But by creating those lower levels you allow for a little bit of level creep.
It’s changed to an 8 year limit now.
Like DW said, the levels just aren’t the same anymore. You used to be able to hunt a bit and be brave and get around Prelim, and now that would just not be possible or a good idea. Times have changed.
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@Jealoushe and @horseshorseshorseshorses thank you for addressing my misunderstanding. I completely missed the the time was extended. That is what I get for shouting at the wind as a bystander.
The 8 years is much more reasonable.
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I think DW addressed this.
Trainers are being strongly pressured by non-riding parents to allow their teenagers to move up too soon, so they can go to (what used to be called) Young Riders before they age out. (with the implied threat that, “If you won’t let her move up, we will switch to another trainer who will.”) A MERs requirement allows the trainer to say to the pushy parents: “It is not up to me. They need to meet the MERs requirement before they can move up”
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Understandable considering it changed right after the first output of the rule lol
The Jon and Rick show was an interesting talk on this. Tami Smith basically said it makes it difficult for riders who catch ride and help upgrade horses, they basically can’t do it anymore. I didn’t realize this was a thing but maybe it is something pros use to help them get all their horses out?
She also really wants the MERS to have stricter score requirements.
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After reading DW’s piece and knowing his background in race riding, I was also wondering why we haven’t seriously pursued some sort of unbiased testing/certification option.
It would have the same limitations as a high number of MERs in the sense that someone living in, say, Wyoming, would likely have just as much difficulty arranging a time to ride before a third party ICP instructor as they would making their 8 MERs. But it would provide an option for people who don’t fit the mold, so to speak.
I probably shouldn’t make the statement I’m going to make because it’s hard to support with evidence (instead of option). But as a bystander I feel many of us can name pro riders with loyal owners and a seemingly endless supply of mounts yet make a lot of questionable riding decisions. Those riders would not have any problem achieving licensure despite this, yet the dedicated and talented amateur with one horse would be at even more of a disadvantage than they are now.
I understand that in a dangerous sport, nothing can replace experience. But experience isn’t simply quantitative. Adding a some options for qualitative safety assessment could ensure the rules are inclusive to more than just the east coast based pro or the up and coming working student.
Too much exclusivity is a sure way to end the sport. I feel like you can both protect people and still provide access with more perspective about the challenges people are facing.
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I hadn’t thought of this, but it’s a good point.
Let’s say I have a client who is established at Training level with her horse (>8 MERs). Horse is ready to move up to Prelim; but for whatever reason, client decides I should take the horse out for its first Prelim run. (Maybe rider get a hurt/pregnant; maybe rider is nervous and wants a positive experience for horse, etc). If it’s a horse I am very familiar with, I ride and schooled at home, I could probably run 1 or 2 Trainings with him and enter its first Prelim and give the horse some confidence.
But under new rules, I would have to take this horse 6 or 8 Training events as a combination (after it’s already done 8 successfully with owner). That’s not going to happen; why would owner pay for 8 (!!) more events her horse doesn’t need, wait an additional 4+ months minimum (paying training board? Hoping he stays sound and doesn’t do a Horse Thing and hurt himself?). In such case…I may lose the client who could justifiably send Horse to an A Licensed rider who can get on and go prelim immediately (despite my previous knowledge and relationship with client and Horse). And I wouldn’t blame client for doing so; in fact, I may facilitate it because it’s not fair to the horse or wallet to do those extra 8 Trainings.
Or…client could say I can’t afford any of that, I live in the Midwest and A List riders are hard to come by, so I’ll go prelim myself after my 8 training MERs, despite the nerves…and horse has a green moment that could have been avoided with a more experienced rider.
There are many mid-level Pros in this same situation all over the country.
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Yeah, it’s funny I never thought of this either, but I have always been wanting a pro to take my girl out for the first time Prelim. But not many A riders around here, so they would likely have to do this new method (if Canada copies which we usually do).
Or, if not, maybe Americans will realize they can bypass this by Eventing in Canada for the summer 
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Those are stats, but not ones that would help evaluate the impact of adding MERs and requiring them as a combination. IOW, that is a between group comparison, not a within group
For instance, those show that at prelim, riders with more UL experience fall less often than those with less experience. That’s probably unavoidable, in that the only way to gain a lot of prelim experience is to ride a lot of prelim. Those who haven’t done so, even if they have many trainings, are still going to be behind those with prelim experience at when it comes to competing prelim.
So if we think the 4.6% is too high, and want to know if adding more MERs would reduce it, we’d need to look at move-ups specifically (horse or rider’s first X attempts) and whether the fall rate was different based on having 8 or 10 MERs or achieving them as a combination.
As another poster said, there are likely many other differences between the groups that are not being isolated, and perhaps that doesn’t matter since we aren’t considering rule changes about those other differences, but we really don’t know if # trainings is the driving factor in the falls.
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Now that I have joined the conversation, I do have to say I definitely appreciate the effort to improve safety, as imperfect as it may be.
One of my acquaintances who has been the most vocal against this change is exactly the type of person it is meant to keep safe. Since I met this person, they have taken several horses up to the preliminary level, none of which had any business showing at that level. You unfortunately can’t trust people to always make good decisions. You can’t even trust their trainers and coaches to make good decisions. I say this humbly as someone who is a far worse rider than said acquaintance; we can all have blind spots or make bad decisions in order to achieve a dream.
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Having thought about this a lot in the past week, and spent some time digging around in the results section of the USEA page I realize why this proposal sits so poorly with me. Would it keep some of those 4-5% of riders who have had a fall at Prelim from heading out on that course? Yes, It probably would. But it will also keep out a WHOLE LOT of people who are not falling - the ones who are not the problem.
And btw in my sample of 30 rides with either a RF or MR score at P? (because it’s pretty time consuming to go through .individually) three people had two falls and one had THREE. So it was 30 rides and 25 riders. What I did was look at event results and if there was a RF I looked up that person’s record and that of their horse.
Am I glad we are trying to do something about falls? Yes But this is the equivalent of making the whole class stay in for recess because one or 2 aren’t up to standard, and how it’s come across from some professionals is that well, so what, too bad for the 95% of you who are not the problem.
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I think the stance they are taking is that it’s better to upset the 95% than to have any more dead bodies on course.
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But are these changes actually casually connected to data that points to them preventing deaths?
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I’ve been ruminating on this thread a lot and I think quite a few of us are interested in the data. It’s unclear if any analysis has been done beyond what the TPTB have mentioned (fall rates by rider licensing type). I have some data that we could analyze ourselves if no one can get a good answer from USEA/USEF. It’s imperfect and it’s going to be time-consuming. Since it’s tax season right now I’m working 60+ hours a week plus riding and caring for my horses, so I may not be able to contribute much to the analysis, but I can share the spreadsheets I started last year (to examine whether fall rates vary by venue and course designer). I am happy to drop them in a Google Drive and explain how I generated them in the first place, so you can make more. I will try to contribute to the number crunching as I can too.
I’m envisioning focusing on Prelim to start.
What I have is recognized HT results in pdf and Excel forms. I downloaded them as pdfs from the USEA Calendar Archive and converted them to Excel using a free website. It’s pretty painstaking because the formatting always needs to be tweaked. Here is an example of one Prelim class at one event (UNH in April 2019):
The percentages in the bottom right were what I was originally interested in, but I have added some blank columns relevant to MERs that could be a way to proceed. Also a Pro/Am column since that shows up on riders’ records. It would be better but harder to classify each rider as A/B/UL.
Frankly, you could make almost infinite columns here. You could have one set of Horse/Rider/Combination columns to reflect their first move-up only, one set with all Ts to date, one set with all Ps to date, etc. Or you could narrow it down a bit and start by only completing data entry for people at their first Prelim, to focus on the move-up question.
For example, let’s look at the combination in the first row (I’ll refer to her as C.T. on “Jamie”). I apologize in advance for singling this person out but it was random and I won’t use their full name. Jamie’s USEF show record starts with a Training on 2/10/16, when he was 7. No idea if he competed overseas or under a different name before. Jamie’s first outings before moving up to Prelim back in 2017 were all with C.T. and here are the results:
2/10/16 T - D 34.2 / XC 20,TE / SJ 0 jump, 3 time - no MER
2/19-21/16 T - D 30.2 / XC 0,0 / SJ 0,0 - MER at T
6/23-25/17 N - D 29.1 / XC 0,0 / SJ 0,0 - MER at N
7/29-30/17 T - D 27.5 / XC 0,0 / SJ 0,0 - MER at T
8/11-13/17 P - D 36.8 / XC 0,0 / SJ 0.0 - MER at P
So what I would do is enter the following in the Horse column I created:
T Starts: 3
T MERs: 2
MER %: 67%
You could also create a set of columns for the combination, and in this case those would be the same as the Horse entries.
This particular horse never did a T again after his first P, so the above is also his lifetime results at T. Other horses might go up then back down then back up so you’d have to decide how to reflect that. These tables could get as complicated as we want to make them.
The rider column is even more time-consuming if the person is a pro like C.T… I looked at her record back to 2010 (first result was May 2011 so I think I went back far enough) and clicked on all the Training results. What I got and would put in the Rider columns, assuming it reflects first move up to P and not lifetime T results before the show in question, was:
T Starts before 1st P: 12 (all on the same horse, not “Jamie”)
T MERs: 6
MER %: 50%
I wrote out all the individual show results but lost them trying to format it 
and I’m not retyping it all! FWIW none of the non-MERs were due to dressage scores or stadium rails.
Again, I apologize for singling out this rider. I am just using her a random example of how the table above could be filled out to provide some potentially useful information.
Finding and entering this data is very time-consuming. Searching horse records on the USEA site only gives you back to 2018 and today when I click on the “Click here for a detailed report” link I get an error message. I’ve used that before so I’m not sure what’s going on but I sent them a tech help message. USEF records go back farther but to see details like dressage score and jumping penalties, you have to click on each class then look for the horse/rider.
There are many other columns that could be added, like how many horses rider has competed T.
Is this something that anyone would want to work on? I can share the Excel docs that I have (2019 Areas I-III, because I was working on this project in early 2020 and started in numerical order), as well as pdfs of those results that haven’t been converted to Excel yet (2019 Areas IV-IX), and instructions on how to do that. If there are better ways to find results and enter data than I have described here, I am ALL EARS!
Once all the data is entered in spreadsheets, it won’t be hard to analyze although it might be better to copy everything (say, all 2019 Prelims) into one spreadsheet. I think pivot tables alone could be pretty telling. Having all that data would also allow us to analyze things like to what extent dressage scores and/or SJ penalties correlate with XC penalties and falls.
Ideally it would be better if the rule proponents would share data like this, but if a few of us work together it might be possible to generate at least some of it and see if any trends show up. We could start with just the people who moved up to P for the first time in 2019, to narrow the task down a bit, then go from there.
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omg, this is exactly what I was doing. I didn’t want to finish my taxes…
My columns were Ammy/Pro/Jr, dressage score/sj score. How many other riders were at Prelim at that event (all divisions) how many other people fell at P at this event, MER prior to this event, # of runs at Prelim before the fall, and other notes.
What I did was look at an event’s record and then click through to the horse and rider results and write in my columns.
