I am not sure how that measures your progress. If I am riding in a division with Boyd Martin, that is a high standard to compare against. If I am riding in a division with people like me, that’s not really going to tell me anything.
I guess I’ll put it in another way. Teaching was a second career for me. I taught Calculus. The head of the school was talking about raising standards. My thought was that we should target every kid in the school passing the AP Calc exam. The other teachers said it was an impossible standard. My response was that it I miss that goal, then I would still have a very high success rate. However, if I aim at a lower goal, say every kid passes Algebra 2, and I miss that goal, then my standard is pretty low.
So, IMHO, populating lots of divisions actually lowers the standard of competition.
I do not actually consider these two things comparable.
Your goal for your teaching is not the same as the students goal for their learning.
And as a teacher you know there are lots of people want to be good, work hard at being great, but will never even be close to Boyd or AP calc level. The constant very expensive kick in the teeth would really be frustrating to many/most people.
Why not give you (specifically) the option to show against Boyd, and also give those who are truly not pro level riders the option to show with those people? No harm done to your drive to be the best, no harm done to their drive to be their best.
If we could all beat Boyd then Boyd would not be Boyd.
I started eventing as a teen in Area 1. I used to get Olympians and UL Event Stalwarts like Stephie Baer, Denny Emerson, Courtney Cooper, Corrine Ashton, etc, in my divisions. At one point I had six UL riders in a BN division on my green TB. It didn’t discourage me, but I remember it discouraged my parents / grandparents, who were incredibly generous with their time despite being non-horsey. At Hitching Post one year, I had my best test to date and full double clear and was still 8th - my trainer pointed out at least I was the highest placed teen in the division, but I don’t think it mattered to my parents, who were discouraged for me to have worked hard with little to show for it. Since parents tend to pay for their kid’s entries, I think it’s important to acknowledge that a 10c ribbon can go a long way to keeping them invested and supportive in the sport.
I like it better now that classes are split. It’s a more fair playing field to have the youngins and the greenies competing against each other, not UL riders on top class green horses.
And riding against a pro who rides 5-8 horses a day tells you… what? You’re not a pro nor do you ride that many a day. I am acknowledging your perspective but 80% of people probably do not share it.
I have ammy friends who prefer to compete in the open divisions. Some ot measure themselves against the pros, some because not a lot of ammies do it and they have a better chance of being 1 or 2 ammy and scoring for AECs. Pick your poison.
So what was the consequence for the kids if they failed AP Calculus? Or was it more of a teacher goal to prepare them for that, but the kids still took the lower exams?
If kids or show competitors or horses feel overfaced or outmatched in competition they quit. They start refusing. You can build excellence by being around Olympians at shows and sharing their warmup. But it’s not a good feeling to find out you can never win, especially in a society where winning is considered optimal.
One of the things I like best about the eventing divisions is that amateur competitors have a choice. They can enter Open and ride against experts, including amateurs with years at that level, on different talented horses, maybe higher levels as well. Maybe some U.S. team members.
That won’t be me, though. I won’t be competitive, there. I’m just division-filler to boost the numbers in that division. I’d rather put that money toward a clinic or other educatonal endeavor.
Or, I on my 14 yo horse can choose to actually compete against riders who are much more my peers in the Rider division at the LL’s. Whatever our experience and horse demographics, we won’t be facing the elites.
Exactly. I’m riding a 14 yo trooper of a horse, and the pro is riding a 6 yo prodigy of a horse with stunning gaits.
I pay for a competition to compete against my peers. I don’t have any movie-fantasy dreams of some day winning the Open division against International Velvet.
Yes, that is the whole point.
That’s what divisions are. Groups of competitors who are on common ground.
Everyone is not trying to be International Velvet and ‘50 to 1’ and every other fantasy comes-from-nowhere winner who beats an Olympian. That’s not my goal. That’s not why I event.
I’m also not going to spend money and time on the fantasy. But I’ll gladly step up to the reality of competitors.
If other amateurs want to compete in Open, they have that choice and more power to them. I’ll cheer them on from the sidelines and I hope they do win.
Frontal lobe understand “competing against yourself” and never ending self improvement. Lizard brain like shiny pretty ribbon. Put shiny ribbon on wall in home. Shiny pretty ribbon provide motivation for lizard brain to keep going with sport. Keep lizard brain and frontal lobe in harmony, happy human that keeps paying entry fees.
Speaking seriously, adding a horse/rider/junior division costs very little in terms of the total cost of a horse trail. An extra set of ribbons and/or prizes, but that might be enough to keep people coming back. Steepleview in MN gave ribbons to 8th place and they were magnificent and fancy, tails two feet long with giant ruffled rosettes. It was such a great experience to ride around with that flapping from your horses bridle.
Okay but is it really a “Victory Gallop” if your mount doesn’t take off at Mach 200 once those brilliantly ruffled rosettes start to flap and slap their face???
Going with the grading example, in this case there is 1-A, 1-B, etc. and if all the divisions are together and a pro or pros riding several horses a day enter a lower level it’s like a high school class with college graduates in it competing for the few top grades. The playing field will never be entirely level, but let high schoolers compete against each other, and the college grads will be in a separate division the high schoolers can enter if they want to.
I remember one show with my late spicy TB mare Confession that I was more proud of the fact that she finally tolerated the neck sash and ribbon, AND she let the stranger put them on her!, than I was of our placing.
But how do you even know if it’s an accurate score?
There’s the score you get at a rated show which has a different weight, the score you get from a schooling show from a “encouraging” judge, there’s the score you get from a schooling show from a “judge who’s tough,” the score you get from a judge who tells the scribe they don’t like your breed, etc.
I may never know what my actual scores are.
I’ve shifted to sharing neither my scores nor my ribbons.
I don’t think these things are mutually exclusive. You can have a lofty long-term goal that you’re working towards, but you still need intermediate benchmarks to accurately track your progress. You don’t learn anything by making a freshman take the AP Calc exam right away; you spend a few years teaching and testing them as they move through the pre-req courses until they’re ready. Similarly, my (unrealistic) long-term goal might be to ride as well as Boyd Martin and that might be the standard I push myself towards, but in the meantime losing to Boyd in an open division doesn’t give me any useful information on how I’m doing. Boyd is too far out of my league to be a meaningful standard.
I think the eventing system handles this pretty well compared to other disciplines. The horse and rider divisions are more useful ways of breaking things out than just amateur vs professional, and you always have the option to run open if you want.
I personally don’t put much stock in placings or what division I’m in, since it seems to vary so much by event anyway. Sometimes there are just a couple Open divisions and the split seems more or less random—more about needing to run multiple dressage rings and stagger ride times than anything else. This past weekend a friend and I with similar-ish level of experience were in different Modified divisions and each of us had at least one 5-star rider with us.
And, for those who mention USDF medals as a goal, USEA also has a medal program with score vs placing requirements. It’s not a gimme to get your gold, especially as you go up the levels. I’ve qualified for AECs at Training through Prelim and have won plenty of ribbons, but only have my gold at Training so far, generally due to time penalties XC.
Boyd got to be Boyd by working, riding, competing for years against everyone and anyone, an amateur before turning professional. Boyd is Boyd because he has unique talent combined with his willingness to put in the effort to find those tiny fractions of improvement. Put him on a 14 yr packer and likely he would still win over an ammy on a $$$$$$ fully trained imported superstar horse. But some days the ammy will beat him because it’s Eventing, a sport full of glorious uncertainty, and it isn’t cost or financial investment or professional status that spooks the horse in a shadowy corner and causes it to run out.
IMO competing against the best raises everyone’s game. An amateur shouldn’t think that they were beaten on an unfair playing field but rather learn what the professional did to achieve that win in those circumstances.
If a horse dislikes water, train and learn until the horse copes with water rather than avoiding any Event that includes a fence with water.
The great thing about eventing - those who think it is great to compete against people like Boyd can do it and those who would find competing against someone like Boyd as an added stress to an already nervous making experience do not have compete against him, they can compete in their own division.
This sounds like a nice idea, that training fixes everything, but I know dozens of people who have had to move on from horses that don’t do ditches/water/drops and those people are extremely talented amateurs or professionals. It relates directly to the Kentucky post about forcing a horse to do something. Even people like Boyd or Sinead Halpin or dozens of others have sold horses that don’t like certain elements.
OK, I live on an Atlantic Island that has a lot of rain: horses get wet. But I agree that horses who clearly say “I prefer dressage to xc” are sold on.
A complete tangent: I live in the NE where there’s two seasons: mud and snow. When starting my filly XC, she made it known she was a Fancy Prancy Druh-SAHGE Horse, not a utility vehicle. She hated getting her toes wet, even in grass. I started feeding her in a puddle and spent an entire spring/summer making her go through every puddle or wet crossing I could find. There was a lot of Pearl Clutching on her behalf. I was actually worried for a while she wouldn’t ever get over it.
BTW, all it takes to get her hustling to her run in shed is a single speck of rain. I think she comes by her water revulsion naturally.
