I’m sorry, but it stops being about “not being cruel to the rider and family” (etc.) when a horse dies as well. That lovely animal lost its life, and it certainly isn’t the first (I will never forget Eleanor Brennan many years ago…and @Jealoushe 's thread documents horse deaths). We make the choices we make, but the horses don’t.
I think eventing will be eventually shut down completely if some big changes aren’t made. The world is becoming less tolerant of animals dying because of humans’ whims. I love eventing and have been following the sport for twenty years but it is time for serious changes.
There are two things that need to happen. First, there needs to be a serious study of safety and changes made to the way the sport happens - be it table design, tighter qualifications, more stringent yellow-flagging, etc. Secondly, people need to step into a zone of discomfort to call other people on dangerous riding. I stand with those who looked at the video of that rider at Rebecca and wonder why nobody recommended that she slow right down rather than move up to intermediate. It doesn’t take an expert to see.
Riders at the top of the sport seem absurdly hesitant to call for change, and so it’s time for the grassroots to organize.
Without knowing the details of the incident, you can’t say a more durable helmet would have changed anything. She could have succumbed to injuries to her torso, etc.
I’m not downgrading your experience What I’m saying is it appears that many on this BB have decided that ranting online is the solution because the officials aren’t going to listen. Who cares if they ignored it before? They might not ignore it now.
As far as me accepting rider deaths? That’s pretty uncalled for and unacceptable. Why go to an attack on someone’s character when they approach something from a different angle? That’s weak. There’s a HUGE difference than asking hard questions and having some Monday morning quarterbacks watching some old videos and saying that they saw it coming and extrapolating that the rider probably deserved it. That’s cruel. It’s cruel to sit in our chairs at home as a random person and say we saw it coming. It doesn’t help the dead horse. It doesn’t help the dead rider. It doesn’t help the trainer or the family or the barn mates. It also doesn’t help bring weight to anything anyone on this BB says.
I have seen officials speak to riders and give them warnings. I’ve seen officials following certain riders around after witnessing issues at previous shows. I’ve seen officials asking jump judges to report on certain riders and seen them speak to trainers. I don’t know if there needs to be a clearer line about what’s a yellow card and what isn’t. I think that might help.
NO ONE here has said that the rider ‘deserved it’ . No one.
Do you have a point to make about safety or is it that you just come here to attack those who do? Last week, you were chastising people who complained about Marilyn Little’s harsh equipment and bloody mouths. You made some sniffles about how ML’s feelings might be hurt. As opposed to her horse’s bleeding mouth, I guess.
Without knowing anything about your fellow BB members, you’re calling us ‘Monday morning quarterbacks’ and ‘random people on the internet’. Why are you here if this is how you feel about us?
How is it that you’ve been on the BB since 2002 and you’re apparently unaware of Reed’s background or the attempts at the collapsible tables or the speed study?
You know who’s posting on this thread? Lawyers, doctors, scientists, engineers, all kinds of professionals. And then there’s all aspects of eventing: riders, breeders, trainers, big-time owners, people who’ve lost their own horses in eventing accidents and people who’ve lost colleagues and friends.
Random people my *ss.
And to repeat: no one has said the rider deserved it. People - knowledgeable people - have said that the rider was riding dangerously. What she did at Rebecca is something that riders are very specifically warned against. It’s not her fault that she wasn’t given a warning card (or stopped on course as she should have been) but there is no other interpretation of the video. It’s dangerous riding.
What you’re seeing here is the outcry of people who wish they could have done something to save this girl. She was one of us.
+1000 to that. The two Australian girls are the only somewhat comprehensive reports that I’ve seen in terms of eventing accident investigations, and that was only because the parents requested an inquiry into their deaths. Otherwise, right now all we have to go on is speculation, previous results (which don’t tell us much), and perhaps eyewitness accounts. Transparency is everything in an organization. If you want the complete support and trust of your members, you need to be willing to show even the ugly stuff, and LISTEN to what they have to say.
I watch many people ride their horses cross country. Professionals and amateurs alike. I repeatedly emphasis to my amateur friends that they only have one chance out there to ride well and or to have a clean go. Those aren’t necessarily the same, as we well know. Many pro riders have issues with their horses, and they do not get judged on how things look. And they often get hurt. And they win so the crappy riding is forgotten, and they get more horses. So figuring out when to give a yellow card out is not an enviable task. And until it is not looked upon as a scarlet letter of shame, they won’t be given out often. Many folks get talked to, I have had the opportunity to do this to someone in an official capacity at an unrecognized event, and it really is uncomfortable. Making more “safe” jumps–which unfortunately riders then ride faster at because they fall down, which causes other problems and can even be less “safe.” Tables now have a more forgiving shape due to outcry, now we gallop at them unless in combinations. So the combinations make people fall if they aren’t on the right step…and we get showjumping on xc. Another thought of mine is to have someone hired to reward the good riding seen xc, with bonus points available perhaps at the championship level, and that someone also presents the rider with a card listing scores on such things as control, harmony, judgement of pace for all the riders. I don’t have any answers, just more questions. I like to say it’s not my sport anymore, it belongs to the young people, I just get to play in the sandbox. I absolutely love a well trained event horse, event horses have no equal, I think overall the standard of riding has improved over the years, and because of that level creep is making the jump into the serious upper levels almost insurmountable for the average. I am so sad for the loss of this horse and rider.
This MYOB-at-all-cost thing we do these days is a contributing factor in such a tragic accident. It ought to be considered among all of the other contributing causes, am I right? After all, we can’t completely control all factors, but we should completely control the ones we can.
I do see the creep of tolerance (great) and relativism (great with respect to opinions, not so much with respect to facts) in horsing just as it’s increasing in other parts of culture. When I was a kid, if you were doing something unsafe, someone older than you said something. Furthermore, they didn’t worry about your feelings in that, Rather, their saving your ignorant keister took precedence over the way they delivered their opinion. As an old lady, now, I have been guilty of the same thing. If I see an impending disaster taking shape, I’ll use my voice as necessary to stop it before the wheels fall off the situation. I have been surprised to hear someone whom I kept safe (and explained what we averted) school me on just how bad it was that I finally yelled, “Just stop where you are!”
I think it’s a mistake to stand back and watch someone hurtle toward disaster when the stakes are high. I don’t know how to justify a MYOB approach in that situation. Do you guys?
There are additional problems stemming from a discipline that requires and admires some guts and grit. There’s plenty of self-selection for those who do push the envelope. Those folks get together and celebrate that guts and grit, the “getting the job done.”
Add to that the fact that horse training is both unregulated in the US and intrinsically local. That means someone can be successful locally (with almost whatever degree of knowledge and safety they possess) and then have others around them watch that as an example of how it’s done. So, unless one has the time, money, effort and ambition, to leave their local scene and get more education and more sophisticated education, where would they learn that they were “just getting the job done” in a way that would, sooner or later, not be enough to keep them safe?
I think getting a Yellow Card should be the very, very last line of defense against a style of riding, competitiveness and horsemanship that increases the risk of serious injury.
I am the wrong one to give authoritative criticism on that July, 2019 XC video presented here. I’m the wrong one because I haven’t evented or field hunted in a long time. I’m also the wrong one because I have always valued the trained horses and the tactful ride taught in the American show hunter division. (And not for nuthin’ but that style of riding kept me really safe and my horse’s happy and listening in all kinds of terrain.) But in that video, I see a somewhat unrideable horse, without enough scope, and a rider patching together some control. I don’t know if that’s how most modern XC rounds look. But that’s not a kind of riding I’d like to do, speaking only from a self-preservation perspective. I don’t think you can wrestle a horse through a course indefinitely and expect to stay safe. Sooner or later, your being at odds with your horse is going to cause a miscommunication that your horse can’t physically correct.
I don’t think anyone should die for their riding or horsemanship mistakes. But I do want to know if they are being candid enough with themselves about whether or not they have done all they can to lessen the risk.
Fist of all; I am very sad and sorry to hear of this. Heartbreaking
Second: Is it statistically proven that tables are the cause for such horrific accidents? Not just rider deaths and horse deaths but rotational falls, falls in general, bad accidents, are tables more likely to cause disaster?
Why the heck did they not pull her after she went into that field? That round was crazy.
I see a lot of people on here trying to explain away her death. This mentality of ‘it won’t happen to me, I’m more careful’ ‘it was a matter of time’ ‘someone should have told her’. Many of you are doing this because you compete in this sport, and it can be hard to reconcile the fact that people keep dying with the fact that you are competing right along side them.
It can happen to you. Using her riding skills as a way to justify why you don’t think it will happen to you is absurd. It takes one mistake, one miscalculation, on the part of the horse or rider and you are toast. If you mess up in dressage, you get a bad score. If you mess up in show jumping, you knock a pole. If you mess up on the cross country course, you might die.
If you want change, tell USEA. Get involved. Ask your local competition venues to switch to safer jumps and frangible pins. If you are concerned, use your feet to protest and don’t ride at venues who haven’t taken a proactive approach to safe jumps.
I’m not an expert, on watching it again I think she used it to slow the mare down and regroup. As Reed said, she pointed her into that field. She was visibly significantly adjusting and fiddling with her reins in a way that looks like it’s unfamiliar, maybe they were new reins or something like that. You know what educated riding looks like. It doesn’t look like educated riding.
y’all remember the viral video of the gal on the black mare trying to shock her into running the pattern? I don’t have to be in the WPRA to know that’s a BS way to train a barrel horse. Sometimes that bad or unskilled or dangerous is plainly evident.
I’m just going to roll my eyes a little at this one. We aren’t trying to ‘explain away’ her death so that we can reassure ourselves that it won’t happen to me. We’re trying to determine what issues in her riding style and choices may have led to her death so that we can be doubly careful NOT to make the same mistakes!
Look, I see someone who is using her hands a lot to try and half-halt 1-2 strides in front of the fence. And I see a horse who is blowing past those attempts at a half halt, perhaps because she is so used to being snatched in the mouth she ignores it. Now I’m going to look at my own riding and determine if that is something I also do. And if it is…I’m going to work a lot harder to address that issue because it might kill me if I don’t.
Yes of course it can happen to me. That’s why we are evaluating what we know of her.
And of course it shouldn’t kill you to make a mistake. Which is why I donated to the frangible fund and will continue to do so going forward. But there’s two sides to attack this from and one costs money while the other is something we can do now. 1) We can work towards making frangible tables mandatory on courses but it will take time for that to happen because of cost. And 2) We can immediately start publishing accident reports that let the general riding population know why the accident occurred so we can take a closer look at our own riding and choices and trainers can take a closer look at the riding choices of their own students and make immediate changes or steps back if the same faults are present as in the riders (plural!) who have died in the last 8 months.
These two paths are not mutually exclusive. They are attacking the issue from different angles.
I watched the July 2019 video. I should forward this with a caveat. I’m just a low level rider trying to wrap my head around the tragedy that’s happened, and what’s been happening to this sport. I mostly ride dressage, but I like eventing and we usually go to one or two BN/N events a year. I am a USEA member, but I’m low hanging fruit.
I have way more experience in this sport as a spectator and volunteer jump judge than as a rider, so take what I say below with a grain of salt.
I read the comments before watching the video. They made me expect way worse. With the exception of the poor call made to go through the unmowed portion of the course, this ride seemed about average for what I see when I jump judge. I saw a strong horse that was forward and had a tendency to want to flatten out and get on the forehand, and a rider that was correcting that a few strides before the fence. I saw a horse that took a lot of strong rein aids to half-halt but that’s very common on cross country. They met a few fences underpowered, but I did not see a horse with a lack of scope for this level… Isn’t that course beefy for the level? I saw what I would say was an average pair on a tough track… so are average riders now getting killed in our sport? When I say average, I mean that they are the middling line, not professionals with incredibly talent and not riders that just fell off the turnip cart either.
I’ve watched many riders on course ride like the above. Is that the metric for “dangerous riding”? Excluding the unmowed portion - I mean the rest of the ride. Am I not doing my due diligence in reporting them for dangerous riding to the TD? My honest take has been the last few events I’ve jump-judged at, most riders were way more dangerous than the above in between fences, with horses barely in control and riders really loose in the tack.
The only thing that will change the situation is for riders and owners to boycott these competitions. At that point maybe the governing bodies will do something. They currently have no incentive to do anything
the problem is the owners want to get their horses out, the pros need the income, etc.
Which is a rider mistake of potentially lethal consequences.
There’s no other side to this. You cannot safely adjust a horse 3, 2 or 1 stride in front of the fence.
You might get away with it sometimes but it’s something you don’t do.
If you don’t see a distance, you put your leg on, keep your hand low and let the horse sort it out. This is the only answer. You do not attempt to yank the horse off its stride and out of balance when you’re that close to a jump.
I’m sure many of us here have been called out for doing something like this.
‘That’s how people get killed!’ Is how I heard it. And the coach was right.
SO the UL riders are all coming together to finance collapsible tables at the events in Florida. Great. I mean I guess it helps, but what about events all over, at other levels?
Isn’t making the table fall just sticking a bandaid on the issue? Lets study how horses see and jump, and start desiging courses that make horses jump better. Make courses about terrain questions and fitness. Get rid of fences we know cause serious issues!! It is not that complex.
I’m not understanding why so many are grasping onto the Derby style that XC is becoming, and not thinking of new innovative ways we can get eventing back to its original test. The knowledge is out there. I have listened to many a podcast and heard a lot of info about how courses and fences are designed a certain way and why. We are capable of making the sport safer but for some reason we choose to ignore the options and do things like encourage riders to wear vests with no safety research.
While you may feel you aren’t, you aren’t the only person on this thread. On here, on Facebook, on other forums, people try to explain her death as a direct result of her capabilities. People see one video of her riding, which could have been just a bad ride, we all have them, and decide she was the cause of her fate.
I see this mentality everywhere, not just in riding. It is a very common, human, reaction. It stops a hard look at what the real causes are of any fall, not just hers.
A few years ago a woman died not far from me galloping her horse. She wasn’t wearing a helmet and suffered a TBI. Did the community immediately don helmets and learn from her? No, they said that it wouldn’t happen to them because they were better riders or their horses were more sure footed.
Not too long after another rider in the same community was riding and fell off, giving herself a TBI. She wasn’t wearing a helmet either. Many people have started wearing helmets, but some still refuse because they think they are better riders or they think it goes against tradition.
Eventers need to decide who they are; are they the people who learned or the people who got caught in their own traditions and pride?
I worry about confusion and mixed messages to the horses about what is an XC fence.
It used to be that an XC fence was solid. The exception to this was brush. The first time you jump brush, your horse balloons over it. Then, very quickly, the horse learns that brush means you can brush through it. An experienced horse does not balloon brush fences. An experienced horse knows that jumps with narrow colored poles - show jumps - also come down when hit.
Now we have logs that look solid (think those white monstrosities at Burghley) but collapse when you hit them. We also went through a phase (thankfully short-lived, like the materials) of using styrofoam logs that deformed.
So now we have solid fences that aren’t really solid.
How does the horse know what’s what? How do you train a horse to prepare for these situations? ‘MIM clip’ is not something you can tell them in advance.
While I appreciate Holling posting the video of the collapsible table and trying to raise funds, as has been pointed out, Gnep had a collapsible table 15 or so years ago and the powers that be were not interested. Are they now interested because there will be a name behind it or because the deaths have just gotten so high profile that they cannot be seen as doing nothing to try to protect riders and horses?
