The whole situation from horse death to events riders attacking each other on social media makes me sick and disgusted with the sport.
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that eventing has become a business for many of the riders now competing. It is no longer a sport in which amateurs compete in the Olympics or a rider has one horse to compete if they have team aspirations.
These professional riders have to make a living, and that is done by having many clients and many horses in training. You will want horses owned by other people or syndicates in order to minimize your costs. You will want clients who have deep pockets and can afford to event frequently and buy the best horses either for themselves or for you. You will need an operation down south and one up north.
When something becomes your business, you make decisions based on what you need to do to make a living. That’s why we see Boyd, Phillip, and Buck riding 7 or 8 horses in one horse trial. That’s why horses’ records are meticulously managed to avoid poor scores or letters showing up when they are offered for sale.
And these are just a very few changes related to a sport that now needs to produce revenue for professional riders, professional show management, professional course builders, and other many professionals.
And I think the entire group, including a lot of amateur riders, breeders, and fans, would like to comfort themselves by saying the sport is safer today than in the past. Yes, the footing and fences in the 60s, 70s, and 80s were hair raising, and to complete a team, horses were run into the ground and catastrophically injured. When comparing those things, eventing looks better today. However, I believe we’re comparing apples and oranges,
We need to ask ourselves about what the sport has become. Sure, the fences are beautiful and the footing beautifully maintained, but we are asking for more jumping efforts at higher rates of speed, for more accuracy and mentally-tiring focus over tight and twisty courses. We have better medical therapy, but it’s being used to help horses jump higher and run faster while competing many times more per year than ever before.
The sport may be different, but it may not be better.
I think it is easy to say “join a committee” or “do something about it.” You can have the ideas, be willing to do something, and/or on the committee but you need the sport’s organizations to be willing to listen, and even if you do have someone listening, you still need the professional riders’ to admit the sport needs to change to better protect both horses and riders. Yet, we can’t even get riders, as a group, to stand up to bad courses, such as the one at Pau, or insist on better research to ensure their horses have the best chance of survival.
How many people, including Denny, have tried to help improve the safety of the sport and been blown off? What pushes someone to the point that he has to basically “scream” on the internet that this sport is killing too many horses, because, face it, even one death, is ONE TOO MANY.
Even on here, we have people who are willing to say, “Well, this was a tragic accident. It could happen in the pasture.” But the difference is…it didn’t happen in the pasture! It happened at a 4-star event in which the horse’s rider said the course and horse were not suited to each other. It happened to a rider who has been using a profile picture of he and said horse in the midst of a rotational fall at another 4-star event.
I absolutely believe Boyd loved this horse very much, but the optics of this death are not good.
As someone who has been away from the sport for 11 years, I have to ask myself, is it really okay to support a sport that feels a horse’s death is an acceptable risk…no matter how that horse dies? When a horse dies in dressage or show jumping, it is a freak event because it is not common. Eventing, on the other hand, well, just look at the long list of horse and rider deaths posted on another thread on this forum.
Just because we say less horses die or are injured does not mean this “better” statistic makes any of it okay.
I think what we are seeing online is so ugly but I won’t bad mouth Denny, who absolutely is one of the finest horsemen I’ve known and feels absolutely gutted to see one more horse lost to a sport that is so willingly sacrificing them, nor will I blame the riders responding to him, who fear the same will happen to horses of their own but feel they have no choice but to accept the sport as it now is in order to make a living while following their passion.
I am just terribly sad for everyone involved. I do think we are getting closer to a breaking point of too many horses dying to justify a sport that has become a business for humans.
