Anyone have a lead on where this data would be found? This is what I do professionally and would love to run the numbers.
Guess it’d be # starters, # Es/RFs, course designer (plus pin activations would be interesting) for the last… x number of years at all the 5*s.
3 Likes
I dunno why each rider did what they did. But as to why someone would go hard to double verticals, it could be that they saw the long spots as the only way to make the distance come up right. That they felt they had to put fewer strides in the middle to make it ride well. And that was the best way to avoid problems. Except for some, it didn’t work.
That is, that the design and the placement of the obstacle encouraged very forward riding, even when it wasn’t the best idea. After all, forward riding all the way is considered by many to be a hallmark of a CMP course.
Just speculation. Wasn’t there, didn’t walk the course or ride it. Don’t know what each of the riders truly thought about that obstacle (except those who said they hated it).
4 Likes
There were 2-3 years when a lot of data of that nature was collected from UL courses all over the United States. While David O’Connor was USEF president and was leading a movement to improve eventing safety. Maybe 2006? or 07?
They looked at fairly detailed profiles of individual obstacles. Such as open oxers vs tables, placement with drop landing or not, placement near a drop or step-up, etc.
They collected a lot of speed data as well. That’s when they figured out that UL’s, especially Prelim, were riding much, much faster between jumps than average pace of the optimum time. They were making up time between jumps because they were slowing down so much to navigate particular obstacles. I think a greater appreciation for galloping fences was learned.
I remember sitting on a course with a watch and a clipboard, with the sole assignment of marking the time of each competitor passing that spot on the course. Volunteer timers were placed before and after more complex combinations on courses to get a feel of how much slow-down / speed-up was going on. The answer was: lots of significant changes of speed.
I wonder if that data is still around somewhere. A lot of it might still be valid in terms of basic obstacle and course design.
2 Likes
I don’t feel picked on at all, it is a good conversation, I wanted to go back and see some of the falls that are said to be scarier, like WF’s. I missed the second half because of kid sports. And I can’t get it to replay yet.
I don’t think anyone was happy with those gates and their failure to deploy, including CMP. He said flatly they won’t be there next year in the press conference. He thought they would ride better than they did, he thought the frangible would deploy better than it did. Maybe the move needs to be when a fence with frangible tech isn’t operating as it supposed to, it should be removed or lowered/modified on the fly.
7 Likes
There is simply no excuse for the lack of discernment on the part of Eliza Stoddart (to whom you are referring) and the officials who watched her round. When she triggered the pin at Discovery Valley across the log corner, her horse whacked himself pretty good and she never even made an attempt to slow down and see if he was ok (although she did turn her head around while galloping away to confirm she’d got an 11). The horse was clearly struggling up until the gates (where he fell) and the writing was on the wall. It seems like the officials had ample reason to pull her off course, and they’re lucky neither horse or rider was seriously injured.
Interesting, at Burghley several years ago, a rider (I believe she was from Sweden) was pulled up very early on course for what appeared to be dangerous riding. She basically was screaming at her horse, flapping her arms and was generally loose in the tack. I know it happens, but it was the first time I’d personally seen anyone pulled up for dangerous riding at a 5* (then a 4*).
5 Likes
I think breaking a pin should be E or like 60 penalties so people retire. Sorry if your horse is breaking XC jumps time to get off the course for a day. Shitty riding or one off, I don’t care.
Also, if jumps are being built now on the thought that “This pin will give if there is error” than this is 100% the wrong attitude for course building!!!
It was a comment on FB said, but I want to repeat it here. If you wouldn’t build the fence without a pin and think it completely safe, then don’t build it AT ALL.
Just because you can make it and pin it doesn’t mean you should. 1 pin an event should happen if that. How many pins were activated at Burghley? Too many, way too many.
20 Likes
If the XC jumps looked like XC jumps, I think that would help. Horses jump XC jumps better, for the most part. The majority of pins that broke were at airy fences with narrow rails that looked like… show jumps.
Ian Stark said this during his commentating as well.
14 broke.
6 Likes
Ian Stark brought that point up Saturday in the commentary. I think he has built a few courses, and Lord knows, he has ridden a few.
2 Likes
Butbutbut… they had a great dressage test!
Great dressage has kept a number of inappropriate or unsafe horses out there on XC. I’m firmly of the belief that the surest way to make XC safer is to either get rid of dressage completely or to make it simply Pass/Fail. If the sport did that, then there’d be no reason at all to keep an unsafe jumper in the sport.
Stoddart’s horse is really attractive and has plenty of ability but, like many Opposition horses, he has a unique and disquieting vision of XC.
5 Likes
Thank you.
I respect Ians opinion.
I also think you are SPOT ON about the fences looking like XC fences and NOT SJs. No wonder the horses are so confused. Not to mention the ride to them is also too SJing like, having tight turns, rolls, and needing collected canter at times.
9 Likes
Pippa has always been here! She was doing a lot of Showjumping too…
The way I look at it, there are 2 reasons that more horses fall in upper level eventing vs lower level eventing or showjumping:
- Courses are more technical than lower level eventing, making mistakes more likely and horses more likely to hit fences
- There is less room for error with bigger fences, and when the fences are relatively solid, the horse falls in eventing, rather than the fence as in showjumping
The solution to #1 is less technical courses, which of course could be done … However, it would have the side effect of making eventing largely a dressage-and-showjumping contest. We all know the old long format isn’t coming back, and it’s much easier to make time and jump clear around a less technical course.
The solution to #2 is to make fences fall more easily so that the fence comes down instead of the horse. But this only improves the safety at fences at which frangible devices are used, and only assuming those devices deploy when hit. If all the fences are frangible, it eventually becomes showjumping over terrain … you might have fewer falls, but it’s a totally different game.
Or you can do what we have now, with some solid fences and some frangible ones, and keep the level of technicality, and maintain the status quo… and claim “rider/course designer responsibility” when horses fall on XC.
2 Likes
Oliver Townend said something similar in that press conference after xc with Pippa and CMP. (The replay of that really is worth a watch for anyone who hasn’t caught it already. I am not a particular fan of OT overall, but I do love his sense of humor.)
Real question for those who compete at that level or are close to people who do: Pippa talked about how awful it is in the lorrie on the night before xc and how it was nice to have someone with her who understood. Is it the same awful as before any major event for a competitive, elite athlete at a world level event or is it a different awful because you know you are going to go out and do this thing, and there is a very real possibility that you or your horse might be killed or very seriously injured?
3 Likes
There are other factors we can add to make it more challenging. As far as I’m concerned, SJ still doesn’t pay a big enough role and dressage is too much of a role. Endurance in some way shape or form would be a way to make the courses less dangerous but add challenge to the sport and also require riders to have their horses fit and ready. JMO.
There are some other sports with an alarming injury rate and the injuries are often serious. Freestyle skiing, trampoline, motorsport, anything with high speed and big air.
I was once on a flight with a big group of freestyle skiers returning from a World Cup in Japan. There was a long line-up of wheelchairs and also ambulatory people with broken limbs or bandaged heads and because they were all young and tanned/sunburned, I assumed they were injured soldiers coming back from Iraq or Afghanistan. I asked an FIS official who was there if this was normal for a World Cup and he said ‘Yes’.
3 Likes
I’m not certain that an endurance phase would decrease the number or horse falls all that much, even if the course was a bit less technical. Assuming the endurance phase is long enough to be significant and not just a nice cross-country warmup, horses will be more tired than they otherwise would be on XC, and therefore more likely to fall in situations where things get hairy — unless XC is kept very simple and showjumping afterward is allowed to be the main deciding factor. That said, I’m not opposed to the idea, because traditionally endurance was an important part of eventing … I just don’t know that its re-addition to the sport would greatly reduce horse falls.
I’m not even convinced that there are more falls now per x number of starts than there used to be during the long format days (feel free to prove me wrong if there is actual data on this!). It’s just that people as a whole (both inside and outside the sport) seem to have a lower tolerance for it.
4 Likes
Pretty much any “extreme” sport. The injury rates for people who do motocross and snowmobile freestyle type events is very high. Including deaths from snowmobiles landing on them. Even football, you can get tackled and never walk again.
2 Likes
@Xctrygirl Thanks. The Maltings look really big for 1.2m. Maybe they allow wider jumps than 1.2m jumpers? That may make them look bigger. You also have to have a pretty special horse to miss to solid and wide 1.2m! at least in SJ the rails fall easily when you make a mistake and missing repeatedly still takes the heart out of them eventually. And this is not me judging, I miss 100x more than some of these riders! But I don’t blame the jump when I bury my horse to an impossible distance. It’s because of me.
I did think it was good at the Maltings that the Joules boxes were set out front a bit.
Rewatched Doug and Van Diver’s fall on the link above (thanks!). lost impulsion before the second Maltings over and Van Diver just second guessed the corner and was sticky off the ground there. That was a real shame because they were looking super.
Unmarked Bills is a horse for the future and Chris has a good partnership with him. There were some green moments but a lot of promise there.
The other heartbreaker of the day, besides Tim and Ringwood Sky Boy, was Efraim catching his shoe in his martingale. What a sad way to go home. Lovely horse.
1 Like
I don’t know, the horses jumped well after phase A/B/C and D before.
I have all the Burghley/Badminton/Kentucky and Olympic eventing tapes from about 1991-200+ There were usually a handfull of falls an event, maybe 2 on a good day, 5 on a bad day. 13 is unreal. I can’t get actual results from the website, I will look at the FEI results when I have time and try and compare how many horse falls over the last 20 years each year to see if there is in fact an increase.
As someone with a jumping machine who tolerates but doesn’t love dressage, I’m all for reducing the influence of dressage on placing (maybe a new dressage coefficient of 0.5 instead of 1.5). And there are definitely some horses out there competing that have had multiple falls and I wouldn’t want to ride cross country because they don’t seem to have the self-preservation instinct.
But I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the main cause of falls on XC at the upper levels, especially on a course like the one at Burghley, is horses that are unsafe jumpers. There have been plenty of bad falls that have happened to horses with previously good records and capable riders on their backs.
3 Likes
