I have been listening to Podcasts and hearing from riders working on the safety task force that they are looking at increasing qualifications for upgrading.
Lesley law talked about how the qualifications now are more geared toward good professionals and not amatuers or professionals who are not quite there yet, and that they should be geared more toward those without experience looking to move up and requiring much more experience and also better finishing scores.
I am supportive of this. What is everyone elses thoughts?
Iāve always felt like the horse/rider combination should have to reach the qualifications together rather than each having reached them separately and then attempting to tackle the level together. As it stands, I feel like you can put an inexperienced rider up on Steady Eddie and get the rides in, then they can turn around and hop on Jesus Take the Reins that only Michael Jung should expect to hang onto next weekend. Maybe that punishes the good pros that do have the experience to figure out whether the combination should be out there together. I donāt know.
I guess Iād have to see the proposed changes to say I support or donāt support them.
āMore geared toward those without experienceā or ārequiring better finishing scoresā could mean so many different things.
If the goal is to prevent accidents, it would also be worth looking at whether falls are more likely among people who would have not have been qualified under the new standards.
This isnāt going to do much except put up barriers to regular riders moving up. Does that make the sport safer?
This will go nowhere to solving the really serious problems in the sport - poor obstacle and course design; insularity of officials (this would be cronyism and a lack of desire to allow for new designers/officials) and a willingness to do anything for the monied side of the sport.
I guess this is topical after the most recent fatality but that pair was qualified through the rules and had a coach who felt they were properly prepared for the level. Would more runs at Prelim have saved her? No - that they got by like that for so long was just a matter of chance.
It depends. Are these standards going to be drafted with geographic distances in mind? Every increase in qualification requirements really hurts proficient amateur athletes who canāt afford to move to eventing-rich areas. Especially once you progress past Prelim/CCI2*.
NotaPonyDoc āWhat if we just actually followed the qualifications in place now? Half the time I see people running prelim with out meeting the quals.ā
I donāt think this is valid at all. You have to meet the qualifications to enter to begin with. For sure Xentry tells you what you can enter at the outset. EventEntries doesnāt but event secretaries do check.
To support gardenie -
The event secretary has to send the entries to the USEA before the event. The USEA office checks for current memberships, and qualifications, among other things.
Agreed with gardenie and Janet. I very closely follow entries at A/4*/5*. I have seen people enter events not being qualified but USEF informs them the week of the event if they are not qualified. I have not seen anyone un-qualified actually come down centerline.
In regards to the qualifications, I agree that I will need to see how they are structured. I do not think more qualifications of the type we currently have is that helpful. I think the quality of the recent runs is by far more important.
If a person takes 20 runs to get 4 clean cross countries, that is not a pair who needs to move up. This is what Equiratings has been trying to push with their EI rating, but it really should be related to the horse/rider pair over just the horse. And I think the scale needs to reflect the increased risk associated with moving up to the next level as well, which it currently does not, which sows confusion amongst those viewing it.
If a person takes 6 runs to get 6 clean cross countries but they are scary at every run, they do not need to move up. This is harder to implement but I think it would be fairly easy to develop a speed rating system that could develop a list of pairs that officials could know to keep an eye on based on their propensity for speed, all the time, even at their first events at a level. Not saying that all of those riders are unsafe but it narrows the pool of riders that the officials should put an eye on to make sure their speed is paired with safe riding and the appropriate skills to manage the speed.
When I talked to Jon Holling about this topic for a COTH podcast literally right before the pandemic hit, I expressed that a knee jerk reaction of increased qualifications is less helpful than an actual dissection of each accident by safety experts. I expressed that to several other āsenior levelā members of the eventing community who also reached out to me.
I do not know if that message got through. I did have a follow up column regarding different safety techniques other recreational/sporting activities have utilized that I researched for but I did not end up writing it because the pandemic was declared WHO the same day we recorded the COTH podcast and quite frankly, it would have become completely lost in the noise.
For the record, I very much got the feeling that the members involved do not truly understand that experts in physics and engineering, experts in the medical field, and experts at riding do not necessarily correlate to an expertise in safety and investigating accidents.
The current qualifications suck. The MER for dressage is too low (at 45). It should go back to 50. An MER shouldnāt be about being competitive. These riders need xc miles and experience. The dressage score is not related to readiness xc. Many of the safest and good xc horses struggle to get below 45. Those are the horses that run clean xc every time and should be allowed to give their riders experience.
Would like to see more of this analysis and less knee-jerk, for sure. I think Jonās heart was in the right place. I think that is noble but only addresses one measure, and that more frangible fences does not necessarily equate to increased safety. I have wondered since the pandemic hit how the frangible fence fund he started is being handled/distributed. Having said that I wonāt be hypocritical, I have donated to that fund in Kerry & Katās memory and in the past I have donated to the USEA safety initiatives fund after fatalities.
I had been considering starting an education in XC design this year after hearing last fall that we are short on CDs in my region. Unfortunately my first two building and shadowing experiences have already been cancelled due to the virus shut-down.
Not sure I get this. This is how the rules currently work (horse and rider have to earn the MERs together) unless a rider is has reached a certain categorization. Which takes quite a bit of experience (and success on multiple horses) to gain.
I thought thatās how it worked until a few years ago after a rider took a bad fall and someone mentioned it was their first event together, so I looked.
Looking at the USEAās appendix on qualifications, it seems to say āBoth the competitor and the horse, though not necessarily as a combination, must have achievedā¦ā So the rider needs to have qualified, the horse needs to have qualified, but they donāt have to have proven that rider can handle that horse on course.
Am I interpreting that incorrectly? Itās been a looong time since Iāve even considered eventing.
The bottom line is youāre never going to prevent all accidents in what is inherently a high-risk sport. Like sky-diving, motocross, gymnastics and football, the very nature of the activity that makes it a thrill is the risk factor.
There was a time when this sport was dominated by a crowd whoād cut their teeth fox-hunting, who rode their horses out over large landscapes virtually every day, and those horses were mostly TBās bred for the track for whom agility at speed was inherent to their genetic makeup. There were also very different attitudes surrounding ārisk.ā
It is well to remember this sport began as an ultimate test for the ābest of the bestā Cavalry officers, who before WWII were the equivalent of āTop Gunā fighter pilots as the swiftly-moving, can-do, eyes and ears of the Army.
Their ethos was you got it done or died trying. The Olympic movement, in essence āimage of war without itās guiltā but one heluva lot of transferred jingoism, fostered the same attitude.
This isnāt the society weāre living in today. Most people born after 1995 literally expect āsomeoneā to keep them perfectly āsafe,ā physically and even mentally, from womb to tomb. If a wreck happens, we donāt chalk it up to bad luck or bad riding or manure happens; we look for someone to scapegoat and that means liability suits.
What Iād do: Get rid of table jumps. Completely. Forever. Ditto any āgotchaā obstacle that creates an optical illusion problem to a horse, and the freaky circus-stunt fences like jumping through a brush hoop over a skinny. What I WOULD build are big, wide, imposing, solid fences you can gallop down to which encourange proper jumping form and reward good forward riding rather than trappy, trick, technical questions. Save those for the stadium, and even then, build the course to elicit the kind of riding you want to see!
Moving up: The nature of the horse business is you are frequently dealing with wealthy people with serious ego-needs, whose self-perceptions seriously outpace their actual skill sets. Somehow you, (the hired help!) have to be the one to impart to them theyāre not quite ready yet to take on greater glory. So having some well-defined rules that the horse and rider combination must have, say 3 finishes with zero XC faults in order to consider trying a level higher would protect people from themselves while letting trainers off the hook.
By no means should the rulemaking be geared toward professionals of any stripe. This is not the NFL.
