[QUOTE=YEG;8665672]
Let’s draw on the incredibly effective and time-tested risk identification and management strategies that can be found at any industrial/engineering company. I’m an engineer, so that’s what I’ll draw on. At any company I’ve worked at, safety really has been the number one concern, as it should be. No accident is called a “freak accident” in the workplace, because the root cause can always be identified and measures can always be taken to improve safety as a result. “Accidents” aren’t even called accidents anymore, to prove that point: they are incidents, and there is always something to learn from them.
Some of the ways incidents can be reduced:
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Risk identification and mitigation, as OP mentioned. Even if the risk is infinitesimal, let’s make a plan to mitigate it. The probability may be small, but the consequence (death) would be unacceptable.
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If an incident does occur: a thorough investigation has to happen, and a plan made to prevent it from happening in the future. Again, others have mentioned this, and it isn’t happening enough yet.
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Near-misses: this is where we need even more action. We can learn as much from the near-misses as we can from the horrible events that cause injury or death, and the benefit is that we can apply mitigation measures before something catastrophic happens. I think this is an area that needs to be greatly improved. Sometimes jumps are removed from the course, yes, but are they really analyzed to find out what the danger was? Is that learning shared throughout industry so that practices can evolve and others can benefit from the knowledge? I agree we need to collect more data about the jumps involved in injuries and death, but lets go further and collect data on the near-misses as well.
Of course, this all costs money and time and expertise, which isn’t necessarily available in our sporting bodies. I argue that the money and time would be well spent, and that a third party that is an expert at risk management and prevention (not necessarily with an equestrian background!) should be hired to really look at this, for the sake of our horses and our riders.[/QUOTE]
I remember reading about the psychology of near misses. Airplane engineers take them very seriously. If there is any near miss, for instance even planes landing too close together, the whole safety study protocol comes into play. A near miss means you are already in the danger zone.
But IRL, car drivers tend see a near miss as evidence that they are in fact safer, not at more risk. They think “I got myself out of that, I’m a great driver” or they think “that was a fluke,” or “today’s my lucky day, I’m still alive.”
This made a big impression on me, and changed how I view my driving. If I have any kind of near miss, even if it is clearly the other person’s fault, even if it is just something minor like almost backing into a car in the parking lot, I dial it right back and make my driving super safety-conscious for the rest of the day. Realistically, my near-misses happen when I am emotionally distracted or excited about things, too. That is when other people almost hit me 
and everyone else’s driving falls apart :).
I think that something like this could apply to riding at speed. You could be riding at the edge of control, or riding at the edge of the horse’s ability, or at the edge of where the horse is tipping onto the forehand, and save yourself again and again, and get the feeling you could pull yourself out of trouble. Then you are at a big competition, there is a little extra excitement, and the near miss becomes a catastrophe.
I haven’t watched a lot of eventers IRL, and its harder to really follow their whole round. But I’ve watched a lot of kiddie jumpers, and even some pro show jumping, live and on TV, stuff way beyond my pay grade And I’ve found that it isn’t that hard to predict the balk, the run-out, the smashed fence, even the fall, a number of jumps in advance. As one of the posters here says, the horse goes on the forehand and starts getting bad distances. When I was a kid, I used to think this was the horse getting ready to balk or run out; now I see it as the horse losing balance over successive jumps so that by a certain point he can only balk, run out, or fall.
I haven’t watched hundreds of hours of video of rides leading up to rotational falls, like some of the other posters, because I don’t need to, and would find it upsetting. But I completely believe, from my rather limited experience watching show jumpers, that you could probably predict disaster. You could set up a series of videos, play the jumps, pause at a certain point, and ask: crash or champion? Are they going to clear the next jump? My guess is that, in most cases probably, it would be somewhat obvious.
That means that we do in fact have the knowledge to analyze what goes wrong.
And someone other than me can suggest how to train to fix the problems.
