Was anyone else worried about the effect that the fancy, artistic, distracting cross country fences would have upon horses and riders? Yes, they were beautiful and related to Peru - but somewhere along the way, the concept of naturalistic fences was lost. So many hours of prep, so much money to send a pair to Lima - and then to be eliminated. Ouch! I thought that the goal was to have most horses complete cross country while still producing a result. This course did not meet this standard.
I just went and looked quickly for fence by fence cross country results but nothing came up.
My personal impression, from the few clips I saw, the coverage I read, and the gross level results was that the low completion percentage was probably more attributable to the intensity of the course (twists and turns, not too many galloping stretches, tricky combinations) rather than the decorations - but I honestly have not seen and do not know enough to speculate more.
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I looked at the photos of the fences and they did not look excessively decorated to me. Like one would see at any big competition.
The area they had to work with was relativeley small, so the fences had to fit and be incorporated into the landscape.
They always are falsy at world games, nothing new really.
