A study on rotational falls and pins;https://www.horsetalk.co.nz/2017/01/30/researchers-eventing-rotational-falls-fence-safety/
That study should be complete now. Can anyone point to its results (I Googled but didn’t find it)?
I watched each trip through here. On balance, it looks like one of two things: either the distance between the bounce logs was long, or there was something backing the horses off more than normal. Out of 7 horses, one broke the 2nd jump, two left a leg at the first jump, and one chipped to both elements of the bounce.
I recognized all the horses and riders and while I’m not going to go back to check all their records at that point in time, all of them had some experience at the level, up to much experience at the level.
The horse that broke the jump did not appear to hit it very hard. Instead, it looked to me like the horse expected to get a bit of drag from the drop down, and didn’t, which is understandable given all that horse’s previous training and competition experience with non-breakable fences.
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What I see is the horse skip from the left lead to the right lead at take off for the first element. He lands on the right lead in front of the second element and then sees the water? which stalls his left leg. He breaks the log with his left knee which could have rotated him if the log didn’t frangitate. Horse hung a leg on a drop into water and the frangible log let go of the trapped left forearm and the horse was able to catch himself on the landing.
Horse is forced onto its left lead upon landing and if you watch the rider get unseated you see other evidence that it wasn’t a slither over the log scenario
The prolog was expensive, labor intensive and it could break under a horse calmly slithering off a drop but I think those weaknesses could be improved with some innovation. Frangible pins also break under slithering horses and I sort of like the ground jury discretion as to whether penalties apply in these cases but perhaps the rules say otherwise currently.
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Just curious, has anyone else read some of Denny Emmerson’s post about how eventing has evolved into the sport as it now exists? How the horses may not be as fit, and how much more technical the courses on X are? Why? I am not an eventer, but have many friends who are, and I find much of what he says to be so true.
Just a thought… any merit to the idea of no longer allowing watches out on xc… I mean if you don’t have that watch counting down; perhaps riders will ride the fence not the time.
When I used to event I rarely used a watch, I felt that it distracted me and I would get more aggressive at the end of the course, especially if I was close to the lead. By removing my watch I stayed more on task of giving my horse a good ride to each jump and rating the gallop by the terrain and how the jumps felt coming to me.
Could be this is nothing and just what happened for me; but thought it may be worth a mention. It would also make it tougher to win and make learning your inner clock a vital aspect of the sport going forward instead of making fences more technical all the time.
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Just adding a different perspective re: riders not respecting frangible fences. I activated a frangible oxer last summer. It was NOT because I didn’t respect it because it was a frangible fence/I knew I wouldn’t get hurt if I got in a pickle. It actually was the reverse of that psychology- I saw that the fence had MIMs clip and equated that to “oh my god this fence is so scary they had to make it frangible.” So when I came up to the open oxer and didn’t see a distance, I panicked and rather than sitting tight, supporting, and letting my catty little horse have the add, I gunned it, took off too early, pulled down the back rail and landed in a heap literally in front of the saddle on my horse’s neck. If it were on video, I’m sure you could say I rode poorly to it, but that’s not news to me- I know I screwed up. I would love to know what other riders in my position have to say, but it was TERRIFYING to know what could’ve happened if not for the MIMs clip and I sure as hell will do everything in my power to never repeat the experience.
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I just started working on analysis like this on Friday. I am inputting show results from the USEA website into Excel and calculating horse fall, rider fall, refusal, and completion rates for each event at each level. Unfortunately I can’t do pin breaks because it’s not captured. 
Eventually I will have enough data to calculate means, standard deviations, etc. I am including course designer names so stats can be broken down by CD too.
It is not difficult but it is time-consuming. I started with 2019 Area 2 since that’s my area and it took me a couple hours just to do March and April 2019, though that included some start-up type stuff and troubleshooting my Excel formulas.
If anyone would like to help that would be great. My goal is to analyze all USEA results from 2015 to 2019.
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Libby, some of that has already been done (maybe just for 4*/5*) because I remember someone posting a list with stats last year sometime – maybe on the Burghley thread? You could check it out. Thanks for working on that, will be interesting to see.
Oh damn, I definitely don’t want to duplicate any work! I will go looking. If anyone knows where to find this please LMK!
ETA: In the 2019 Burghley thread @add leg did it for 5 stars only (post 529 if anyone’s interested!).
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Great post brings up a factor I hadn’t considered. Your heightened “respect” for the jump created a mistake. This issue should lessen if a greater percentage of fences get frangible technology. I am agitated when a course designer brings up the lack of “rider respect” for the fences when discussing bad riding leading to rotational falls.
I’m not trying to draw you out but your scenario should be sort of a big deal. It sounds like the clips might have prevented a horse fall. It sounds like you probably are a good rider that made a mistake in the heat of the moment. Your near miss should be scrutinized extensively; discussions with the course designer, builder, TD etc etc. Did any of that happen?
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Here’s an example on how a lot of rider choose to take on MIM-clip fences. It goes fast even in slowmo around 6h in to the movie.[video=youtube_share;VD7X5Oawo2g]https://youtu.be/VD7X5Oawo2g?t=21899[/video]
Back in the early to mid 90’s we had a death in Pa at novice or training level at a table. After that they said no flat top,tables. Then over a year and a half or so they started coming back. Was there a study or reason for the back and forth on the rule?
6:05 into that movie is where a fall is played in slow-mo. Yikes, glad they both walked away from that one.
So you think an unintended consequence is that riders think that they can ride it differently because it is clipped. A false sense of security might make it even more dangerous because it encourages bad riding?
If frangible technology was perfected, we could have a sport with more bad riding but without the rotational falls. Would that be better than the status quo?
That is a great video that brings up a lot of issues to be discussed further.
If you watched his entire round, he was becoming less in control as it proceeded. He did the same bad riding at a previous unpinned fence - came in too fast, pulley reined the last few strides with the horse’s head raised way up, missed the distance and the horse scrambled. He had a run-out as a result.
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A question - this discussion is assuming that the horse actually tries to jump the obstacle, what happens if it doesn’t and collides with the fence at speed but with no vertical component whatsoever? My thought is that you would get one of those spectacular old style Hollywood rotational falls produced by tripping the horse. ISTR that, on review, this is actually happened in several of these tragic events.
Another thought is that penalizing a particular rider for distorting a MIMS Clip will be almost impossible to police in practice. Some fence designs have multiple clips and, even in Upper Level divisions with three minute intervals between riders, it will just take too long to verify.
What I saw was the rider recognizing that he was wrong about 4 strides away and nipped the horse the next three strides. the horse didn’t respond by shortening quite enough and he was buried at the base for takeoff. I don’t think the fact that the fence was clipped played a role unless that rider would have normally seen the bad striding eight strides out on an unclipped fence.
I think the take away point of that video for me was that the technology failed! The fence didn’t deploy and the horse fell. Not good enough, sorry. The clip in that instance wasn’t sensitive enough, it produced a false negative test result, the worst kind of sin in this scenario…
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And that, is not just the state of the art in frangibles but the heart of the problem. Even a horse clearing a fence can & will hit it with considerable force such that any device must resist this deformation or the fence will collapse prematurely possibly triggering a fall. The gradual effect of these impacts will also eventually deform the device (more often than not now a MIMS clip) but exactly when this goes past the critical can be hard to ascertain - another reason not to penalise a particular rider.
BTW this is the link to the USEA on Rotational Falls:
https://useventing.com/news-media/news/safety-concepts-for-every-ride-simulations-for-reducing-cross-country-rotational-falls?utm_source=Heels+Down+Brief&utm_campaign=f41f6a8155-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_03_23_01_24_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f8a5fb1320-f41f6a8155-60785417&mc_cid=f41f6a8155&mc_eid=cc70224ab7
I think your link found that 2/5 horses hit a given fence while jumping it. That is definitely a factor in the design of frangible technology.
Can you expand on the scenario in which a horse would fall because a fence prematurely collapses?
