I just saw the email from USEF saying there is a “presidential modification” stating that safety cups are now mandatory on the back rail of all oxers. I agree it’s a good general practice to have, but why was the change done in this way in the middle of March instead of a regular rule change? It’s not like safety cups haven’t been around for years. Was there some sort of incident that prompted this?
I think I saw a discussion somewhere where somebody mentioned the idea that the jump cups could have been a factor when David Beisel got hurt in Ohio a few weeks ago. I think they were talking about the front jump cups, though.
Maybe somebody thought this was a compromise between requiring all the jump cups to be breakaways and not doing anything at all. That’s just a guess on my part.
Somehow I thought this was already a rule. Looking at the full language, I think the main changes are to the schooling areas.
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From the COTH article it seemed the problem was that Hunter rules previously required deeper cups and there are no FEI approved safety cups of the depth specified in the Hunter rules. So they’ve decided that the back rails of oxers in Hunter divisions will now be the shallower safety cups instead. Looks like a trade off of an increased chance of having a rail down versus overall safety.
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Words cannot express how many times the subject of jump cups came up during the USHJA annual meeting online in December. Let’s just say, a LOT. So it has been a topic of discussion for a while.
That’s what the article made it sound like. What was the concern? That people would have more rails with the shallower cups? I’m curious what the resistance to the change was.
I think it was a combination of concern about having more rails down plus the fact that it sounded like the cups they wanted basically just do not exist at this time.
So that was the cause of a lot of yinging and yanging back and forth about what to do in the meantime until different jump cups become available.
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I am now envisioning a hunter round with flat cups and I like it. Sorry jump crew.
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I’m actually going to take this one step further. What if shallow jump cups sorted out the over-prepped, and let judges off the hook.
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I am curious what precipitated this as an immediate change. I noticed on FB that all over-fences classes for the Region 7 Arabian show have been cancelled. Wonder if these are connected? Like, the jump supplier doesn’t have these cups, or if there is no connection at all (totally possible, could be entries were just too low).
suppose both could be true but when I saw the original statement from the federation pres, I thought what if a show management does not have these cups on hand A smaller club running a show may not have ready funds to buy sufficient cups
I would guess some kind of insurance prompted it if they are indeed canceling classes last minute.
