Wow – exciting news!
The Pan Am games are kind of stacked. The USA and Canada against a bunch of countries with much less disposable cash for sports.
Nobody has to play if they don’t want to.
I know. But getting gold silver or bronze at the Pan Am in any sport doesn’t mean what it might if all the nations had similar wealth.
The Brazilians do well in Eventing and Showjumping.
News flash - IRL, there is no such thing as a level playing field 
(I totally get what you’re saying though!)
Brazil took the silver well ahead of Canada for the bronze.
It has to do with securing a slot at the Olympics, which Brazil has now done. (The US was already qualified)
Well, you can call them stacked, but the US does tend to treat Pan Am as a way to send up and coming riders to international competitions/championships. The experience is important to maintain a solid stream of riders in the pipeline. As we all know, it’s much more expensive and complicated to send riders and horses to international competition than it is for many other sports.
It’s hard to get riders that kind of experience - riding in a WC in the US is not the same as taking one or two horses overseas and having way more time on your hands than when home with 15-20 horses and clients occupying your attention all day long.
It’s not like we sent Guenter, Adrienne, Steffen, etc…
I know one of the Pan Am riders personally and could not be more excited for her. She’s worked very hard and I certainly hope this is only an early phase of a long and successful career riding for the US.
Oh yes. I agree the Pan Am games do their job of Olympic selection and Olympic trial run very well, and I’m sure they help many less wealthy countries qualify for Olympics in many different sports.
I just mean that in equestrian the US and Canada always trade the top 3 spots, with some surprises added. I think Mexico made it into the top 3 one year. I expect Canadian jumping will feel the loss of Ian Millar and Eric Lamaze for a while.
So for an individual rider from Canada or the US, getting to the Pan Am games is a huge accomplishment because the depth of competition inside the US in particular is exceptional. But once you are there, most of the other countries are not that well funded
It was only fairly recently like within the last 8 years I realized this. The Olympics and the Pan Am pits together the best athletes from each country not in the world. I was looking at Pan Am general results one year and saw that basically the US and Canada were swapping first and second place across the board in almost all the sports, even ones they never medal in at the Olympics.
If you look at the FEI dressage rankings, pretty much the first 20 or 30 are German or Dutch. There’s going to be some amazing CDI4* somewhere in Northern Europe where the top ranked world competitors are battling it out among themselves. But at the Olympics they are competing against the best from other countries who likely wouldn’t even place in that European CDI4*.
I also learned that the jump heights and cross country courses at the Olympics are not quite as challenging as top.competition in other venues because it wouldn’t be safe for all the competitors.
I just never paid attention to the whole Olympic /Pan Am concept until I got back into.horses and nosy about our national team. Previous to that I’d just assumed it was “the top athletes in the world.” No, it’s top athletes from each country and economic disparity plays a huge role.
That said, getting there are the top.athlete from a highly competitive country does mean something and the people that equestrian events at the Olympics are the top ranked people globally on the FEI lists.
Can anyone explain how it works in terms of Grand Prix vs. Prix St. Georges? If I understand correctly, both levels are offered and are scored together, with standings based on just the scores without any differentiation between levels.
Does that mean that a country could send a team competing entirely at the Prix St. Georges level and potentially secure an Olympic berth without a single Grand Prix-level rider?
This isn’t really accurate. Olympic showjumping has a max of 1.65, which matches the highest levels of the sport. Olympic eventing runs at the championship level, which is roughly 5* dressage and showjumping and 4* cross country. There are only a handful of 5* events in the world. If the Olympics ran at 5* level the vast majority of countries wouldn’t be able to consistently field teams, including the US and Canada. It’s not about safety as much as making sure there’s a big enough field to keep things interesting, plus making it a little easier logistically for the host countries to build the courses.
I don’t know enough about championship level dressage to know if there are parallels here, but I will say that you can run upper-level dressage with just a ring, the same one everyone else uses. You can only run 5* cross country on a 5* cross country course and there aren’t that many of those around to practice on.
Ah ok I stand corrected!
As I understand it riders at Grand Prix get a 3% bonus added to their scores. And a team needs at least 2 riders at Grand Prix to earn an Olympic qualification.
That makes more sense, thank you!
This is an equestrian competition. Even if the nations had similar wealth, that doesn’t mean the horses and riders will have the same talent and expertise. Judges score the performance in front of them, and awards are given on merit.
Individual results:
Yes but in every Pan Am sport Canada and the USA top the scores, even things they don’t medal in at the Olympics.
I guess I’m not understanding why this is such a sticking point for you.
There has never been parity in sporting competition. It’s an understood fact that some nations/teams have more money to spend on sports or put more value on successful athletic endeavors. And within any country, there is not parity in the money spent/available for any sporting competition. All you have to do is look at high school football stadiums in Texas vs say West Virginia.
So they’re winning medals at sports that they would not at the Olympic level. So what? The nations who are not winning medals at Pan Am would not at the Olympics either. It is up to the NGB for each country to decide if they are going to send teams in any particular discipline - no one is forced to field a team.
I actually appreciate that Pan Am pares down dressage to 2 small tour and 2 large tour combos per nation. That is an attempt at some level of parity. I don’t follow the minute details of Show Jumping and Eventing to know if they pare those down as well.
At the end of the day, making the Pan Am team is more than 99% of those of us will EVER do. It’s still a massive achievement and it strikes me a little as mean girl to dis the riders by implying it isn’t a real achievement. All 4 of the Pan Am dressage riders are very accomplished and frankly would blow most of us away in any competition.
And for all this talk - it’s not like the US went 1-2-3 in the individual medals.
