WTF Are We Doing?

[redalter]

[QUOTE=vineyridge;8667135]
I may be wrong because it’s hardly an organized sport, but foxhunting involves riding XC over terrain and natural obstacles, and it doesn’t seem to have as many horse and rider deaths. So two thoughts–event riders used to foxhunt and in the US, most no longer do. The more experience with cross country riding the better.

Second thought–perhaps the mere fact that jumps are designed to be certain heights and widths over and over again and in complexes increases the danger. Foxhunters have been known to jump 4 and 5 bar fences, but usually only once or twice per day, if then. Foxhunters ride in water, jump solid fences, go at a gallop over terrain, jumping whatever is in the way (in first field). Heck, when I was a teenager, my hunt used to carry rolls of black plastic so they could wrap barbed wire, and we’d jump the fence. No one died, and no horses were ever broken that I saw. In New Zealand, their hunters jump naked electric wire fences that have substantial height.

Given that, I’d put my money on the unceasing technicality of today’s XC courses and their effect on the human and horse brain.[/QUOTE]

:applause::applause::applause::applause:

[Gry2Yng]

[QUOTE=Thylacine;8665941]

eventing NEVER used to be like this.[/QUOTE]

According to the data, Eventing used to be worse than this, you just didn’t hear about it.

[snowrider]

[QUOTE=Mischievous;8666965]
I understand your concern, but eventing has ALWAYS been like this. ALWAYS. The only difference is the internet and the access to information that we didn’t used to have access too.

As a matter of fact RIDING has always been like this. I have attended more equine caused funerals than I care to count in my 30+ years in this business, and NONE of them have been eventing, or even jumping deaths.

The only way to stop the riding deaths is to stop riding horses. Perhaps we should stop riding them. If the riders who die eventing is too many and the sport should stop, then aren’t the ones who die NOT eventing just as important, and shouldn’t we stop all riding?

I am not trying to be snarky, but I am struggling with this question right now. In my experience more people die just riding horses than die eventing, so why no calls for action about that? Shouldn’t we be questioning all horse activity? If not, why not? I am really having a hard time separating the two.

Are eventers lives more important than other horsemen’s lives? If eventers deaths are unacceptable and cause us to question the sport, why are other horsemen’s deaths not causing the same consideration and discussion about ending equestrienne sport altogether?

Does anyone have statistics for general equine deaths per participant vs. eventing deaths per participant?[/QUOTE]
It’s the competition aspect. People die in sports like rock climbing and skiing all the time too but not during competition. When they do it is a HUGE deal and can kill a venue or competition. In fact I don’t think anyone has ever died at a climbing competition that I know of.

Why? Because competitions are usually designed to not put competitors at the absolute limits of their skill, physical abilities and mental abilities at the same time for safety reasons. There should be a margin of safety, always.

Eventing is a strange one because it doesn’t exist outside of competition anymore. There is no pool of well rounded non competition oriented riders who regularly school dressage and ride cross country on the same horse to provide a real world counterpart to the competition.

[tbchick84]

I’ve been thinking about this for a few days now. Logic tells me, that as long as fallible humans ride 1200lb fallible horses at high speed over solid obstacles, accidents are going to happen. It seems to shift the focus on minimizing the damage. This is a bit out there and would need some design modification to fit eventing, but can anything similar to roll bars be incorporated into vest design? Something like a flat-ish roll bar would effectively protect the chest area from a crush injury? For helmets, would something more similar to what there wear in motor cross help protect from head trauma without adding so much weight as to affect how riders can balance their horses for the larger fences?

[Gnep]

[QUOTE=Badger;8667096]
If it’s always been this way and we are just now aware of the severity of the risk because we finally have access to the information, then we should process the new information, learn from it, and make changes. Anything less is the proverbial sticking your head in the sand (an illustration of blocking all new information input). Sticking your head in the sand is not the proper response to a growing realization of how high the deadly risk to horse and humans really is. I am sickened by GNEPs story about the eight riders he was on a young rider team with, and he is one of only three still around, the rest (if I am reading the post right) died eventing at some point.

Holy.

Crap.

Not reasonable, not sustainable.

That is correct. One of them is now a rather famous coach, to say at least.
The other one went into race horses, first as a rider, than because of weight as coach.
I never road with my older brother, he is 7 years older and he quit with 20, not the horses but eventing, he did hunting, because it was so much saver.

I just want everybody to understand, todays eventing is already 50 ore 60 times saver. We had no vests, something called helmet, but honestly they probably killed the riders, jump construction, design and so on, were rather rough, so to speak. Speeds, distances were far higher and longer. Can any one imaging to fly down a tracktor trail in the forest with ruds a foot deep, in rain at 600 plus, than cross over the ruds and have to jump a natural, a real sheep pen, with rather strange distances.
I just want to remind people who always say, it was so much better in the old time and no progress has been made.

The sport has made huge progress, but it has not been able to develop a culture of safety, were fatalities are considered unacceptable, were reasons for serious injuries are investigated and than changes be made.

Huge progress has been made, slowly, agonizing slowly, to slow. Some of it is knee jerking, political correct, like the helmet rule for Dressage, we did something, pat us on the shoulder.

[Gestalt]

I don’t know how to describe my emotion while reading this thread. It seems as though some people who think nothing can change or even think we should try.

[Manahmanah]

[QUOTE=Gestalt;8667337]
I don’t know how to describe my emotion while reading this thread. It seems as though some people who think nothing can change or even think we should try.[/QUOTE]

I don’t see that at all.

This year’s rendition is a lot better than the henny penny sky-is-falling business that went around last year.

I really appreciate the stories from the old timers. Eventing used to be a lot more dangerous. The stories and the data both support this.

It shows that we are making progress. No, we are not “there yet”… but we are on our way. So many people are hopping up and down yelling that no changes are being made, people just don’t care. That is far from the truth. I don’t know how many times the research on tables (make them slightly sloping, geoundlines, etc) has been posted in this and the JFXC thread. Every time someone posts it they claim that the research is there but nobody listens to it. These same people have obviously not reviewed the FEI course design sheets anytime lately or they would have known all those suggestions HAVE been listened to and are in effect.

If you are shouting from the rooftops that nobody is listening but too lazy to check if the information that you are shouting is correct, this is not helpful to our sport. We will not go anywhere if we allow these people to poison the well from within .

[Gnep]

[QUOTE=Manahmanah;8667364]
I don’t see that at all.

This year’s rendition is a lot better than the henny penny sky-is-falling business that went around last year.

I really appreciate the stories from the old timers. Eventing used to be a lot more dangerous. The stories and the data both support this.

It shows that we are making progress. No, we are not “there yet”… but we are on our way. So many people are hopping up and down yelling that no changes are being made, people just don’t care. That is far from the truth. I don’t know how many times the research on tables (make them slightly sloping, geoundlines, etc) has been posted in this and the JFXC thread. Every time someone posts it they claim that the research is there but nobody listens to it. These same people have obviously not reviewed the FEI course design sheets anytime lately or they would have known all those suggestions HAVE been listened to and are in effect.

If you are shouting from the rooftops that nobody is listening but too lazy to check if the information that you are shouting is correct, this is not helpful to our sport. We will not go anywhere if we allow these people to poison the well from within .[/QUOTE]

The problem of the sport is not the progress it has made, concerning safety, it is how that progress was made.
The sport has never progressed from the 70, 80, 90 into the modern age, from its culture how it handles those accident, toughen up cup cake, move on nothing to see, upper stiff lip, RIP, kick on, next show please, lets have a save one this weekend, you see we had one and nobody got hurt or killed, freak accident. The sport just moves on. That’s what high risk sports used to do, 20 years ago.
That is the nature of our sport, ok.

Wrong, ain’t ok, not any more, our culture has changed, its not any more the 80s or 90s, its the 21st century.
We have the tools. We can built the most powerfull race cars ever, to absolute perfection, that allow a driver to survive 40 and 50 gs impact, by just using a computer and on top of it they are nearly perfect for racing without having seen a road.
Money wise it is a lousy comparison, but than world wide eventing is a multi billion dollar business.
If eventing wanted it, world wide, they could raise the money, to develop proper safety gear for riders or develop jumps that would lower the risk of rotation, or develop jumps that would prevent killing crashes and so on and so on.

If eventing does not change as any of the high risk sport has done, it is toast.
It will be toast in Rio if any horse has to be killed, at least for the Olympics. It will not hurt the sport much, but it will raise awareness, not in the sport, that will be the usual, but in the public and that could mean legislation in some countries.

Maybe it needs a very public fatality, to wake it up

[JER]

[QUOTE=Gnep;8667435]

It will be toast in Rio if any horse has to be killed, at least for the Olympics. It will not hurt the sport much, but it will raise awareness, not in the sport, that will be the usual, but in the public and that could mean legislation in some countries.

Maybe it needs a very public fatality, to wake it up[/QUOTE]

I don’t know. At Vancouver 2010, a luge athlete was killed on the track, the competition continued, and the sport of luge is still in the Olympics.

[Jazzy_Lady]

[QUOTE=JER;8667450]
I don’t know. At Vancouver 2010, a luge athlete was killed on the track, the competition continued, and the sport of luge is still in the Olympics.[/QUOTE]

This is true, particularly of the winter games. There are many, many incredibly dangerous sports at the winter games. A death at the games would not be new.

[Winding_Down]

[QUOTE=vineyridge;8667135]
I may be wrong because it’s hardly an organized sport, but foxhunting involves riding XC over terrain and natural obstacles, and it doesn’t seem to have as many horse and rider deaths.

Given that, I’d put my money on the unceasing technicality of today’s XC courses and the effect on the human and horse brain.[/QUOTE]

Hunting: There are plenty of very serious and fatal accidents in fox hunting, both horse and rider. But to my knowledge, there has not been the outcry that we see in eventing following such tragedies. I can only speculate as to why there is that difference.

Technical Courses and safety: Remember that there are fewer falls and injuries over the past decade, as the technicality of courses has increased. That being said, I do not believe there is a causal link between the two. Our courses and jumps are also much safer than they were in past decades. Compare Rolex 2016 to a Rolex from the 80s.

Statistical Anomaly, I hope. These past months have been a deviation from this trend but I do not think that this deviation is meaningful, insofar as nothing has changed significantly in courses, jumps, horses, training, etc etc etc Statistical Anomalies are bound to happen sooner or later.

Research! Please support the research being conducted at the U of Kentucky - this is a team of trained researchers who are experienced and qualified in carrying out this particular kind of research. I have made a career of being a Social Scientist but I would not try to frame myself as an expert in research outside of this area. IMHO, this research team is far superior to any group of volunteer scientists from various fields that might congregate to conduct this research.

I hope that more academic research grants can be awarded to support similar research

Searching for causes and complexity in riding accidents
Sometimes, shit happens and riding and horses introduce a huge amount of “error variance” that you do not see in the hard sciences. We have riding accidents for any number of reasons and sometimes those reasons have nothing to do with our riding, our horses, or the courses we are riding. Horses do odd things for odd reasons as well. For example, if a horse “drops a leg” on take off over a solid table and this results in a rotational fall, do you blame the jump, the horse, the momentary lapse in focus, or what… Maybe the horse lost focus due to something as simple as a distraction across the field… we may never know.

So riding accidents can occur for a myriad of reasons, and sometimes these reasons are totally unrelated to the objects (such as jumps) that happen to be salient in our visual fields. We really need to accept that there are so many variables, from the sunlight on a nearby puddle, to the twitch of a horse’s muscle that can cause catastrophe. Heck, one of my worst accidents was when riding a horse that spooked at the walk, bolted, and accidentally plunged and spun sideways next to a tree that struck me head on.

I did not blame the tree.

I did not blame the horse, nor me, nor the footing, or the time of day. I chalked it up to a harmful incident, occurring under highly unusual and unlikely circumstances, otherwise known as a freak accident.

Being at precisely the wrong place at precisely the wrong time…

[vineyridge]

Rolex didn’t exist in the 60s. The first major HT at the KHP was the World Championships in 1978.

As for hunting, I’ve seen serious accidents (mostly with staff) but no fatalities. Can you give some examples or some stats?

[LAZ]

[QUOTE=vineyridge;8667658]
Rolex didn’t exist in the 60s. The first major HT at the KHP was the World Championships in 1978.

As for hunting, I’ve seen serious accidents (mostly with staff) but no fatalities. Can you give some examples or some stats?[/QUOTE]

i know that in 1983 the three hunts that were in Indiana all had significant falls in a very similar time span. One rider died at Romney (crush injuries) one spent time in the hospital with crush injuries (Traders Point) and a walk away with aches and pains (New Britton Hunt). The last one was me and I was lucky when I flipped my fox Hunter over jumping a fence uphill that was over its scope.

[Peggy]

[QUOTE=vineyridge;8667658]
Rolex didn’t exist in the 60s. The first major HT at the KHP was the World Championships in 1978.

As for hunting, I’ve seen serious accidents (mostly with staff) but no fatalities. Can you give some examples or some stats?[/QUOTE]A woman died on a hunt California recently though I think she was riding back to the kennels as opposed to galloping cross country. There was a ravine filled with tumbleweeds that they didn’t see in time and fell into. So pretty much a freak accident as LAZ described with the tree.

[snowrider]

Research! Please support the research being conducted at the U of Kentucky - this is a team of trained researchers who are experienced and qualified in carrying out this particular kind of research. I have made a career of being a Social Scientist but I would not try to frame myself as an expert in research outside of this area. IMHO, this research team is far superior to any group of volunteer scientists from various fields that might congregate to conduct this research.

I hope that more academic research grants can be awarded to support similar research

The problem is not with these researchers and no one is offering to do this work as a volunteer. The problem is that the direction of research should come from the USEF, which is member supported and it should be transparent. Most likely one group, no matter how well qualified, cannot answer all questions.

I run a research an applied science program (ie we think abut stuff and we build stuff!) that is of interest to the public and I ALWAYS answer when someone emails with a question or an offer to collaborate, and trust me I get a LOT of those. If the current safety team can’t handle that burden they need a team who can and will. And yes, I think they need to tap the expertise of volunteer members. I belong to about 10 similar groups at all times, I’m sure ssmom, Reed etc do too. We know how to move a whole program of research forward.

For example: a co-workers kids play lacrosse. The National lacrosse group is providing grants to scientists to study safety. They raised enough funds to be granting it out and have an experienced group that can review proposals and select the ones that advance their internal priorities which they developed with input from their membership and a good review of the existing data. USEF could do that.

@Gnep;8667316

Can any one imaging to fly down a tracktor trail in the forest with ruds a foot deep, in rain at 600 plus, than cross over the ruds and have to jump a natural, a real sheep pen, with rather strange distances.

And if you didn’t make it out of the sheep pen you were stuck!! And everyone yelled at you to just trot over it to get out. Or they ran at you making flapping motions so the horse would jump it. We also used to jump a hedge onto a tarmac road, abut 1.75 pony strides to another stone wall with a drop the size of a tractor on the other side. During our hunter trials for children under 12. Jump: sliiiiiiiiide. Jump. haha. We had a sunken road nearby too, it was a big deal when you were allowed to jump it. Stone sides of course. Yes course design is so much safer today, although I personally am not a fan of the perfectly rigid chest high hanging logs as they seem designed to tip you over if you slide into them. I moved to the jumpers as a teen so I never jumped many of them so maybe I would have been used them if I did.

[Littleluck55]

[QUOTE=vineyridge;8667658]
Rolex didn’t exist in the 60s. The first major HT at the KHP was the World Championships in 1978.

As for hunting, I’ve seen serious accidents (mostly with staff) but no fatalities. Can you give some examples or some stats?[/QUOTE]

9 year old girl was killed last month on a hunt

http://www.horseandhound.co.uk/news/nine-year-old-girl-dies-hunting-accident-531556

[Winding_Down]

[QUOTE=vineyridge;8667658]

As for hunting, I’ve seen serious accidents (mostly with staff) but no fatalities. Can you give some examples or some stats?[/QUOTE]

To my knowledge, there are no stats or research.

However, in my immediate area, Northern Virginia “Hunt” Country, I can think of 3 deaths from hunting and 4 people who were seriously hurt (permanent injury, 2 in wheelchairs). But that is across the years that I have lived here and includes incidents that I can recall.

And don’t get me started on the horse injuries.

[RAyers]

[QUOTE=Winding Down;8667645]
…

Research! Please support the research being conducted at the U of Kentucky - this is a team of trained researchers who are experienced and qualified in carrying out this particular kind of research. I have made a career of being a Social Scientist but I would not try to frame myself as an expert in research outside of this area. IMHO, this research team is far superior to any group of volunteer scientists from various fields that might congregate to conduct this research.

I hope that more academic research grants can be awarded to support similar research
…[/QUOTE]

Some good thoughts but I am going to ask about this one specifically. How do you qualify trained researchers? I work at 2 academic institutions. I win grants in both medicine and hard sciences. So do many of those who have volunteered in safety research for eventing. The only difference is we ride horses.

So what is your definition? Established research programs at academic institutions? Would TRL or RAND or SAIC or RMSL qualify as they are independent research entities outside of academia?

To comment on something else you mentioned, many hard scenes are quite familiar with statistical probabilities. Hence why we have fields of statistical thermodynamics or statistical quantum physics. They deal with insanely low probability occurs few and outcomes.

[Rallycairn]

What data is the basis for several saying eventing is safer now? Thanks

[Pennywell_Bay]

It saddens me that people are taking the position “It happens in Foxhunting [insert sport here]”. It can be perceived as “So- deaths happen everywhere” instead of the crux which a lot of posters are bringing up- how to make it safer?

Is “it happens everywhere, look at XXXXX” the stance people want to take? Not, yes- eventing is dangerous to horse and/or rider. Is there a problem, can is be minimized? It can be perceived as “Shrug, kick-on”.

Everyone has to acknowledge there are inherent dangers in any equine sport of choice. Is there a way to minimize the danger and potential loss of life or Catastrophic injury in eventing?