Part Two: Is the Stopwatch Hiding Something?
- Henrietta Forrest
- Aug 20
- 9 min read
Updated: Aug 21
In Part One of this series, I looked at how eventing changed: the disappearance of the old endurance phases, the increasing technicality of cross-country and the wider changes in the horses and riders arriving at the start box. But there is one difference between the cross-country I remember and the sport I watch today that has been nagging at me more than almost anything else.
It is the rhythm.
The cross-country I remember riding in the late 1990s and early 2000s was predominantly about getting a horse travelling. That may partly reflect the level at which I competed and the sort of courses I rode, and I don't want to pretend technical questions didn't exist. They did. But what stays in my memory is the feeling of establishing a gallop, meeting a fence in that rhythm, landing and travelling on.
My experience riding point-to-pointers in the Borders probably colours that memory too. I never raced, but I rode them at speed and over point-to-point fences, and there is a particular feeling when a horse settles into an economical galloping rhythm. You aren't manufacturing every stride. The horse is travelling.
Watch a modern upper-level cross-country round and the pattern can look rather different. The horse gallops, shortens and rebalances for a technical question, jumps, turns, accelerates away, gallops again, comes back for another combination, perhaps changes direction or negotiates a slope, and then accelerates again.
Which made me wonder something very simple: if two horses complete a cross-country course at exactly the same average speed, have they necessarily done the same amount of work?
I'm increasingly wondering whether the answer might be no.
What average speed doesn't tell us
Imagine, in deliberately simplified form, an old-fashioned galloping course: gallop, gallop, gallop, hedge, gallop, gallop, rails, gallop, ditch, gallop.
Now imagine a more technical pattern: gallop, rebalance, shorten, turn, jump, accelerate, gallop, rebalance, turn, accuracy question, accelerate, downhill, shorten, jump, accelerate again.
Both horses might average 570 metres per minute. On the results sheet, their speed looks identical. But that average doesn't tell us how many times each horse slowed down and accelerated again, how sharply it turned, how often it had to alter its balance or how closely the jumping efforts were grouped.
Two sections of cross-country can produce the same average speed while containing very different patterns of slowing and acceleration.
I am not a physiologist, so I went looking to see whether there was any research behind what was essentially a horsewoman's hunch.
There is.
Not, I should stress, a study proving that modern technical courses cause more fatigue than the galloping courses of the past. I haven't found that. But there is some fascinating research suggesting that the workload hidden inside an average speed is rather more complicated than I had realised.
Speed isn't the whole story
One study looked at 1,463 cross-country rounds from 294 horses, competing from two-star through five-star level. Unsurprisingly, travelling faster increased the physiological demand on the horse. For every additional 30 metres per minute in average speed, heart rate increased and post-exercise blood lactate rose by around 41%. Hills mattered too.
But one finding particularly caught my attention. As the average distance between jumping efforts increased, both heart rate and lactate decreased. In other words, how the jumping efforts were distributed appeared to matter as well as how fast the horse travelled overall.
That sent me back to my original question. A horse travelling for much of a course in a relatively consistent rhythm and a horse repeatedly slowing and accelerating could arrive at exactly the same average speed. The stopwatch cannot tell us the difference.
And when you think about what the horse is actually doing, that seems important. A galloping horse is remarkably well designed to travel at speed. But ask it to come back sharply and it has to slow and reorganise itself. Ask it to turn, and the loading changes again. Ask it to shorten for an accuracy question, jump it and then accelerate back towards optimum speed, and you have asked for another series of physical adjustments.
Then do it again.
And again.
I am certainly not suggesting that the modern horse simply “works harder”. The old long-format horse faced an extraordinary endurance test involving roads and tracks, steeplechase and cross-country.
What I am wondering is whether the modern horse sometimes does a different kind of work.
Could it also produce a different kind of fatigue?
This is the bit I find particularly interesting.
When we think of a tired event horse, we tend to imagine a horse running out of petrol towards the end of a course. But could a horse be extremely fit and still become tired in a more subtle way from repeatedly slowing, turning, landing, rebalancing and accelerating?
The simplest analogy I can think of is ourselves. Imagine running steadily for half an hour. Then imagine spending half an hour running, sprinting, stopping, changing direction, jumping and accelerating again. Even if you somehow covered the same distance at the same average speed, I doubt your legs would tell you that you'd done the same exercise.
Obviously horses aren't humans, and that analogy only goes so far. But there is eventing research showing that fatigue is associated with measurable changes in the way horses move and jump.
A study of 54 high-level cross-country tests involving 33 horses measured horses as they progressed around the course and found changes in both stride and jumping characteristics associated with exercise and fatigue.
That doesn't mean fatigue caused a fall, and it certainly doesn't prove that technical courses produce more dangerous fatigue. But it does make the question more interesting. A horse doesn't necessarily have to be visibly exhausted for fatigue to matter. What if its reactions are fractionally slower, its jump changes slightly or it becomes just a little less able to reorganise itself when something goes wrong?
I don't know.
But I think it is worth finding out.
Then I found a study that came remarkably close to my question
A 2025 study tried to model the energy demands of cross-country using GPS-derived information including speed, elevation and acceleration, alongside physiological measurements such as heart rate and blood lactate.
What interested me was that speed variability, acceleration and terrain all contributed to the energetic demands of cross-country. Competition level also appeared to add demands that couldn't simply be explained by average speed, with the researchers discussing factors such as the jumping and technical requirements of the higher levels.
Now, this still doesn't prove that today's technical courses create more fatigue than the galloping courses I remember. But it does seem to confirm the thing that originally bothered me: average speed isn't telling us the whole story.
There is something going on inside those 570 metres per minute.
So why don't we measure it?
This is where I started disappearing down something of a rabbit hole.
Modern GPS and motion sensors can record far more than a finishing time. So instead of simply saying that a horse averaged 570 metres per minute, why couldn't we look at its entire speed profile? How many times did it slow significantly? How rapidly did it accelerate afterwards? How sharp were the turns? How much elevation did it cover? How closely together were the jumping efforts?
Put all of that together and you could begin to create what I have been thinking of as a dynamic workload profile for a cross-country course. That isn't an established eventing term - it's simply my description of what I would like to see measured.
And then I started wondering whether we could go backwards as well as forwards.
Could we compare Badminton 1975 with Badminton today?
We obviously can't go back and put GPS trackers on horses competing fifty years ago.
But we do have film.
Could old television footage from Badminton, Burghley and other major events be analysed to estimate how horses travelled between fences? Were they maintaining a relatively consistent speed for longer periods? How often did they make substantial reductions in speed? How many major changes of direction were there per kilometre?
Then compare that with modern footage.
Perhaps my impression is completely wrong. Perhaps the speed profiles would turn out to be surprisingly similar. That would be fascinating in itself.
But perhaps an older course would produce a relatively smooth speed profile while a modern course produced far more peaks and troughs.
At the moment, much of this discussion inevitably relies on memory and visual impression.
Why not measure it?
And perhaps there is another measurement missing
I've also started wondering about what I can only describe as technical density.
Two courses might have a similar number of fences over a similar distance, but that doesn't necessarily tell us how much horse and rider have to do between them. A big straightforward fence approached out of a gallop is one problem. A downhill approach, turn, angled element, related distance to a narrow fence and another change of direction can compress several adjustments into a few seconds.
There is already research showing that what happens around a fence matters. A study of international eventing between 2008 and 2018 found increased odds of a fall associated with factors including downhill approaches, fences landing into water and later elements of combinations.
Earlier British research also found associations between falls and factors including water, drop landings, ground conditions and fence geometry.
Neither study measures “technical density” in the way I am suggesting. But they do reinforce something that seems increasingly obvious to me: a fence doesn't exist in isolation. The horse arrives at it carrying everything that has happened beforehand — speed, terrain, turns, previous fences and fatigue.
Perhaps counting fences per kilometre isn't enough. Perhaps we should also be interested in how many significant adjustments horse and rider are being asked to make per minute.
There are two athletes out there
And of course, I've concentrated almost entirely on the horse. There is a rider up there too.
A technical course asks the rider repeatedly to judge speed, line, stride and balance while remembering the course and constantly interpreting the horse underneath them. The rider is also physically working: sitting up, rebalancing, stabilising through turns and drops and then allowing the horse to travel again.
I haven't found research showing that “decision fatigue” contributes to eventing falls, so I don't want to pretend that there is. But I do wonder about the combined effect.
Could some mistakes late on a course involve not one dramatic failure, but a slightly tired horse, a slightly tired rider, a difficult question and a tiny error in timing?
Again, I don't know.
That's rather the point.
Perhaps we're asking the wrong question
I don't think the useful question is whether modern cross-country courses are too technical. That immediately turns the discussion into an argument about whether old eventing or modern eventing is better, and I don't think that's particularly helpful.
The question I would rather ask is this:
Has the increase in slowing, turning, rebalancing and accelerating changed the type of work - and perhaps the type of fatigue - experienced by the modern event horse? And could that matter when something goes wrong?
As far as I can establish, nobody has yet tested that whole question.
But we know enough to make me think it deserves testing. We know speed and hills affect heart rate and lactate. We know the spacing of jumping efforts matters. We know fatigue is associated with measurable changes in the way horses move and jump. And newer research suggests that acceleration, speed variability and terrain tell us things about workload that average speed alone cannot.
What we don't yet know is whether the modern pattern of repeatedly changing speed and balance makes any meaningful difference to a horse's ability to recover from an error.
I would genuinely like to know.
Because perhaps two horses can cover the same distance, record exactly the same average speed and cross the finish line with exactly the same time on the scoreboard - while having done two quite different kinds of work.
And if that's true, perhaps the stopwatch is telling us rather less than we think.
In Part Three, I want to move away from the course and look at the horse arriving at it. Have arenas, prepared surfaces and increasingly controlled training changed the physical education of the event horse? And is being extremely fit necessarily the same thing as knowing how to look after yourself when something goes wrong?
Sources and further reading
Kirsch et al. — Heart rate and blood lactate responses
Burger et al. — High-level competition exercise and related fatigue
Liedtke et al. — Modelling Energy Demands of Cross-Country Tests
Bennet, Cameron-Whytock & Parkin — Fence-level risk factors for falls
Murray et al. — Risk of a horse-and-rider partnership falling
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