Part Three: What Future for Eventing?
I went to Burghley this year while I was halfway through writing this series and it probably wasn't a bad place to end up. Having spent rather a lot of time thinking about what might be wrong with modern eventing, it is difficult to stand there watching some of the best horses and riders in the world galloping across that park with thousands of people there to watch them and conclude that everything has gone horribly wrong. In fact I came away feeling rather more positive about the sport than I had expected.
That doesn't mean the questions in the first two parts have gone away. I still wonder whether we fully understand what the increasingly technical nature of cross-country asks of horses and whether the stopwatch tells us enough about the work they are actually doing. I also still wonder whether the way we produce horses and riders has changed along with the courses, but perhaps there is a bigger question behind all of this which is what eventing is going to look like in another twenty or thirty years and whether safety is actually the only thing we should be worrying about.
What have we actually got right?
It is easy when writing about safety to make it sound as though everything is getting worse when actually some things have got considerably better. The figures show that horse falls and particularly rotational falls have fallen substantially since eventing became much more systematic about safety, frangible technology, course design and collecting data. That doesn't make the accidents that still happen any less awful, but it does tell us that this is a sport that has been prepared to look at a problem and change.
What I have become less convinced about while researching these articles is that there is ever going to be one answer. Serious accidents are probably much more complicated than that, with a slightly tired horse, a rider who is a fraction late, difficult ground, an awkward approach or perhaps something that happened several fences earlier all potentially contributing. Individually these things may amount to very little but occasionally several of them come together at exactly the wrong moment, which is essentially the Swiss cheese idea already discussed in eventing safety research. It is also why I think we need to become much better at looking at the whole round rather than simply the fence where something finally went wrong.
The interesting thing is that we are increasingly capable of doing that. GPS can show where a horse accelerates and slows, sensors can pick up changes in stride and heart rate and ECG can tell us something about what is happening physiologically. The question I asked in Part Two - whether two horses travelling at exactly the same average speed have necessarily done the same amount of work - therefore isn't something we have to sit around arguing about forever as it should be possible to test it. We need to get more nerdy!
I would also love somebody to look properly at the saves. We collect enormous amounts of information about falls but what about the horse that leaves a leg, gets far too close or lands badly and somehow sorts itself out? It crosses the finish safely and disappears from the statistics, yet perhaps that is exactly the horse we should be studying. What did it do that another horse didn't, what did its rider do and what experience did both of them have before that moment? It still seems to me one of the most interesting questions to come out of this whole series.
The other problem is money
Horses have never been cheap and eventing has certainly never been a cheap sport, but I do wonder whether the sheer cost of doing it is going to change eventing almost as much as some of the changes to the sport itself. You have spent quite a lot of money before the horse even leaves the yard as in 2026 a British Eventing Standard membership bought online is £157 and Premier is £325, and then there is the horse registration or season ticket and the entry fee before we get anywhere near training, diesel, transport, farrier, vet and the fairly considerable cost of buying and keeping the horse in the first place. (britisheventing.com)
I am not having a go at British Eventing here as they have much the same problem from the other side. They say that since 2022 inflation has risen by around 25% while membership fees rose by 8% and event affiliation fees remained largely static. For 2026 the affiliation fee paid by organisers increased from £6.25 to £10 for a national entry and from £8.25 to £15 for an international one, with BE acknowledging that organisers are likely to have to pass that on through entry fees.
(news.britisheventing.com) Putting on events costs a lot of money too, with land, ground preparation, officials, medical and veterinary cover, insurance, safety equipment and all the people required to make the thing happen having to be paid for somewhere.
This matters for more than our bank balances because eventing needs a bottom as well as a top. If fewer ordinary riders can afford to compete regularly, where do the experienced riders of the future come from, and if smaller events cannot make the figures work and disappear, where do horses and riders get the miles they need before moving up? Fewer events can also mean longer journeys which makes competing more expensive again, so there is a danger of ending up with a smaller and smaller pool of people who can afford to do enough of the sport to become really experienced at it.
That in turn brings us rather neatly back to safety because being qualified to compete at a level and having accumulated years of experience are not necessarily the same thing.
Having said all of that, the latest figures are rather more encouraging than I expected. British Eventing's 2025 participation report showed total runs up 3%, event capacity up 14% and fewer riders leaving the sport. Those who were competing averaged 8.3 runs each, the highest figure in more than a decade, and there was encouraging activity at the lower levels where so much of that experience is accumulated. The overall competitor base is still below its 2021-23 peak, but these aren't the figures of a sport simply disappearing and perhaps it is more a case of eventing trying to find its feet in a much tougher economy. (news.britisheventing.com)
Where does the Olympics fit into this?
I had also assumed, as I think quite a few horse people do, that equestrian sport was constantly having to fight for its place in the Olympics, but the immediate picture is rather less dramatic than that. Eventing, dressage and showjumping are all confirmed for Los Angeles in 2028 and equestrian has retained the same 200 athlete quota places as Paris, including 65 for eventing. Santa Anita Park has been confirmed as the equestrian venue and the timetable is already in place. (fei.org)
There must surely be a point where a cross-country course becomes so compact and technical that it is testing something rather different from travelling across country.
It isn't difficult to see why equestrian sport presents problems that many other Olympic sports don't though. Horses are expensive to buy, keep and transport and eventing requires land, stabling, veterinary facilities and a cross-country course, so it is never going to be particularly cheap or simple to stage. I don't think there is much point in pretending otherwise, nor does saying that equestrian athletes work incredibly hard really answer the accessibility question. Of course they work hard, but so do athletes in other sports and the uncomfortable bit for us is that ours requires a very expensive animal before you can even begin.
What I would worry about more is whether, in trying to make eventing shorter, easier to stage and easier for an Olympic audience to understand, we gradually alter the thing itself. Eventing has already changed enormously to survive and some of those changes have undoubtedly made it better, but there must surely be a point where a cross-country course becomes so compact and technical that it is testing something rather different from travelling across country.
Which brings me back to Burghley, because being there in person is quite different from seeing individual combinations on a screen. You see the landscape and how far the horses actually travel, and you walk the hills yourself and realise what the contour lines on a course map don't tell you. You also get a much better sense of the change between a horse galloping freely and then having to come back and organise itself for a difficult question.
There were parts I wasn't entirely comfortable watching, sadly. The Leaf Pit in particular seemed to cause some horses real confusion as they were dealing with the drop and the water but also a considerable change in light and you could see some of them trying to work out what was in front of them. At the Joules Maltings - it was like Spaghetti Junction, there seemed to be an awful lot going on in a relatively small space and it brought me straight back to the question I had been asking while writing Part Two, as it isn't necessarily the difficulty of one fence that interests me but how many things the horse has to do in succession.
Galloping, shortening, rebalancing, turning, jumping, landing and then turning and reorganising again is a very different pattern of work from simply travelling on and jumping out of a rhythm. I understand the thinking behind alternative routes and of course the longer option gives a rider a way out when the direct route doesn't suit the horse or things haven't gone quite to plan, which is a good thing, but the trade-off is time and it can also mean an awful lot of fences and decisions in quite a small area. The fences themselves are becoming incredibly narrow too and I did find myself wondering just how much narrower they can eventually become.
This is where I have to be very careful because I don't have evidence that repeated turning and rebalancing on a modern five-star course creates a dangerous level of fatigue. That was really the point of Part Two as we don't know, and while my suspicion is that it adds a type of workload that average speed doesn't adequately describe, suspicion isn't evidence. Rather than saying course designers have got it wrong I would simply like us to measure it and if the data eventually showed that I had been worrying about nothing I would be quite happy with that.
For all of those reservations I absolutely loved watching the horses that were enjoying themselves. There is something amazing about a confident horse that has understood the question, locked onto the fence and then landed and gone away again with its ears up, never looking as though it is being manufactured around every stride but simply getting on with the job.
There were thousands of people there wanting to watch it too, with families, children, current and former competitors and plenty of people who probably couldn't tell you much about the technicalities of what they were seeing but certainly knew a good horse when one galloped past them.
How much should we ask?
There is one other question I came away with and it is probably the most difficult one, which is whether at some point there has to be a limit to what we keep asking horses to do.
I don't mean that five-star eventing should disappear or that the courses should suddenly become easy. The extraordinary challenge is part of the sport and the horses competing at that level are extraordinary athletes, but they are also sentient animals who have no idea that Burghley is Burghley or that a fence is five-star. They know what we have trained them to do and ultimately they trust the rider sitting on them, and that puts quite a responsibility on us.
Perhaps at the top of eventing we should occasionally ask whether increasing difficulty is always progress.
There is a tendency in sport to assume that progression means making things progressively harder, higher, narrower, more technical or more precise, but perhaps at the top of eventing we should occasionally ask whether increasing difficulty is always progress. The question shouldn't only be whether the very best horses and riders can do it because clearly they can, but whether it is reasonable to keep asking more of them simply because they have shown us that they are capable of answering what we already ask.
I don't know the answer to that and I am not sure anybody does, but I think it is a question worth keeping in the conversation.
When I started this series I half expected to end up arguing for more of the old sport and I haven't. I don't want solid fences that cannot deform, poorer veterinary cover or worse protective equipment and I certainly don't think modern training has somehow produced inferior horses and riders as there is an enormous amount that is better now. What I would like is to understand a little more about what the old system may have produced almost accidentally.
Horses travelled over varied ground because that was where we rode them, riders learned to cope with things going wrong because things went wrong and horses spent hours hacking because many of us didn't have arenas. Riders accumulated miles in the saddle without necessarily calling any of it training and perhaps some of that made no difference at all, but perhaps some of it did.
We now have the technology and the data to start finding out rather than simply relying on people like me remembering how we used to do things. We can look at speed changes rather than only average speed, study fatigue through a round, look at the saves as well as the falls and perhaps begin recording more about the lives horses lead away from competition, including hacking, turnout, varied terrain and how they were produced as young horses. That seems much more useful to me than arguing about whether old eventing or new eventing was better.
The same applies to keeping the sport itself going. We need the great events such as Badminton and Burghley but we also need the little ones, and we need professional riders at the top but also ordinary people having a go at the lower levels and discovering that they rather like it. Most of all we need enough affordable opportunities for horses and riders to become genuinely experienced rather than simply qualified, because if the bottom becomes too small eventually the top will feel it.
I started this series by asking when eventing changed and I think the answer is that it changed many times and for many reasons and quite often for the better. If I am being honest I am probably a bit less worried about the sport than I was when I began writing about it, but I am still convinced that we need to look beyond the obvious things.
Safety isn't only about the fence, fitness isn't necessarily only about how fast a horse can gallop or how quickly its heart rate recovers and experience isn't necessarily represented by the number beside a rider's name. In much the same way, average speed may tell us surprisingly little about what actually happened between the start and finish.
The future of eventing isn't only about safety either. It is also about whether people can afford to do it, whether organisers can afford to put it on and whether in making it fit the modern world we can hang on to enough of what made it eventing in the first place.
Perhaps that is what Burghley reminded me of. Watching those horses I didn't particularly want eventing to go backwards and I don't want any of the safety improvements undone or to return to an age when we understood less about horses simply because some of them were very good at looking after themselves. What I would like is for us to understand a little better what we may have accidentally got right as well as everything we have deliberately improved.
Perhaps the old horses had experiences we no longer give them and perhaps modern horses are better prepared in ways we haven't properly recognised. I suspect the answer is a bit of both, and if eventing can remain affordable enough for people to do it, viable enough for organisers to put it on and we are all curious enough to keep asking questions about the horses themselves then perhaps its future isn't quite as bleak as I thought when I started writing this series.
I hope not, anyway, as I still love watching these horses and riders gallop across country. When I watch them I don't think about the fence as much as all the quiet work behind it, because I know as a horse rider how many years it takes to get them there. What these horses do for us is really remarkable, which is why their welfare must always come first if eventing is to thrive.
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