When Did Eventing Change?
- Henrietta Forrest
- Aug 17
- 9 min read
There is a question I have found myself returning to recently - when did eventing change?
I don't mean when the rules changed, when long-format disappeared or when frangible technology arrived. We can put dates to all of those things. I mean something rather bigger. When did the horse change? When did the rider change? And when did the life that produced both of them change?
I should probably explain my own relationship with eventing at the outset. I have always been more of a showjumper than an eventer, but in the late 1990s and early 2000s I did event. I hunted a little too, and for a time I helped ride point-to-pointers in the Borders. I never raced them, but I did ride them at speed most days and over point-to-point fences before they raced. So although I would never describe myself as an event rider first and foremost, galloping and jumping horses across country was just part of my riding life.
What I remember most about the eventing I did is the rhythm of the cross-country. The courses certainly asked questions and they weren't without technical challenges, but there was a feeling of getting your horse travelling and going somewhere. You galloped, you jumped, you landed and you galloped on. Perhaps my memories are inevitably coloured by the sort of riding I was doing at the time, but when I watch modern eventing, that rhythm often looks very different.
Perhaps more importantly, I didn't have an arena at home until around 2004. Before that, virtually all my everyday riding was done out hacking, including the fitness and schooling work for my showjumpers. An arena was somewhere I travelled to for the occasional training session, not where I automatically rode every day. I didn't think of hacking as cross-training or terrain training. It was simply how the horses were exercised.
I am part of that change myself. I have an arena now, and inevitably my horses today spend far more time working on a prepared surface than my horses did thirty years ago. I still take my young horses cross-country schooling and make an effort to get them out of the arena, partly because I am conscious of how easy it is for their world to become rather controlled. But the fact that I now have to think about providing that variety is perhaps revealing in itself. Once, much of that variety happened automatically.
And that makes me wonder whether the same change has taken place much more widely. Modern competition horses are extraordinarily well trained and managed, but how much of their physical education now happens in environments specifically designed for training? How much time do they spend simply negotiating the world?
None of that means the old way was better. Eventing was dangerous then, just as it is dangerous now, and many of the changes in the sport and in horse management have been enormous improvements. But when I watch eventing today, I can't escape the feeling that something fundamental has changed - not only in the courses, but in the horses and riders arriving at them.
Recent events have inevitably made these questions feel less academic. After a devastating weekend for eventing, in which two riders lost their lives in separate cross-country accidents, there has understandably been renewed discussion about safety.
I want to be very clear about the limits of what follows. This article is not an attempt to explain those accidents, and I don't intend to speculate about what happened. Two tragedies do not prove a theory, and it would be both irresponsible and unfair to use them as evidence for one.
They have, however, made me think harder about questions I had already been turning over for some time. When something goes catastrophically wrong in eventing, we understandably look at the fence, the course and the immediate circumstances of the accident. I wonder whether we also need to look further back - at the horse and rider arriving at that fence, and at the years of experience, training and management that brought them there.
The sport really did change
My recollection that eventing was once much more of a galloping and endurance sport isn't simply nostalgia. The old three-day event contained roads and tracks, steeplechase, another roads-and-tracks phase, a ten-minute box and then cross-country. The FEI describes it explicitly as a test of stamina, recovery and endurance. The short format was introduced at the Athens Olympics in 2004, and Badminton, Burghley and Kentucky ran their final traditional long-format competitions in 2005. The FEI's history of the change is worth reading in full.
What is particularly interesting is what happened next. The FEI itself says that once those endurance phases disappeared there were concerns about horses simply travelling faster across country, and that courses became more technical partly to slow the pace down. That is an important point because it establishes that we did not merely shorten the old sport. We changed the nature of the cross-country examination.
The old question was often something like: can you keep travelling, meet a substantial obstacle in a forward rhythm and jump it?
Modern cross-country frequently asks something more complicated: can you gallop, shorten, rebalance, turn, hold a precise line, jump an accuracy question, accelerate away and then prepare to do it again?
Neither is inherently superior. They simply aren't identical tests.
The horses arriving at those courses have changed too. The event horses I remember hacked a great deal. Many hunted. They galloped and worked on natural ground and encountered hills, ditches, gateways, mud, ruts, traffic and all the other inconveniences involved in actually going somewhere on a horse. Riders accumulated hours in the saddle almost accidentally.
Today we have wonderful arenas, engineered surfaces, horse walkers, sophisticated veterinary medicine, physiotherapists, nutritionists, video analysis and training methods that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. Modern horse management has brought enormous benefits.
We have become extraordinarily good at keeping horses.
But have we changed something about making horses?
That is a much harder question.
Before we romanticise the past
There is an uncomfortable complication here. If we are going to investigate this seriously, we can't just construct a cosy story in which eventing was safe until modern course designers came along and ruined it.
It wasn't.
Reliable historical comparison is extremely difficult because the detailed databases we now take for granted did not exist in earlier decades. Modern eventing has become far better at recording starts, falls, fence characteristics and injuries. There were also grim periods in the comparatively recent past: a review published in 2016 reported 38 eventing rider deaths during or following competition between 2000 and October 2015. That review is freely available here.
The sport responded. Risk-management programmes, improved data collection, qualification requirements, course-design changes and deformable fence technology have all become part of modern eventing. Frangible technology began being trialled around 2002, and the FEI now describes it as an important tool aimed at reducing the risk of crushing rotational falls.
The most recent FEI statistics also make an important point: rotational falls are now rare relative to the number of starters, although when they occur they remain disproportionately dangerous. The FEI's published risk-management statistics are therefore a reminder that safety interventions can work, even in a sport from which risk can never be entirely removed. The FEI publishes its risk-management statistics here.
So my question isn't whether modern eventing is simply “more dangerous”.
It is whether it presents different risks, to differently produced horses and riders.
What actually predicts a horse fall?
One of the most useful pieces of research in this discussion is also the largest British study of its kind. Researchers analysed 749,534 British Eventing cross-country starts between 2005 and 2015 and identified sixteen factors associated with horse falls. Level mattered dramatically. Compared with BE90, the adjusted odds of a horse fall were around 1.6 times higher at BE100, 3.6 times higher at Novice, eight times higher at Intermediate and 12.5 times higher at Advanced. The paper is freely accessible here through PubMed and the University of Glasgow.
Dressage performance was associated with fall risk too. For every additional ten dressage penalties, the odds of a horse fall increased by about 20%. That doesn't mean a good dressage test somehow protects a horse across country. More plausibly, the dressage score may be telling us something about the underlying partnership: training, balance, responsiveness, suitability for the level, discomfort or a host of other factors. The study cannot tell us which.
And here is something I find especially interesting: the researchers explicitly identify one major limitation. Their huge dataset contained no information about the training activity of the horses or riders.
Think about what that means.
We can know the horse's level, its dressage score and its competition history. We can analyse the fence. But the database cannot tell us whether that horse hacks five hours a week or never leaves an arena except to compete. It cannot tell us whether its rider hunted for twenty winters, has ridden fifty different horses or learned almost entirely on beautifully schooled competition horses.
Those may turn out to be irrelevant variables.
But at present we don't know.
The horse that knew how to get itself out of trouble
Older horsemen frequently talk about horses being able to “look after themselves”. It is an expression that can sound suspiciously like nostalgia, but perhaps we should examine what it actually means.
A horse that hunted regularly encountered thousands of situations nobody had deliberately constructed for its education. (I should say here that I eventually stopped hunting because chasing a fox wasn't for me personally - the rights and wrongs of hunting are a subject for another day though. What interests me in this context is simply what riding across country behind hounds taught the horse and rider.) The distance wasn't always right. The ground wasn't always level. Another horse stopped. The rider didn't see the ditch. The footing disappeared. The horse slipped, recovered and carried on.
The horse learned where its feet were partly because sometimes it got them wrong.
And the rider learned something too. That is something I remember from the horses I rode. You couldn't manufacture every stride for them, and nor did you expect to.
Sometimes you helped. Sometimes you had to trust the horse underneath you to sort things out.
Sometimes the best thing you could possibly do was leave the horse alone.
Modern training is exceptionally good at teaching us how to produce the correct answer. But cross-country safety may partly depend on something else: what happens when the answer is wrong?
That question interests me far more than whether hunting made riders “braver”. Courage is not the point. Adaptability might be.
Perhaps we should study the saves
Safety research naturally studies falls. We record them, classify them and examine the fence, terrain and circumstances. We should.
But imagine watching a thousand cross-country rounds while recording something different: every occasion on which horse or rider made an appreciable mistake but did not fall.
A horse hits a fence. A rider sees a stride that isn't there. They arrive too close. The horse takes off too far away. A foreleg is left behind. A horse slips or pecks badly on landing. For a fraction of a second the situation looks precarious - and then horse and rider reorganise themselves and continue. Lucinda Green often draws attention to exactly these moments in her cross-country training videos, analysing the saves as well as the mistakes and what horse and rider did to recover. Find out more about Lucinda here
Nothing appears in the accident statistics because there was no accident.
Yet those moments surely contain some of the most interesting safety information available to us.
Why did that horse recover? Was it conformation? Strength? Reaction speed? Experience? Luck? Did the rider stay out of the way? Had that horse encountered hundreds of similar small mistakes before?
We know from older research that the immediate circumstances of a fence matter. Water, drops, ground conditions, approach speed and fence characteristics have all been associated with fall risk. One important study of cross-country fall risk can be found here.
But perhaps another part of the story lies much further back.
Have we become better at preventing mistakes during training while giving horses and riders fewer opportunities to learn how to recover from them?
I don't know.
That uncertainty is important. This series is not an argument that we used to know better. It is an attempt to separate what we remember, what we assume and what the evidence can actually tell us.
Because perhaps the safety question in eventing is not simply, “What causes a horse to fall?”
Perhaps we should also be asking:
What gives a horse and rider the capacity not to fall when something has already gone wrong?
And perhaps the place to start isn't only with the horse that fell.
Perhaps it is with the horse that should have fallen - but somehow didn't.
In Part Two: Is the Stopwatch Hiding Something? I look at what happens when a horse repeatedly gallops, slows, rebalances, turns and accelerates again and ask whether two horses travelling at exactly the same average speed may actually be doing very different kinds of work.
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