When Did Eventing Change?
Updated: Oct 2
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 because 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 sort of 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 odd training session rather than somewhere 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 of course. 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 it happened without anybody planning it.
And that makes me wonder whether the same thing has happened much more widely. Modern competition horses are extraordinarily well trained and managed, but how much of their physical education now happens in places we have deliberately 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 rather 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 that this article isn't 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 I find 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. So we didn't simply make the old sport shorter. We changed the nature of the cross-country test itself.
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 can ask something rather different: can you gallop, shorten, rebalance, turn, hold a precise line, jump an accuracy question, accelerate away and then prepare to do it all again?
Neither is necessarily better or worse. They simply aren't quite the same test.
The horses arriving at those courses have changed too. The event horses I remember hacked a great deal and 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 and I certainly wouldn't want to give most of them up.
But I do wonder whether we have become extraordinarily good at keeping horses while changing something about making horses.
That is a much harder question.
Before we romanticise the past
There is an uncomfortable complication here because if we are going to look at this properly we can't construct a cosy story in which eventing was safe until modern course designers came along and ruined it. It wasn't. Find out more here
The sport responded and rightly so. Risk-management programmes, better 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 regards it as an important tool in reducing the risk of crushing rotational falls.
The most recent FEI statistics make another important point. Rotational falls are now rare in relation to the number of starters, although when they do happen they remain disproportionately dangerous. That is surely evidence that safety interventions can work, even in a sport from which risk can never entirely be removed. The FEI publishes its risk-management statistics here.
So I am not trying to argue that modern eventing is simply more dangerous. What interests me 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 I found 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 enormously. 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.
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. It may simply be telling us something else about the partnership - training, balance, responsiveness, suitability for the level, discomfort or any number of other things. The study can't tell us which.
What stopped me rather more was one of the limitations the researchers themselves identified. Their enormous dataset contained no information about the training activity of the horses or riders.
We can know the horse's level, its dressage score and its competition history and we can analyse the fence it fell at. But the database can't tell us whether that horse hacks five hours a week or barely leaves an arena except to compete. It can't tell us whether its rider hunted for twenty winters, has ridden fifty different horses or learned almost entirely on beautifully schooled competition horses.
Those things may turn out to make no difference whatsoever. But at the moment we don't know.
Perhaps we need to start recording more about the life of the horse outside competition. Does it hack? Does it work on varied terrain? How much of its training takes place on a prepared level surface? None of those questions should come with a pre-decided answer, but I would quite like to know what the answer actually is.
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 one of those phrases that can sound suspiciously like nostalgia, but perhaps it is worth thinking about 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. What interests me here is simply what those hours riding across country behind hounds may have 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. None of this was described as proprioception or problem-solving. It was simply what happened when you went across country.
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 and 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 and that is no bad thing. But perhaps cross-country safety depends partly upon something else as well: what happens when the answer is wrong?
That question interests me far more than whether hunting made riders “braver”. Courage isn't really the point. Adaptability might be.
Perhaps we should study the saves
Safety research quite naturally studies falls. We record them, classify them and examine the fence, terrain and circumstances and of course we should. But imagine watching a thousand cross-country rounds while recording something slightly different - every occasion on which horse or rider made a fairly significant mistake but did not fall.
A horse hits a fence. A rider sees a stride that isn't there. They arrive too close or the horse takes off too far away. A foreleg is left behind. A horse slips or pecks badly on landing and for a fraction of a second it all looks rather precarious, then horse and rider reorganise themselves and carry on.
Lucinda Green often draws attention to exactly these moments in her cross-country training videos and talks through the saves as well as the mistakes and what the horse and rider did to recover. You can find out more about Lucinda's XC Academy here. This is the sort of video I mean.
Nothing appears in the accident statistics because there was no accident, but 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 or simply luck? Did the rider stay out of the way? Had that horse encountered hundreds of smaller versions of the same problem before?
We already know from research that the immediate circumstances around 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 part of the story begins much earlier than the approach to that particular fence.
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, and I think that matters. This series isn't an argument that we used to know better. It is really an attempt to separate what we remember, what we assume and what the evidence can actually tell us.
Perhaps the safety question in eventing isn't simply what causes a horse to fall. Perhaps we should also be asking what gives a horse and rider the capacity not to fall once something has already gone wrong.
And perhaps the place to start isn't only with the horse that fell, but with the horse that should have fallen - and 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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