08/05/2021
This is a hard one to share. Mainly because I actually feel exactly as described so it is a vulnerable place. I have slowly fell out of love with eventing as I have been present when riders and horses have died. Some friends and horses I had ridden even. I don't accept death as a common occurrence which is what it now is in Eventing. I am taking a long hard look at what I do with my "next 30 years" of riding, and as a lover of the horse first, it is more and more difficult to choose eventing as a person desiring to compete at FEI levels.
“That won’t work---.”
Has anyone noticed that whenever someone comes up with any idea to try to make eventing less likely to injure or kill horses and riders, there will be plenty of others who instantly reject those ideas as unworkable?
And so years go by, little changes, horses and riders die, nothing changes, not really, at a deep down fundamental level,
I have had people ask me, “So, Denny, you were an event rider for fifty years, and yet you make critical comments about the sport, aren’t you the hypocrite?”
Well, I watched two horses get killed one year at Rolex, another two horses get killed at Bromont, another two horses get killed at So Pines, and watched a rider fall at Rolex, get helicoptered away, and later learned she had died, A couple of former students got killed, and at some point I realized that any “sport” that accepts so much suffering is a sport in deep trouble, and needs to stop and take a hard look at itself.
If I were the czar of eventing, I would stop right this minute and convene a meeting of all sorts of people, and not just event types, but car and ski racing people, others from industry, and I would task them to come up with ideas to try, just as car racing did after Dale Earnhardt died, and the sport finally said “ENOUGH.”
Maybe the ideas wouldn’t work, but doing next to nothing isn’t working. Frangible technology is a good start, but it is expensive, and many of the feeder events can’t afford it.
Someone just defended the Olympics last week by saying something about “only one horse died, and he could have died running in his pasture.” Talk about losing our collective ability to be shocked at death---It is like what happens after a mass shooting, a lot of talk for a week, then back to business as usual.
None of the riders speak out---They don’t want to be seen as disloyal or as the whistle blower. They attack anyone who questions the status quo.
What’s it going to take? Darned if I know--.
