It’s been an exciting few weeks of online streaming. Equitation finals, hunter classics, grand prix competitions: all are available to watch live from the comfort of one’s preferred device.

I love looking at the course diagrams and hearing commentary from knowledgeable sportsmen and women while competitors execute flawless, skillful rides. I also love the “blow-by-blow” accounts from the winners of exactly what was going through their minds while they were on course. They’re so calm, cool and collected about the fact that they just bested 250 other riders, or that they just navigated a course of fences big enough to keep a T-Rex out of your backyard—in white pants, no less.

It makes me wonder what it would be like to interview the less-successful “also-rans” after an event. You know, those of us who barely escaped with our lives and bodily fluids intact.

First and foremost, we probably wouldn’t remember much of what had happened, since the finer workings of memory tend to short out when raw survival skills take over. It doesn’t make inspiring video to watch us genuflecting in thanks to a higher power we never prayed to until we got an eyeful of the triple combination. Not to mention the fact that it’s difficult to speak eloquently while shakily swigging the contents of the last bottle of wine we had stuffed in our tack trunk.

Even if we could pull it together long enough to tell our tale, it wouldn’t make for a neat accounting of things tied up in a pretty bow.

Visually speaking, it might go a lot like the diagram below: