But I’ve never heard any discussions that consider how it will affect our up-and-coming young riders, the ones who are aiming for either the one-star or two-star events at the North American Young Riders Championships this month or another three-day this fall. I can almost guarantee you that if you take an informal poll of all the young event riders you know, say those between the ages of 12 and 20, they’ll nearly unanimously support keeping the more rigorous test.

I’ve been talking to many of my students about the future of the three-day event this month, and two of them summed it up for all of them.

“Training for the three-day is the ultimate goal, and it would take away from the whole idea of eventing,” said Kristin Schmolze, 21, of Montville, N.J., who’s a veteran of one-, two- and three-star CCIs.

And she added that replacing three-day events with horse trials “is going to hit people my age the hardest because we’ve done the CCIs. So we’re going to feel like we’ve had the rug pulled out from underneath us, like we could never get to the level of all the riders before us. It would just take a lot away from us, and it would mean it’s not a cross-country sport anymore.”

James Connor, 18, a training level rider from Louisville, Ky., agreed with Kristin. “I hate it,” he said. “It’s kind of unfair, because we’ll never get the opportunity to do it. It takes away from the sport altogether.”

There is a universal phenomenon, which I’ve dubbed the Rule of Old Fogeydom, which postulates that when you get too old to do something, you get to run it.

If you examine eventing, the makeup of the Board of Governors of the U.S. Eventing Association, for example, or particularly the members of the Federation Equestre Internationale Bureau, or the judges and officials at our events, you’ll see lots of 40s, 50s and 60s, but few 20s and 30s. It’s not because all of the younger people lack the judgment or capacity to make wise decisions, but they’re usually too involved in competing to get involved in management. That’s normal’in any sport.

When we get to be Fat and 40, Unfit and 50, or Senile and 60, we get our chance to direct the whole show.

The problem, though, is that those of us in control are often out of touch with how the front-line troops feel about the decisions we make for them.

As a parent of two sons (now 27 and 30), I know how natural it is for parents to want to shelter our children from risk and harm. It’s exactly the heightened risk of setting off on a cross-country course with an already tired horse that gives opponents one of the strongest arguments in favor of doing away with the three-day format.

But it would be unrealistic to think that safety is the only reason to jettison the three-day event, because organizers and administrators also cite expense and land loss as compelling reasons. These, at least, are not philosophical considerations. But, as financial reasons, they’re subject to creative remedy.

I think we can find the means to keep the three-day event as an intrinsic part of eventing’if we truly want to save the sport.

The real gut issue, in my opinion, is whether three-day eventing is just too risky and archaic for today’s riders and horses. That’s the issue that most directly affects the younger riders.

All parents will obviously have widely divergent views about the appropriate degree of control and protection to exercise over their offspring. No normal parents would let a toddler wander off alone into the forest or play unsupervised near a busy street, just as no normal parents would totally lock a child away from all outside influences.

But everything between these extremes is open for disagreement.

Similarly, the broader cultural context within which we live greatly shapes our attitudes. About 140 years ago, America was solidly involved in the great westward migration. In 1999, just four years ago, a 122-year-old woman died in France. She was born a couple of months before Gen. George Custer was killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

What I’m suggesting is that we’re really not very far away from our own frontier epoch, when people hunted animals on horseback and on foot for sustenance and for a living. Children of that era grew up very rapidly, took on adult responsibilities as young teenagers, and lived lives that today most people would consider dangerous in the extreme.

In the modern horse world, there are plenty of safe havens for those who are risk averse. And eventing isn’t one of them.

The kids who gravitate toward eventing might also be attracted to downhill skiing, hang gliding or rock climbing. They don’t generally shun risk, and I can tell you from experience that it’s not always easy to be the parents of such children. But does that make it appropriate to change the very nature of the sport they long to be involved in?

We tend to become more cautious with age. Bruce Davidson notwithstanding, there are very few advanced event riders in their mid-50s. In the whole world, 10, perhaps? All the rest of us have retired or dropped down the levels. It’s easy for us to forget what it’s like to be without fear, without pain, after so many injuries, so many hospital sojourns, such protracted recoveries. And so we older riders, quite understandably, project those worries onto the youngsters.

But our children don’t want our worries. They want risk, challenge and adventure, and they want to be able to reach the same high standards of eventing that we had. Ask any one of them, and hear it for yourself.

In a poem entitled “Prairie Spring,” Willa Cather writes of the incredible hardships of being a Midwestern farmer at the turn of the 20th century:

“The toiling horses, the tired men;  “The toiling horses, the tired men;  The long empty roads,  Sullen fires of sunset fading,  The eternal, unresponsive sky.  Against all this, Youth,  Flaming like the wild roses… Youth with its insupportable sweetness,  Its fierce necessity,  Its sharp desire…

The “fierce necessity and sharp desire” of youth. Why should we who had our chance to be three-day event riders deny the same opportunity to our hungry young riders? Isn’t that the Rule of Old Fogeydom at its very worst?