The Kentucky Horse Park will host an eight-discipline international championship in 2010, and a lot of the people who’ll be associated with it are hoping that the folks from the Federation Equestre Internationale come to their senses and change the name back to what it used to be. Ever since 1990 it’s been the World Equestrian Games, but the FEI’s leadership hired a consultant last year, who told them the name could be only two words and it had to have FEI in it.

So they came up with “FEI Games” (you saw the 2010 logo in last week’s issue), managing in one swift swoop to eliminate the two adjectives that best describe the competition. And if you think this is all some kind of academic marketing exercise, the Rolex Kentucky CCI (p. 8), where 2010 was on almost everybody’s mind, and NBC’s Rolex Kentucky broadcast last Sunday should have proven that it wasn’t. I heard Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher call 2010 the “World Equestrian Games,” and then correct himself to “FEI Games” during both the awards ceremony and a TV interview. And the TV producers even called it the “World Equestrian Championships.”

Of course they did. “FEI Games” is absolutely meaningless. It’s certainly understandable that the FEI’s leaders want their name associated with their biggest property (you know, for “branding”), but why not just plunk “FEI” down in front of World Equestrian Games? I’d be willing to bet the house that 95 percent of the people who ride or own horses in North America couldn’t tell you what the three initials stand for–never mind trying to describe what the federation actually does–if their lives depended on it. And when you put “Games” behind a meaningless acronym, it sounds like a costume party or a croquet match, not like the biggest thing in equestrian sports outside the Olympics. (Notice that I didn’t say Olympic “Games.”)

I was confounded by this name change when it was announced last December and heartened that I hadn’t missed something obvious when I discussed it with several people far more knowledgeable than I am about marketing at last January’s U.S. Equestrian Federation convention. But the perfect time to write about it didn’t come until Kentucky, where the place was abuzz with excitement about 2010 and awash with confusion about what to call the event that’s likely to be the biggest public-relations opportunity American horse sports has ever had.

Bob Hughes is the producer of NBC-TV’s Rolex Kentucky coverage and the man most likely to produce whatever coverage there is of 2010’s event. He suspects that FEI officials were unduly influenced by the success of the FIFA World Cup, soccer’s Super Bowl. He said people around the world actually call it the FIFA World Cup, and it’s annually the world’s single most viewed sporting event, despite a minuscule American audience. And FIFA (which stands for Federation Internationale de Football Association) is, like the FEI, headquartered in Switzerland.

Hughes said they had little choice but to call both this summer’s competition in Aachen, Germany, and the 2010 event in Kentucky the “World Equestrian Championships” on TV. Why? “You have a name right now [World Equestrian Games] that not even all equestrian fans know what it means, so we had to go back to what it really is–the championships,” said Hughes, adding, “NBC will never call it the FEI Games.”

So, please, FEI, let us give 2010 a name that won’t confuse potential fans or sponsors. Let us give it a championship name, one that will give people a clear reason to come to Kentucky in four years.