Even a quick glance at the results from Poplar Place Farm March and Southern Pines II Horse Trials from this weekend, March 25-27, could send eyebrows skyward—the numbers of cross-country eliminations and retirements alone in Hamilton, Ga., and Raeford, N.C., respectively, were shocking.

But Saturday, March 26, was more than just unlucky for riders Michael Pollard and Arden Wildasin, who had to euthanize their mounts Dekorum and Mandar after non-fence related injuries on cross-country. And just hours before those accidents, British team veteran Daisy Berkeley lost her longtime partner Spring Along at the Gatcombe Park Horse Trials in Glouchestershire, England.

Pollard, of Chatsworth, Ga., was competing Dekorum at Poplar Place for owner and breeder Jane Rusconi of Jefferson, Ore. Her 9-year-old Thoroughbred-Warmblood cross mare (Catherston Dazzler—Bett’s Jet, Valhalla Gained) was competing in her third advanced horse trial. She fractured a hind leg before fence 8, having just cleared a bounce of huts a few strides before.

“She jumped the bounce easily—it was early in the course, but she’d been going really well,” said Pollard. “As she was coming down the hill to the water, it felt like she hesitated and then hit [the fence into the] water hard. Then we landed, and normally she’d pick right up and go, but she didn’t go anywhere. I could feel that something wasn’t right, so I looked and saw her hind leg. I reviewed the video later, and it looked like it was about the fourth stride coming down the hill that she just took a bad step and broke the leg before take-off, which is why she hit the fence.”

Pollard praised Poplar Place’s emergency team members, who responded quickly and attempted to stabilize the mare so she could be transported. But the damage was too great for her to be able to walk onto the trailer. In consultation with the two veterinarians on hand and Rusconi by phone, Pollard and his wife Nathalie made the decision to immediately euthanize the mare.

“It’s something that you never think will happen to you, and I’m very fortunate that I haven’t had that many horses injured underneath me,” said Pollard, 30. “It’s just very sad. Ultimately, there’s not a whole lot that can be done when you see that kind of break. You just try to hold it together and stay calm.”

Wildasin, 17, of Sperryville, Va., was competing in the intermediate rider division at Southern Pines. She pulled up Mandar, an 11-year-old Irish Sport Horse (Condios—Ballinclover Penny, Clover Hill) owned in conjunction with her father, James Wildasin, in between fences. After transporting the horse back to the barn, veterinarians discovered he’d fractured his hind fetlock.

U.S. Equestrian Federation President David O’Connor, who was competing at Poplar Place, said he hadn’t seen footage of Wildasin’s incident, but that he’d reviewed the tape of Pollard’s several times.

“It just wasn’t fence-related,” he said. “You didn’t see it coming. The horse just was going in between two fences and had not hit the fence before it. There was no real reason. It was just some weakness in that hind leg.”

Berkeley’s Spring Along, an 18-year-old four-star and team veteran, died of a suspected pulmonary embolism while jumping up two steps to a palisade, fence 23AB, on the 25-fence open intermediate course at Gatcombe Park. In August, the pair won the British Eventing Open Championship at the same venue. This was the gelding’s first competition since then, as Berkeley took time off to have her first child early this year.

“Obviously, condolences go out to everyone involved,” said O’Connor, who’s also a former chairman of the Fédération Equestre Internationale’s Safety Sub-Committee. “To have this all happen in one day is unbelievable.

“You pore over these things all the time and try to look for something you can prevent. It’s a constant conversation—the ‘What if?’—that everybody asks—riders, trainers, course designers, officials,” he continued.

But since these accidents were all unrelated to obstacles and show no evidence of any mistake being made, “I’m not quite sure how you would prevent anything,” he said.

O’Connor noted that he lost one of his own young horses earlier this spring in a pasture accident almost identical to that of Pollard’s horse. He and his barn staff will never know how the injury happened, but the horse had to be euthanized.

“You keep going back to that line, ‘You can’t make the sport safer than life itself,’ ” O’Connor said. “I think this sport takes very, very seriously the need to look at [accidents] and ask if there are common threads. But sports have risks to them. There’s no way that you can have a non-risk environment.

“I really don’t believe that these accidents were sport-related, they just happened in the sport,” he added.