In the 2006 World Equestrian Games, 2008 Olympic Games and now the 2010 WEG, the U.S. eventing team has failed to medal. Industry leaders share their ideas on regaining the podium.

Denny Emerson:

Let’s Re-Examine Our System

Twenty years ago, I remember an article, I think in the Dartmouth alumni magazine, about David McLaughlin, former President of Dartmouth College (N.H.). He’d come to Dartmouth after working as a top business executive.

The article talked about how the management style at a corporation is very different from the management style at a college, which is cooperative, or “collegial.” At a college, people sit down and arrive at a consensus in the spirit of cooperation.

What I felt in the U.S. Equestrian Team’s eventing squad, under Neil Ayer and Jack Le Goff, was a collegial management style. I don’t see the present U.S. Equestrian Federation leadership reaching out to involve its constituents in a shared support and sense of mission. These are two nonprofits, and that ought to be the style.

When Le Goff was head of the USET, Ayer was head of the U.S. Combined Training Association, and they worked together, hand in glove. You have a very clear sense now that there is no coordination between the USEA and USEF—they’re almost on counter paths. The “all for one, one for all” attitude that Jack Fritz, Jonathan Burton and Neil brought to the sport is gone.

There’s the sense that the USEF is operating behind closed doors because no one is articulating their mission. I wish that, just as they did for their eventing safety summit, the USEF would call together 25 of the best and brightest minds in the country: George Morris, Mark Phillips, five or six riders, organizers of big events, judges, head of the USEA, head of the selection process, vets—an eclectic selection of people.

It’s time to re-look at things, not just go back to the same people. We need to open it up. We’d need a professional moderator, a two-day retreat, then come back and publish the ideas and share them with the eventing community.

Should the U.S. coach be American or live in the United States? What are we doing to help people find horses, to help young people come up the system? How are we spending money? At the end of the day, if you don’t come out with new ideas, you’re not trying.

If a sports team has a losing season, you bet the teams have brainstorming sessions. They don’t just plod along. Don’t be arrogant and elitist. Get momentum going.

Improve The Infrastructure

The U.S. should be always in the top three. We should have been this time, but we had bad luck. We’re a big, powerful country with more money than anyone else except the Saudis. Our program isn’t a disaster, but it’s not as good as it could be with clear leadership.

Leaders develop a following by showing where they want to go and persuading people to follow. I don’t see any of that in this country today. You can bet the Germans have a young horse/young rider coordinator, someone to oversee the dressage, a very integrated structure. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it articulated what our program is. I’ve never seen them say, “This is what we’re trying to do.”

If I was running the team now, I’d sit down and ask, “Who are my top people, what do they have for horses, and how do we get them prepared and sound and in the ring in two years?” That’s the immediate goal, but we also have to be building an infrastructure; that should be happening at the same time.

I felt right from the beginning when they hired Capt. Mark Phillips as chef d’equipe that it’s a mistake to not have someone who lives in the United States. I don’t know how many days a year he’s over here from England, but I would be surprised if it was 100 out of 365. 

You’ve heard of the 10-10-20 theory: You have 10 top riders, 10 in the wings, and 20 percolating underneath. Even people in the second 10 think Mark doesn’t know who they are or who their top horses are.

Here’s an example of the strength of the old system. In any professional sport, they make lists of who are the best athletes. Who are the best 10 event riders in the United States? Certainly high on that list would be Kim Severson. If there was a WEG coming up and Le Goff saw that she didn’t have a horse equally as good as her, he would’ve moved heaven and earth to help her out. He wouldn’t have let a championship come up without her being properly mounted. That piece of our infrastructure has crumbled.

If we’re going to turn our program around, we need someone who understands public relations, who’ll mend the rift between upper-level riders and the rank and file, who’ll get back the happy family feeling there was under Le Goff and Ayer.

Partner With The USEA

The USEA is an enormous resource that the USEF could use much more if there was open communication and a two-way street.

For instance, tons of people produce young horses, and most of them bring the horse up to a certain point, then that’s as far as they can go. Let’s say we have a list of the top 20 to 25 riders identified by the USEF. Out of those riders, people like Karen O’Connor, Phillip Dutton and Boyd Martin are in good shape with owners. But there’s Sara Mittleider or other kids in their 20s who’ve gone around Rolex and looked like the real deal. If we’ve identified these riders as having the drive, capability, courage, commitment and skill but no horse, let’s put their names out there. So if you have a young horse with potential, here are people you would do well to connect with. It could be a joint USEA-USEF venture.

Similarly, there are good instructors in the United States, but maybe 10 to 15 of them have produced people to the three- and four-star level. Those trainers have never received a letter from Mark or [USEF President] David O’Connor, saying, “We’re trying to broaden the infrastructure, let us know if you have a highly talented rider.”

There are ways we can create a safety net so these riders don’t get lost through the cracks. All kinds of programs could be done if the leaders talked, if they had a vision. They don’t have a plan that they’ve sold to their constit-uency, so they don’t have a constituency.

A nonprofit needs volunteers and donors, so you’d better sell your mission in a way that makes people want to support you. We have a whole group of people passionate about the sport, only waiting for a way to help, but that feeling of community is lost. Is that entirely Mark’s fault? Probably not. But he’s the point man.

Denny Emerson represented the United States on the 1974 World Championship gold-medal eventing team.

Capt. Mark Phillips:

We Need More Focus On Development

When the team is successful, everyone wants to talk to the riders, and when we’re not successful, everyone wants to talk to the coach. It’s a fact of life. I’ve got no secrets. I run a very open ship. Call me, and I’ll tell you what the deal is. The only thing I’m not free to discuss is veterinary issues.

Eighteen months ago, I made the decision to retire after 2012, and by then I’ll have done the job for 20 years, which I think is enough. I’ll be 64, and it’s time for somebody else to come in and bring a new or different dynamic to the senior squad.

I want my successor to be able to decide what’s good and bad, what to keep, what would be beneficial, and not have a last-minute handover. If my successor is in the United States, then it’ll be relatively easy to understand the budgeting and system. If you’re an outsider, it’s like walking into a Chinese puzzle.

When I first came to America, they had one of the biggest budgets of any nation, and now compared to the Europeans they have one of the smaller budgets. When the U.S. Equestrian Team and American Horse Shows Association merger was going on, the message was that there would be more money in one organization.

What’s happened is the complete opposite. On a net basis, taking into account inflation, our funding has gone down in the last five to eight years.

Compared to what the Europeans have in terms of the developing riders, junior and young rider programs, ours is very much a second-division affair. Ever since I’ve been on the job, the Developing Rider program has been the first thing cut out of the U.S. Equestrian Federation budget.

I complained to the Federation and U.S. Olympic Committee last year that we were in trouble because we didn’t have a big enough pool of talented riders coming up. The USOC put in money for us to send some Developing Riders to the Boekelo CCI*** (the Netherlands), and you can see what a success that was (see Nov. 12). Through a lack of funding, we haven’t been able to do that in the last 10 years.

The good news is we’ve qualified for the Olympic Games. The Pan American Games next year will be a two-star, so we hope to have an opportunity to give team experience to younger horses and riders. Under U.S. laws, however, we have to select the best horse/rider combinations to help the U.S. team win a medal.

So if senior [more experienced and qualified] people apply, we’re bound by the law, as I understand it, to select them. We don’t have option to say, “I know you’re our best chance to medal, but we want to give someone else experience.”

The priority is always for the senior team to meet performance markers, so the Developing Rider tour is the first thing cut out of the budget. We really are going to be in trouble here. The average age of our team at WEG was a lot more than 30.

We have the horses in this country, no question. But they’re not all with the people they need to be if we’re going to win a gold medal. There’s nothing new about this. Thirty years ago, when I was competing, who was responsible for doing this? We were, the riders. Riders still have to take on that responsibility today.

The German Federation can spend up to a million dollars to buy a horse and give it to a rider. Our Federation cannot own horses. We cannot do that in the United States and not be seen to have conflict of interest in our selection procedure.

I do my best to discourage riders from clinicing or riding young horses in the month before a major championship. I think it’s beneficial when we have to go to Europe or somewhere before an event, because the riders have nothing else to think about except that horse or how to win that medal.

At the WEG, we had the home disadvantage because they were pulled in many different directions. In England and other nations, they have lottery funding and multi-million Euro programs, but our money comes from sponsorship and donations—no government funding, no sports administration funding.

Still, it’s not just about money. Would more help? Yes. But would we have won a medal if we had just ridden better at the WEG? Absolutely.

We Weren’t Good Enough

It just wasn’t our weekend at the WEG. We could have won a medal, and we didn’t. It’s a long and complicated process, but the selectors did a good job in selecting the best possible combinations. In hindsight, all the right decisions were made and with due diligence.           

The bottom line is that as fantastic as we rode Saturday, we were seventh after dressage, and that wasn’t good enough. I’ve said for the last 10 to 15 years that we’ve got to be under 50 in dressage, and we are, but now so is half the field. It’s not good enough anymore. All the top nations scored around 40—that’s where the game is today.

And no, our horses weren’t as good as the Brits’. That’s why it was fantastic to get as close to them as we did on Saturday. But we didn’t ride well enough on the first and third days.

We had a program this summer to protect the horses we had and to compete on a minimal basis so we’d have something to select from in September. But when you look at our horses compared to other teams, ours still weren’t as sound.

The Brits went home at 8 p.m. on Saturday and didn’t come back until 8 a.m. My team was there half the night. We had an unbelievably good backup team with veterinarians Wendy and Brendan Furlong and farrier Steve Teichman, and it’s only thanks to them that we could jump Sunday morning.

Still, we took the best horse-rider combinations we could to win a medal, the ones we thought were sound enough to get through the inspections. We were correct in every one apart from Becky.

No one had to run for time at the final selection trial [at the Land Rover/USEA American Eventing Championships]; that was never the plan. We always wanted to give horses a confidence boosting outing there. The footing was only good enough to do that; it wasn’t good enough to go 700 mpm, and that’s what people did who didn’t get nervous.

While naming the team earlier would give riders a bigger degree of comfort, would it help them prepare their horses better?

I’m not convinced of that. If you’d known six weeks before, what would you have done different? We already gave people a huge amount of flexibility in what they did, where they ran and how. In fact, some people would say we were too lenient, that one or two horses should have had another run.

Capt. Mark Phillips has been the U.S. chef d’equipe and coach for eventing since 1993.

Jim Wolf:

We Can’t Just Blame The Budget

We had an unlucky weekend at the WEG, but you don’t walk away from a bad day and just completely shrug it off. You use it to motivate you. Had we held our place after cross-country and won the team silver, we may not have paid as much attention to stuff we need to. So the silver lining to that cloud is that we’re qualified for the Olympics, but it’s putting a bright spotlight on things we have to do better before London.

And at the end of the day, in horse sports it’s always about having a little bit of luck on the day. I can’t remember who had the quote, but it’s a great one: “Isn’t it funny that the harder I work, the luckier I get?” I believe that. We need to work harder.

Don’t think that the Brits, who had a great Games, didn’t also walk off saying, “OK, how are we going to be more competitive next time?” because the game passes you by very quickly. Even if we had medaled in all the Olympic disciplines and done all the things we’d aspired to do there, I’d still be having meetings as urgently as I am now to say, “OK, now our job is to not lose the momentum we have.”

I think for the most part our athletes represented our country really well at the WEG. There were a few exceptions, but we credentialed 395 people. That’s the largest delegation we’ve ever put in the field anywhere, and it’s probably the largest we ever will.

There were no positive drug tests, horses or human, and we selected eight teams without an athlete grievance. You know you’re doing something right when your selection procedures hold up. I also think they worked. In 1992 we had to leave Gem Twist at home from the Olympic Games because of our selection criteria. But this year I don’t think we left anyone at home that should have been there.

Yesterday I talked to Boyd [Martin, who was the top U.S. eventer at the WEG and recently stirred up controversy for criticizing the USEF’s spending decisions on his blog]. Everyone has his own perspective, and I think Boyd’s asked some important questions about the appropriate use of funds, about athlete fitness. I think those are questions we should always be asking ourselves.

My only comment to Boyd was that even though he raised some very interesting points, I think those are probably best discussed with the High Performance Committee and the Active Athletes Committee, and not in a big public forum. That’s not to say I’m afraid to talk about anything we do. We’re very transparent. I’m not afraid of conversation. But nothing’s going to get done in a big public forum.

The Monetary Breakdown

Right now [the USEF is] in the middle of finalizing our budget process for next year, and there were a lot of conversations about our priorities for next year, based on our performances at WEG, like the Pan American Games.

We’re waiting to get an approved schedule from the Pan Am organizers of the Pan American Games. In eventing, we need confirmation of whether we’re doing the Olympic format or the World Games format. Are we sending a team of four or five riders?

We do have the luxury of not having to send our absolute top combinations there. But I won’t send a team down there to not be competitive. I’m going to put the best people I can on the field at that level.

It wouldn’t make sense to send four-star horse-rider combinations. You may have a four-star rider on a two-star horse, and that’s exactly who we may end up sending. Phillip Dutton or someone like that on a great two-star horse—you bet.

The Federation is committed to developing the pipeline. It’s not that it’s not important to us. But I have to put flying horses to the Pan Ams in the budget before

I can put in a developing rider grant for Boekelo. It’s not really fair to say we’re cutting things from the budget, we just can’t put them in. There’s a big difference there.

When we’re looking at budgeting priorities, the first thing we have to look at is where we have contractual obligations [like coaches’ salaries]. That has to be in the budget—we’ve made a commitment.

Then we look at the things that are tied to selection—the things we’re obligated to fund, because our selection criteria is really a contract with the athletes. Flying selectors around or sending vets to do evaluations are things we’re contractually obligated to do within the selection criteria.

Then we fund the support we need for whatever championship team we’re going to put in the field that year. So if Mark [Phillips] is saying he needs a dressage coach or a jumping coach, and the High Performance Committee agrees with him, then that would be a priority. And then if we have funding available, then we prioritize developing the pipeline.

I think a more accurate way to state it is that the developing rider programs are less of a priority, by necessity, than the things we’re obligated to do immediately that year and that we’re under contractual obligations to fund.

Also, much of the Boekelo money was designated funds from the U.S. Olympic Committee. And if it’s designated for a project, you can’t use it for something else unless the USOC committee agrees to it. It’s very collaborative with them, and they’ve improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years in terms of partnering with the national governing bodies to produce results. But we just can’t on our own initiative decide to use money that was designated for one project and use it on something else without their permission.

I think it’s wrong to say that the budget is to blame, and this is where Mark and I get into it sometimes. It’s not so much how much money you spend, but how smart you’re spending the money you have. Look at the Canadians. They beat us with a lot smaller budget than we had, so don’t tell me it’s all about the budget. It’s not. It’s about making good decisions, and it’s about using your money wisely.

Jim Wolf is the U.S. Equestrian Federation’s executive director of sport programs.