There is a vibrant grassroots movement going on in the United States right now to save the traditional three-day event.
The message coming through loud and clear to the leadership of the U.S. Eventing Association, the U.S. Equestrian Federation, and what’s left of the old U.S. Equestrian Team is “lead, follow, or get out of the way.”
The prevailing sentiment of the thousands of lower-level riders toward the several dozen “big-name riders” who haven’t spoken up is very simple: “If you don’t care enough to fight for it, you don’t deserve to have it!”
Even though it’s pretty latent most of the time, embedded somewhere in the American psyche is the conviction that we don’t like being told what to do unless we’ve had a say in the process. We may not consciously think it, but that slogan from 1776, “No taxation without representation” is part of our collective memory.
What triggered this current revolt–if that’s not too strong a term– began when the elitist International Olympic Committee pressured the equally elitist Federation Equestre Internationale to “dumb down” the three-day event by getting rid of roads and tracks and steeplechase for, first, the Olympics and then for all international championships. This removed much of the speed-and-endurance part of the equation that so fully tests the basic soundness, stamina and generosity of the elite cross-country horse and tests so many of the horsemanship skills of the rider.
The majority of American event riders have hated the changes all along. A U.S. Eventing Association poll a year ago confirmed that more than 92 percent of us were against it, so we waited for our leaders to speak up. And waited. And waited. Certainly, a few of us wrote some articles–John Strassburger, Kevin Baumgardner, King Penniman, Jack Pollard. But the overall silence was deafening. Meanwhile three-day was crumbling before our eyes.
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In October, two months after the debacle of the “Olympic eventing competition” (no longer a three-day event), the Fair Hill CCI*** (Md.) changed to the short format. And U.S. Chef d’Equipe Mark Phillips has been telling riders to avoid next April’s Rolex Kentucky CCI**** and go instead to the Luhmuhlen CCI**** (Germany), which will be run in the short format, if they want to make a future American team.
It appeared that our leadership had caved in, and–with a handful of exceptions–the current crop of upper-level riders, so brave in other ways, seemed too intimidated to speak up. So who was left?
Well, people most of us had never heard of–Tammy Makela, Mary Lynn Kuh, Janet Gunn, Karin Hagios, Laura Mungioli, and a host of others on The Chronicle of the Horse eventing discussion forum. What we were about to see was the unleashing of the extraordinary power of the Internet. It’s instant communication around the globe, magnified dramatically by geometric progression.
One Internet subscriber can come up with an idea and e-mail it to 20 friends. The friends can mail it to their friends, and so on, so that in a few days that idea is in the hands and minds of thousands of people. Of course, used wrongly, this phenomenon can do as much harm as good.
The COTH readers intuitively understood Confucius’ saying, “It’s better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.” What they also knew was something that Confucius could never have imagined. Thanks to geometric progression, a candle can turn into a blowtorch!
The online dynamic of creation is similar to watching a glowing bar of iron get hammered into a horseshoe. Let’s say “Flying Change” comes up with the idea of making “Save the 3-Day” T-shirts. Someone else, say Karin Hagios, has a logo idea. Then Janet Gunn suggests a modification, and so on. Laura Mun-gioli contacts Caf
