The Rolex Kentucky CCI is to eventing as the Final Four is to college basketball, and its centerpiece, the cross-country course, is to course design as Mercedes-Benz is to automotive design. It sets the standard, and everybody else tries to emulate it.

It’s always been that way, ever since the 1978 World Championships, when Roger Haller set a track of imposing and exacting jumps, the creativity and craftsmanship of which were overshadowed by heat and humidity that made it mostly a survival of the fittest.

Since then, the four course designers who followed Haller (Neil Ayer in 1982 and ’83, Patrick Lynch in 1984 and from 1986 to 1992, Richard Newton–who built Haller’s course–in 1985, and Michael Etherington-Smith since 1993) have tested or perfected a wide range of tests there. They’ve built bounces into and within water complexes, skinny jumps (often on bending, related distances), corners over ditches, mounds and keyhole jumps on the bluegrass of the Kentucky Horse Park.

“All the roads lead to the top events, like Kentucky here or Badminton in the U.K., so we do set the standards and trends, inevitably,” admitted Etherington-Smith.

But Haller, who’s been an official at all four of the world’s four-star events, is far more convinced that Kentucky sets the standard in course design, especially in the United States, but around the world too.

“I’d say Kentucky is a leader, especially since it’s a more sophisticated course than Badminton, Burghley [England] or Adelaide [Australia],” said Haller. “And I’d say Mike’s used it to try out new ideas” that he’s used at places like the 2005 European Championships or the 2000 Olympics.

The cross-country course for any horse trial or three-day event has to be dynamic–if it doesn’t change, competitors will go elsewhere in search of new challenges. And the Kentucky course has to be especially dynamic since it’s the country’s biggest, most prestigious eventing competition and the only one that’s truly a spectator affair and is covered by network TV.

Consequently, one of the most obvious changes Etherington-Smith has made over 13 years is in the course’s track around the KHP. He described the course’s shape when he took over as “a long, thin sausage” that wound from one end of the park to the other, and back again.

He said the ideal course shape is a cloverleaf, because spectators can watch horses pass several times, so about a decade ago he chopped off the western end of the course while building more jumps in the steeplechase course infield and on the east end of the course, next to the polo field and campgrounds. The result is a more compact, easily viewed course, especially with the two Jumbotron TV screens placed strategically around the event.

“I fear I may have done my job too well. Now the fans don’t seem to move around like they used to,” said Etherington-Smith with a laugh.

Testing What?
“It might surprise you,” said Haller, “but I think the biggest change at Kentucky since 1978 is not the type of fences. It’s the length.”

That’s because the three-day used to be primarily a test of speed and endurance. Just a decade ago, during the four phases of speed and endurance day, horses and riders would cover as much as 30 kilometers (18.5 miles) in about 1 hour and 45 minutes in a championship.

And at the first Kentucky four-star, in 1998, phase A (the first roads and tracks) took 26 minutes, phase B (the steeplechase) took 4:30, phase C (the second roads and tracks) took 44 minutes, and phase D (the cross-country) had an optimum time of 12 minutes. The total distance was 25.3 kilometers (15.6 miles), requiring 86 minutes, plus a 10-minute hold in the vet box before cross-country.

This year, because Kentucky, like all the three- and four-star events in the rest of the world, will be a short-format event, horses and riders will have only the cross-country course, which will be roughly 6,270 meters long (3.88 miles) and have an optimum time of 11:00.

Even though the CCI, or international three-day event, is now a completely different animal than it was just five years ago (“a glorified horse trial,” grumble some), Etherington-Smith insists that the 2006 course will not be easier than in 2005. “It’s every bit as big as last year–in some places it may be bigger,” he said.

And he said that the short format hasn’t changed how he presents the questions. “A course is like a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Whether it’s short or long format, all designers have to give the riders tools they can use to get going and get home,” Etherington-Smith said.

One of the biggest changes in cross-county course building over the last 20 years has been an evolution toward what designers call “clustering.” Three-day courses used to have long gallops between fences, often three or four massive but straightforward fences over the 400 meters or more, followed by a combination, usually a water jump, a coffin, a bank or a sunken road, and then another long gallop.

“Run-and-jump fences on their own aren’t enough anymore,” said Etherington-Smith. So he and other international course designers have come to rely more on combinations, or a series of related fences, that demand more mentally of both horse and rider. Four-star fences require both to react quickly, to change direction, stride and balance in what sometimes seems an unrelenting manner.

It’s the nearly unrelenting series of adjustments and questions that mostly separates the four-star from the three-star. And it’s why you often see rookie combinations gallop around with a great round for the first half or more of the course, have a run-out or even a fall at a late fence, and then continue as if nothing had happened. Their brains just get tired, but a brief miscue gives them a second to recover and get back in the game.

“It’s a trend that’s, for me, gone about as far as it must go,” said Etherington-Smith of clustering. “The intensity of effort is so much more than it was just 10 years ago, and I doubt it can go much further.”

But designers like him are stuck because the shorter length that FEI rules mandate forces him to build the fences closer together.

“It strikes me that the course has become increasingly beautiful and spectator friendly, in the sense that the key complexes are grouped almost as little ‘mini courses,’ with great throngs of people trekking from complex to complex,” said Denny Emerson, the 1974 World Championship team gold medalist who remains one of the most outspoken proponents of the traditional three-day format.

Emerson regrets that the Kentucky course–and almost all other three-day courses–is no longer home to horses whose strong suit is galloping and jumping all day long.

“The actual jumps are plenty tough, but my sense is that it’s a bit more like ‘show jumping in the open,’ with the resultant need for a horse who’s both a very good technician and a scopey athlete,” said Emerson.

Sophisticated But�
“From the beginning, Kentucky was meant to be a test of the riders, and that’s certainly what Mike has continued to do. That test is certainly a lot more sophisticated now than it was [in 1978], but he has a lot more tools,” said Haller.

He meant that Etherington-Smith and other designers have created a variety of obstacles that no one had thought of in the ’60s or ’70s, and he has equipment and artisans to use that no one had thought to use 30 years ago either.

“The course Rick Newton built for the ’78 World Championships was sophisticated relative to the era, but not compared to today,” Haller said.

Haller compared his Fort Lexington Bank, which has remained one of the course’s signature fences through dozens of permutations, to one of Etherington-Smith’s 2005 creations.

The original Lexington bank–where horses leaped over a ditch onto the steep side of the bank, took a stride or two to the top, then jumped over a bounce to land on the other steep side and jump off–was a straight-line test of courage, impulsion and agility.

But last year Etherington-Smith built another variation on the bank theme, near the campgrounds, that’s indicative of how things have progressed. Heavy equipment created two mounds, on top of which Etherington-Smith placed massive, brush-filled corner jumps, with three strides between them.

Haller said this question added new questions to the traditional bank. “Craftsmen’s Corners” combined balance, steering, impulsion, and the ability to regulate the horse’s stride on a related distance over undulating ground.

“The sophistication of the questions is staggerlingly more than it used to be,” said Haller.

Those corners also demonstrate how, over the last 13 years, Etherington-Smith has added numerous terrain features to the Kentucky course. He said he had to do that because, although the park’s ground rolls, it lacks much naturally usable terrain since it has no streams, woods or hills. His predecessors used the western end that he cut off because that part of the park had the only steep hill and an old streambed. But it was more than three-quarters of a mile from the trade fair.

John Williams, who finished second at Kentucky in 2002 and designs the courses for the Jersey Fresh CCI***/** and the American Eventing Championships, called last year’s mounds combination “one of the most difficult questions I’ve ever seen. You had to be good, and you had to be lucky.”

Williams thinks “the way Mike has rearranged the earth and used the placement of the fences on those lumps and bumps is probably the biggest change.

“He’s very clever about it. Those lumps and bumps force the traditional, unpredictable distances back into the game and take away the predictable distances that favor the show jumping types. He forces the cross-country skill back into the game, and I think that’s a good thing.”

Making Terrain
Etherington-Smith said he’s been moving tons of earth in an attempt to make the fences look more as if they belong there naturally. Haller admitted that his and Lynch’s fences tended to be tremendously imposing, almost monstrous, to make up for the lack of terrain.

But, said Williams, one thing that’s largely gone–from both the Kentucky course and almost everywhere else–is those incredibly daunting fences–suspended logs that had to be leaped to get off the Lexington Bank, the huge white rails of the Head of the Lake, the daunting broken bridge, and the courage-testing, sheer drop of Lynch’s Leap.

“The course tends to be a little less frightening,” said Williams. “And, for the most part, that’s probably a good thing, unless you can find a safe way to ask those questions, to not have to deal with a horse stuck in a ditch or something. But you do lose some of those old-type fences that were such a part of the sport.”

Etherington-Smith agreed with Williams’ observation. But, he said, he tries to make all his fences relate, somehow, to each other, not just be a random series of imposing tests.

“The cross-country course is a package of questions, and there has to be a relationship between them, so that what happens at one affects what happens at another,” he said.

An example is the Head of the Lake, the Kentucky course’s No. 1 signature fence, the place where spectators start camping out at 7 a.m., even if it’s pouring rain.

The lake has always featured a six-foot to 6’6″ drop into the water–in 1978 horses leaped over a water-filled ditch onto a small bank, then bounced over white birch rails to descend into the water. Etherington-Smith has often used a bounce to set horses up for the drop, “but everybody’s become so good at that now.”

The challenge he faces at the Head of the Lake is that spectators like to see horses gallop across the water, “but the more time you give riders between the fences, the easier it becomes. That’s one of the differences between the three-star and the four-star, that the riders–and the horses–have to react quicker, be sharper” said the designer. “So the water itself doesn’t actually want to get any bigger.”

Instead, Etherington-Smith has built a third water jump for 2006, right next to the Fort Lexington Bank. Horses will jump out of this new pond, the fourth fence from home, and onto what’s left of the bank, giving spectators and the TV cameras one last chance to see horses make a splash.

The new water jump also represents a step in the course’s next evolution, since Etherington-Smith plans to turn the course around, to run it in a generally left-handed direction, again in 2007. In 2003, he reversed the course, to a generally right-handed direction, for the first time since 1981. And he got rave reviews, mostly because the right-handed track allowed the first half a dozen fences to be a good introduction to the tougher questions to come.

“We’ll see what happens next year,” said Etherington-Smith with a smile.

They Do A Lot Of Woodworking And Gardening
What most sets the Rolex Kentucky course off from every other course in the United States is the care that surrounds the jumps Mike Etherington-Smith creates. One element of that is the craftsmanship of the construction and the decoration that enhance Mike Etherington-Smith’s designs. The other element is the footing, the quality of the ground leading up to those questions.

Course builder Mick Costello and assistant Mat Langeliers use their chainsaws and other implements to create ducks, squirrels, fish, canoes, bridges, tables and more. And then a committee of about 85 people dresses up those creations even further, with paint, stain, mulch, sod and thousands of flowers and shrubs.

“There’s certainly a school of thought among the people at Kentucky that they want to make sure it looks really, really good, and they do. We have a team that gives blood to make everything look superb,” said Etherington-Smith. “But there is a school of thought that says you can go too far decorating your fences, led by Hugh Thomas,” the director and course designer of the Badminton CCI**** (England).

In course decoration, as in course design, Kentucky sets the standard for the rest of American events. But Etherington-Smith doesn’t think other course designers and builders need to compete or be as elaborate.

“It’s not a competition to see who has the most beautiful fences,” he said. “Not every fence has to be a work of art.”

Actually, he believes that decoration isn’t nearly as important as footing. He even said that, given the choice between building an elaborate jump or two and making sure the footing will hold up in pouring rain and provide cushion in drought, he’d make sure of the footing.

“All of us have become so much more cognizant of the footing, and at Kentucky we certainly spend a lot more time preparing the ground than we used to,” said Etherington-Smith.

Almost all the take-off and landing points have been re-enforced with bluestone or rocks to provide drainage and support, and the track is regularly aerated and seeded–even though the Kentucky Horse Park is in the center of Kentucky’s legendary bluegrass country.

“The footing there is so good naturally, but we take care of it to keep it that way,” said Etherington-Smith. “And that’s something that everyone needs to be aware of. Taking care of the footing is one of those things that’s not really visible–unless something is wrong with it–and something you have to do all the year round.”

What Will The Future Bring?
Roger Haller, who created the course for the 1978 World Three-Day Event Championships at the Kentucky Horse Park and for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, has a prediction about what the future will bring in course design, at Rolex Kentucky and elsewhere.

“I don’t think there has been as much emphasis as there should be on what I call ‘the fences in between,’ ” said Haller, referring to the galloping jumps between the eye-catching combinations. “I think we had almost more variation in those fences in the ’70s and the ’80s, and I think that’s where the next evolution in course design is going to come from.”

Haller, who keeps busy as a technical delegate, inspecting other people’s courses, these days, recalled that corners and narrow jumps (“skinnies” or “pimples”) emerged and became a standard feature on courses in the late ’80s and ’90s, and clustering groups of fences and combinations has been the big innovation in this decade.

Those changes, he said, coincided with the dramatic increase in the sport’s dressage requirements (most especially the flying changes) in the late ’90s and the increase in the show jumping height and technicality in this decade. Gone are the days when a horse could place lower than about 10th in
dressage and win Kentucky, but now two dislodged show jumping rails could knock a horse out of the top 10.

“The pendulum is going to continue to swing, as it always does, so I’m sure we’ll see some kind of evolution in the next 10 years. And maybe that will be a big change in the fences in between,” said Haller. “Or maybe it will be something else, something we can’t even imagine right now. But I have a feeling we’ll see it first at Kentucky.”