The U.S. show jumpers left for the Pan Am Games (p. 8) with the weighty responsibility of, basically, having to place first or second to avoid the embarrassment and repercussions of being shut out of the 2004 Olympics. And first or second place was no given’they hadn’t won the Pan Am team gold since 1983. Canada had beaten them in 1987, and since then Brazil had run up a three-Games winning streak.
But Chris Kappler, Margie Engle, Lauren Hough and Beezie Madden delivered in the crunch. As Chef d’Equipe Frank Chapot said, “The team was very professional, and they were chosen to do just what they did.” Notice that he used the word “chosen.”
The debate over subjective vs. objective selection for U.S. show jumpers is a well-worn one, but this year’s selection process and the results rendered give a lot of weight to the argument for a more subjective selection process. The U.S. Equestrian Team began to rely on strictly objective selection trials after litigation in 1988 and 1990 left them no option, but for the last two years the criteria have had a section that allows some subjective judgment from a selection committee, and this year they used it.
Kappler, who with Royal Kaliber won the $150,000 Budweiser American Invitational (Fla.) and the $200,000 Budweiser AGA Championships (Fla.) in April, didn’t even start the selection trials (held in Lexington, Ky., in May) and was given an automatic bye.
Hough, on Windy City, won the first round of the selection trials and was then allowed to sit out the other rounds to protect a collarbone she’d broken a few weeks earlier. Engle and Madden made the team at the trials, and Engle came home with an individual bronze medal, while Madden added just 4 faults to the team’s score.
Kappler said that skipping the trials allowed him to hone his own and Royal Kaliber’s preparation and fitness against the world’s best in June at the Aachen CSIO (Germany), where they jumped one of only two double-clear rounds in the Nations Cup.
It’s experience in competitions like Aachen or Spruce Meadows (Alta.)’four days of demanding courses, against top competition that makes you ride your best, in front of noisy, electric crowds’that prepares horses and riders for championships, physically and mentally. As Linda Allen has pointed out in her columns in this magazine, American horses and riders can outjump and outrun anyone in a single class. But it’s rare when they can do it in the five or six rounds of a championship’and the artificial and sterile environment of our selection trials have clearly not been producing winning combinations.
USET officials have struck a nice balance with this year’s selection process, which they’re recommending be the process for the selection of the 2004 Olympic team. To address the American cultural imperative of equal opportunity, anyone can take their shot at making the team by riding in the selection trials, if they’ve qualified for the trials through international-caliber performance. Then, clean rounds in the trials could put them on the team.
But the mandates of selection trials have, for a decade, deprived our teams of great stars like Gem Twist and Royal Kaliber because of a fluke or minor injury. A subjective element means they could still contribute to the goal’to win championships. And that’s a goal that’s important because winning medals is a sure-fire way to increase interest in show jumping and all horse sports, to generate funds to perpetuate the sport, and to boost the morale of everyone involved.
