Ever since the U.S. eventing team last won a gold medal, at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, it\’s been a continuous struggle to climb back onto the highest step of the victory podium. And in 2002, our team of John Williams, Kim Severson, David O\’Connor and Amy Tryon did just that, with expert and gritty riding in all three phases.
But how ironic is it that after 18 years\’just as all those dreams, all that work, and all that money brought our quest to fruition\’that the International Olympic Committee should try to yank that podium, figuratively speaking, out from under us and the entire sport of eventing by threatening to remove the sport from the Olympics?
A great deal has been written in the Chronicle and elsewhere about the American gold medal at Jerez, Spain. But I haven\’t read anything yet that attempts to place that victory into perspective against the bitter fight that the leaders of the U.S. Equestrian Team and USA Equestrian have now waged for six full years. What I think is really amazing in relation to that fight is that our eventers not only won, but that the dressage riders, show jumper Peter Wylde, the drivers, vaulters and reiners also claimed medals.
Shortly after the WEG, I heard USET President Armand Leone, in a USAEq teleconference, say that full and total credit for the riders\’ WEG performances belonged to the USET. That, of course, fails to recognize that those USET riders prepared for the WEG in events run under USAEq rules, while being judged and administered by officials trained in USAEq programs, and that they competed for years under the USAEq drug program. Plus, the sport has always been supported to an enormous degree by the U.S. Eventing Association.
My point is this: Nobody but a person of the narrowest vision, totally lacking in the ability to think analytically, can truly believe that competing factions is the smartest way to run a sport. That\’s why it\’s time to end this war. The only reason the USET and USAEq didn\’t merge in 2002 was bitter personal issues between certain members of the respective boards. Obviously, a united national governing body, with a board that addresses top-to-bottom concerns, makes the most sense.
The first victim of this whole mess, though, was common sense.
Hidden Reasons
As if we didn\’t have a big enough challenge fighting against the forces of disintegration from within, the International Olympic Committee decided in August to put three-day eventing on its hit list of sports to drop from the Olympics. The chief reason given was that eventing takes a lot of land and is expensive to run. But if you peel back the curtain and think analytically about their decision, hidden reasons for their plan appear.
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Eventing is probably the most dangerous sport in the Olympics, the one of the three equestrian sports where the specter of equine or human death is actually a concern. Gild the lily any way you want, but you can\’t escape this fact.
Plus, three-day eventing\’like all horse sports\’is almost completely a white sport, and most of the participants are far from poor. How much does a pair of sneakers cost? Or a tennis racket? Not much compared to an Olympic-caliber horse. It\’s hard to sell a white, rich sport to an IOC member from a poor nation where few of the people are white. In other words, since eventing has failed to attract demographically broad-based support, we\’re an easy discard.
The leaders of the Federation Equestre Internationale negotiated a short-term deal with the IOC to keep eventing in the Olympics for at least the 2004 Games in Athens, but in so doing they may have compromised and damaged the sport more than they helped it. At any rate, the FEI basically made this dubious horse trade: “Look, keep eventing in the Olympics, and we\’ll let you get rid of roads and tracks and steeplechase. We\’ll not insist on real three-day eventing, a basically cross-country test of the great galloping horses of the past, horses with stamina, soundness, endurance and true grit. We\’ll let it be a horse trial sport that even horses of a much heavier type can excel in, if only you let us stay. Please, please!”
I read somewhere that Ian Stark, an Olympian and winner of the Badminton CCI**** (England), said, “If this is the way eventing is heading, I\’m glad I did it when I did.” I bet lots of us agree with him. So, will 2002 be remembered as a strange watershed year, a year that our team\’s gold medal was a symbolic farewell celebration to one kind of sport, presaging the dawn of a new, diminished sport? Well, I\’m not that much of a pessimist. I think too many people place too much emphasis on the word “Olympics,” as if that one word has some inexorable power to make or break us. I say just forget the Olympics as the summit of eventing, if it ever was.
Years ago, I was told that the unique challenge of any Olympic cross-country course designer was to create a course that challenged the best riders without bringing whole-scale destruction upon the riders and horses from the weaker nations. That\’s why, to the true horseman, the World Championships and the four-star three-day events of Badminton and Burghley in England and Rolex Kentucky here are the true test of “the best of the best.” Only the uninformed man in the street thinks the Olympics are the great test.
Give \’Em A Challenge!
But, even if we conclude that the majority of American riders do not want a sport that has a horse trials, not a three-day event, as its summit, there are other forces at work to “dumb us down.”
Land loss is the biggest factor, that and its attendant byproduct, suburbanization. It\’s hard to be a bold and daring cowboy, or “The Man From Snowy River,” if you only ride around in a little ring and never gallop. Did you ever see the movie The Way The West Was Won? The West was not won by indulged suburban children. Cross-country riding, in its pure, courageous form, is being assailed by enormous changes in the way Americans grow up, in the places they live, and in the ways they think about risk, challenge and danger.
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Just because we\’re being challenged, though, doesn\’t mean we\’re beaten. I was thinking about whether “old-fashioned” eventing could be preserved as I flew home from the U.S. Eventing Association meeting in Cleveland on Sunday, Dec. 8. On my way back to my winter home in Southern Pines, N.C., from the Charlotte (N.C.) airport, I stopped at a fast-food place. I was sitting at a table alone, when an old man sat down at the table beside me. He explained that he was killing time, waiting for his son. We talked about the ice storm that had just paralyzed North Carolina, and he started reminiscing about storms in general. In 1943, he said, he was 17 years old, and he was on a troop carrier on its way to England to fight in World War II. A huge storm hit the ship and pitched it around like a cork in a bottle.
“Was that the most scared you ever were?” I asked him.
“No, that was the sickest I ever was,” he replied.
A few nights later, the officers came running through the ship, calling, “Lights out, total silence, life jackets on. We\’re close to a German submarine wolf pack.” All night long the silent, dark ship floated with the current, but it managed to escape detection.
“That scared me plenty\’that and the time the Germans ambushed my rifle company and shot me in the leg. They took me back behind the lines, sewed me up, and sent me back to the front line three days later,” he recalled.
The point is that this man\’like all the young men and women in eventing today, who are grandchildren of his generation\’was just a normal American kid 60 years ago. He didn\’t know he was a hero until heroism was demanded of him. Our young riders have just as much courage in them, but our society doesn\’t usually ask\’or allow\’them to prove it.
I\’m not advocating a return to the dangers of World War II to test our children. I do believe, though, that they\’re as potentially tough and gutsy as any generation before them.
But, if they want to retain old-fashioned eventing, with all its risk and difficulty, they\’ll certainly have what it takes to do so. First, though, they\’re going to have to decide what kind of a sport they want.