It’s becoming increasingly apparent that many of our current advanced-level riders, both here and abroad, are in favor of doing away with the speed, stamina and endurance phases of the classic three-day event, the parts we’ve traditionally called roads and tracks (phases A and C) and steeplechase (phase B).

Either they support eliminating this part of the complete test, or they feel that there’s nothing they can do about it, so they’re choosing not to assist the several thousand eventers who don’t ride in three- and four-star events who are doing all they can to save the traditional format.

Several riders–notably Kim Severson, Phillip Dutton, Darren Chiacchia and Bobby Costello–have expressed their views in print, so they have at least demonstrated the courage of their convictions.

Nevertheless, their words have left me with several major unanswered questions, so I’m now going to ask them. To my knowledge, no one, so far, has addressed them.

Question No. 1: Where is your pride? The great event riders of our time all mastered the same high-standard test. Richard Meade, Lucinda Green, Mark Todd, Bruce Davidson, Ian Stark, Mike Plumb, Ginny Leng, Pippa Funnell, and dozens of other great riders took on a certain level of test–and prevailed.

“How,” I would ask, “can you ever expect to measure up to them if the test you master is a diminished test?”

It would be as if the Maryland Hunt Cup’s timber fences were all lowered 6 inches and the distance was shortened by a mile, to the standard 3 miles. How could a rider who won this new version of the Maryland Hunt Cup compare himself to the former winners? I don’t think it would really matter that they still called it the Maryland Hunt Cup.

If the organizers of the legendary Badminton CCI**** (England) drop the endurance phases, they may still call it Badminton (they can call it anything they please), but the reality will be that it’s just a fancy horse trial. You can call a skunk cabbage a rose, but it still smells like a skunk cabbage.

So riders, are you proud of your new sport, even though you know it’s a diminished version of the sport that the past’s great riders mastered?

Question No. 2: If you’re all enamored with the challenges of dressage and show jumping, why don’t you go become dressage and show jumping riders instead of dismantling a great cross-country sport?

I don’t know anyone who arrives at an event and asks, “What’s the dressage test like?” Or asks, “What’s the show jumping course like?” It’s always, “Have you seen the cross-country?”

Our sport has always been, primarily, a cross-country sport. Do you want a sport in which the cross-country challenge is diminished and the dressage and show-jumping phases are worth just as much? Won’t that make you, collectively, “a jack of all trades, a master of none?”

Up ’til now we’ve been the unchallenged masters of cross-country riding. If the overall test on the second day diminishes from 90 minutes, or thereabouts, as it used to be, to 10 or 12 minutes, where is the essence of that test?

Question No. 3: Have you no concern for this new sport’s effect on the breeding of horses? No less an international superstar than the late, great Reiner Klimke, who rode in the Olympic three-day event before he won all his gold medals in dressage, expressed it best in one of his books:

“Although the demands of my profession brought an end to my seven years of competing in events and my greatest success was later in dressage, riding in the three-day event remains for me the best part of all equestrian sports. I am firmly convinced that these trials are a branch of equestrianism with the biggest right to exist. They are absolutely necessary for both the art of riding and for the breeding of horses.

“As long as horses are subjected to the hard realities of horse trials, and with care and consideration succeed in overcoming the difficulties of this contest, so long can one be certain that the horse will keep its robust health and its natural characteristics of hardness, courage and the will to win. As long as there are three-day events, the horse will never degenerate into a mollycoddled pet. Also, it will never be completely degraded into a simple acrobat performing on a carefully tended lawn and, for the diversion of the spectators, be made to jump higher and higher.

“For this reason, the future of three-day events is a reason for the future of German horse breeding.”

If eventing folds, what horse sport left on earth will need stamina and soundness, except for endurance riding, which uses, primarily, smaller, Arabian horses? If no sport needs those once com-monly necessary qualities, how long do you think breeders will breed for them?

Question No. 4: If roads and tracks and steeplechase phases are so bad for horses, how come nobody noticed that over the previous 80-plus years? The Olympic three-day took on its basic format in 1920, and Badminton was founded in 1949. That essentially opened up the sport to civilians, and very significantly, to female riders. Thou-sands and thousands have been contesting three-day events since 1949.

Don’t you think they cared about their horses? Wouldn’t that have made you wonder why there wasn’t an outcry decades ago? What do you current riders know that thousands of others somehow missed?

Question No. 5: Just because the Federation Equestre Internationale and other countries are backing down, why should we Americans back down too?

I hear statements like “the train has already left the station,” or “we have to remember that the other countries don’t all think the same way we do.” Who cares? Those countries don’t share the magnificent horsemanship saga and heritage of our westward expansion, when we defined, once and for all, the true essence of “cross-country riding.” Our predecessors didn’t cross “country” on horseback, they crossed a continent.

So, I hope I’ve offended some of you enough so that you’ll answer some of these questions (perhaps with a Letter to the Editor) and give specific answers to these specific questions, not just rail against me as an irrelevant relic of a bygone era. Tell me something I don’t know.

I read a newspaper article a few years ago about the oldest resident of Corinth, Vt., near where I live. On his 99th birthday, a reporter asked him, “Well, Mr. Perkins, I guess you’ve seen lots of changes in your 99 years?”

Mr. Perkins replied, “Eyah, I have, and I’ve been against every god-damned one of ’em.” I know how Mr. Perkins felt.

If you are an advanced rider who, like Mr. Perkins, is against what they’re doing to your sport, aren’t you going to say anything? We know you have the guts to jump those jumps. Do you also have the guts to take a public stand that may run counter to the prevailing sentiment of your little group that’s following the misguided FEI, lemming-like, over the cliff?