The five-time Burghley winner, who also took top honours at Badminton, won two Olympic team bronze medals and a team silver, and is cross-country coach to the Swiss eventing team, says the start of this season has been mired in issues
While the 2023 eventing season is officially underway, it has been beset by so many problems that I rather feel we should press “stop” and then start again.
The weather is what it is and nobody can sort that out – it will do that itself in time. There are man-made issues, however, that do need resolving.
I was particularly cross about the loss of Barbury – my local event – from this year’s calendar because of British Eventing’s new rule that doesn’t allow international venues to run unaffiliated horse trials as well. It is ludicrous.
How often does our sport get a site like Barbury these days? If organiser Alec Lochore needs to run other competitions to be able to make the finances work, good on him. He’s still staging a much-needed and popular international event.
I see that Aston-le-Walls is taking the international fixture that weekend – fine. Nigel Taylor does an excellent job there. But you can’t compare the two places.
You can go schooling at Aston every week; Barbury is a one-off at a unique venue – you go there once a year to run round its terrain, and both horses and riders learn a lot. There is a shortage of three- and four-star events, so why can’t we have both Barbury and Aston?
To my mind, there is a big shortage of events in the calendar. We have lost a lot of the less commercially minded, once-a-year events. Organisers have had enough, and understandably so. I don’t know how riders with 10 or more horses to compete will manage to find all of them sufficient runs, even when the weather is good.
It’s also bad for the variety of the sport; people go to the same place too often, and appear to choose the softest options available now in pursuit of a cheap clear round, which finds them out when they do go to one of the major events and are confronted by the sort of terrain and track they have been avoiding.
Keeping up a standard
Eventing’s problems certainly aren’t confined to the UK. As part of my work with the Swiss team, I went to Montelibretti in Italy recently. They had a lot of entries, and ran one-, two-, three- and four-star short competitions one week and long-format versions of all of those – plus the short classes again – in the second week.
When I arrived for the second event, the weather was fine, but they had had a great deal of rain in the first week – and the courses were pretty much exactly the same as for the first week’s classes. You do not – and should not – expect that at an international FEI event. The least they could have done would have been to move the fences sideways onto fresh ground.
Then they took three jumps out on the CCI4*-S Nations Cup course, which made an already very easy four-star far too simple. The CCI4*-L had fences taken out as well, so the whole thing was greatly simplified – but the one-star and two-star horses had to slop through the bad ground conditions to the same fences in the same place as they had 10 days earlier. And one of the fences in the two-star that had been taken out halfway through the first competition was put back in – then taken back out midway through the day!
There didn’t seem to be any respect for the fact that this was an international event – the pinnacle of our sport at each level. I know riders often go there for a fairly easy qualification, but this was inappropriate. How can the FEI insist it is so concerned about safety when a supposedly important European show is allowed to operate in this way?
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