Horseback riding is dangerous, and there is no way we can ever make the sport completely risk free. Even with increased technology in helmets, body protectors, and even jump set-ups, accidents happen. Horses are huge prey animals who can spook, have a bad day, or even just trip over their own feet and fall on their rider. Even the best rider and the most well-trained horse can make a mistake, whether that be over a cross-country jump, running a barrel race, or even walking on the flat in a schooling arena. Aside from never getting on the back of a horse or ever coming near a horse at all (since accidents can also happen during groundwork, or even just while feeding a horse in a stall), there is absolutely no way to guarantee the safety of both horse and rider.
That being said, there is a lot we can do to make the different branches of our sport safer. Western disciplines are beginning to require riders to wear helmets – a welcome change, if you ask me, dressage is doing away with top hats and also requiring helmets for competition, and even Eventing has come a long way in the past few years to reduce rotational falls.
And Eventing is what I want to talk about today. Now, I’ll preface this by saying that I am NOT an Eventer. I have never taken a cross-country jump at a gallop. Hell, I’ve barely jumped a cross-rail, to be honest. So I’m basing my opinions on watching videos, reading about the sport, and from the experiences of my friends who do cross-country and eventing. If I have a fact wrong in this blog, please let me know! I like to learn as much about the many areas of horse sports as I can!
So, let’s talk about Frangible Technology. Frangible Technology is responsible for the drop in rotational falls in Eventing in the past few years. Frangible pins can be added to cross-country jumps to make them collapse when a certain amount of force hits the jump (i.e. from a horse not clearing jump and hitting it). One of the biggest problems with cross-country jumps is that they are usually solid, and so if a horse or rider makes a mistake, the jump isn’t likely to move easily. Instead, the horse and rider hit the jump and fall, usually resulting in a rotational fall where the horse lands on top of the rider. These types of falls are more likely to result in serious injury or death.
The difference between cross-country jumps and show jumping is that arena jumps collapse much easier. Only the slightest tap is required to knock a pole off a jump cup, and poles and jump standards fall if a horse and rider crash into them, making it less likely that the jump will become a pivot point and cause the horse to flip over. (LESS likely, not completely impossible. See opening paragraphs about horse activities being inherently dangerous.) Also, there has been lots of talk in the past few years about cross-country in Eventing getting more and more challenging, with course designers making courses that have too complicated of jumps simply for the “Wow factor” and to fit the demand of spectators for more excitement in watching the sport.
Personally, just watching a Go-Pro video of someone doing cross country jumping is enough to make me wet myself, I wouldn’t want to actually be galloping across a field toward a wooden table that drops down into a pond five feet below the jump. No thank you!
So, yes, Frangible technology can help with safety in the sport of Eventing, and some courses have updated some of their jumps with frangible pins to make the jumps safer. But it’s not enough, and converting jumps is expensive, up to $1000 per table jump. The United States Eventing Association allocates about $26,000 a year for grants for competitions to make their jumps safer, which is not enough to implement the technology at a fast enough rate. Aside from being cost-prohibitive, there is no reason to not put frangible technology on every Eventing course across the country.
Jon Holling, Chair of the USEA’s Cross Country Safety Division, has put out a call to make Eventing safer, at a faster rate. He is proposing a 3-year timeline to make any fence that can be converted to frangible technology in some way to be converted, at the Preliminary level and above. The cost of this project is a minimum of $500,000, which is a LOT. But if we spread it out among everyone who loves, participates in, watches, or knows someone who participates in the sport of Eventing, it makes the cost much more manageable and makes that number attainable.
There is currently a campaign active on GoFundMe for this project. At the time of this blog post, over $82,000 have been raised.
Even though I’m not an Eventer, I’m sharing this information because I have beloved friends who are. I don’t want to go to a funeral for any of them because there was an accident and their jump didn’t collapse. Frangible pins can be the difference between needing a hospital stay and needing a casket, and I don’t want any of my horsey friends to end up dead- even if they died doing something they love.
Please give to the campaign if you can, or share it to the horse-lovers that you know!
(Featured image from Wikipedia. Most research for this blog post was taken from this Horse Nation Article.)
