The secret glamorous life of an EN blogger
After hours of meticulous scoring, counts, recounts that would do Florida proud, and maybe even a few hanging chads, 9 would be EN bloggers are moving onto round three of the EN blogger contest. Four EN writers and all of the chinchillas contributed to the judging for this round and I read all of the entries once before and once after reading their reviews. It was incredibly difficult having to write emails to the finalists who were eliminated in this round and, as I honestly told them, all of the round two submissions were better than anything I could have written for my second ever EN submission. This is the first half of the 9 round two survivors. We asked the contestants to include two short sentences about themselves along with their submission about the most important development in eventing over the past 10 years. There are just two more rounds left before we pick the next member of the EN Team, and I will post much more on that along with the final half of the round two submissions tomorrow.
Take it away guys, in no particular order:
Leslie Wylie:
Bio: Leslie Wylie was a newspaper editor until she quit her respectable, well-paying job to become an impoverished horse professional. She’s been eventing for 20 years and is currently pursuing her lifelong dream of interviewing Boyd Martin in his underpants.
Entry: The past decade of eventing has been a crazy roller coaster ride, no doubt. But whether we were laughing or screaming or getting puked on by the person beside us, we were all in it together thanks to the Internet. From blogs and MyTwitFace to COTH forums and a ridiculous website called EN, the mainstreaming of the web has changed the way we talk, think and participate in the sport.
Remember life before eventing “in the cloud”? A little over a decade ago, I was a working student for Julie Richards as she prepared to compete in the 2000 Olympic Games. We finally got horse and rider shipped off to Sydney and then… crickets. For weeks, crickets. NBC obviously considered synchronized swimming coverage to be WAY more important than eventing, and my web-surfing abilities were limited to checking email and downloading ’80s hair metal from Napster. So here I’ve gotten to know this horse down to his favorite corner of the stall to take a crap in, but I have no way of knowing how he’s doing in the Olympic Games. (Julie’s mom eventually called to say they placed ninth individually–no big deal!)
These days you can watch the action as it unfolds, be it cross-country day at Rolex or a keynote speaker’s address at the Annual Convention. Even at small-fry events, a smart-phone saves you from having to leave the beer cooler to go check your score. I’m looking forward to the day when we don’t even have to walk our cross-country course. There will just be pictures of every jump online, maybe accompanied by an interview from a top rider on how he or she is going to ride the fence. Wait, EN already does that? Never mind.
But real-time event coverage is but a single grass tip in the giant stud kit that is the Internet. The web has changed the way we do business, from buying and selling horses to sharing information and swapping opinions. Before the Internet we even had to, like, go to the post office to mail show entries and stuff.
The web makes every aspect of our sport more accessible. Blogs by top riders provide a glimpse into the less-than-glamorous process of making a superstar event horse, which helps bridge the gap between the upper and lower levels. It’s like, if all we ever saw Hannah Montana do was coast around four-stars, we’d probably want to grab that shiny blond ponytail and yank her off her horse. But if we read about Miley getting up at 4 a.m. to muck stalls and her horse is lame and everything is falling apart but she keeps fighting then it’s like, OK, this is someone I want to cheer for.
Of course, eventing is not always the magic kingdom we’d like it to be. We’ve experienced some dark nights of the soul over the past decade, moments that have forced us to ask hard questions about ourselves and the future of the sport. Through it all, the web has played a major role in helping us sort out our differences via a combination of diplomacy and virtual hair-pulling. Innovations in safety and policy have emerged thanks in large part to a silent ruckus raised online. We don’t always get our way, but at least the Internet gives us the feeling that we all have a hand in molding the sport into the shape we want it to be.
It’s a shame we missed our opportunity to put a helmet cam on Murphy Himself, but it’s exciting to imagine what the next decade of cyber-eventing holds. Now close your laptop and Go Eventing.
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Lacy Cotton:
Bio: Lacy Cotton is a 27 year old Prelim level Eventer who has been involved in equestrian sports her entire life (and yet still manages to remain completely horse crazy!). She competes in Area Five with her off-track Thoroughbred gelding named Prophet, and considers eventing to be her second home, a place of sincere friendships and of hard-won accomplishments.
Entry: Learning to Teach, Teaching to Learn
Over the years, there has been an innumerable amount of changes made to the sport of eventing, some more memorable than others. I’d like to focus on one that has managed to span the decade and remains extremely relevant today. That change is the Instructor Certification Program offered by USEA.
Originally developed in 2002, the ICP seeks to educate and promote a network of capable, effective, and (most importantly) safe riding instructors spanning all levels of eventing. The program includes workshops, mentorships, and assessments that prepare candidates for levels of certification ranging from I to IV. It’s a veritable Shangri-La of proven riding techniques, drawn from the assembled hivemind of the most successful riders our sport has ever known, and it’s only grown in the nine years since its conception. The current all-star ICP faculty includes Karen and David O’Connor, Mark Phillips, and Darren Chiacchia – just to name a few! And while that’s all very impressive, the most amazing aspect of the ICP process is the quality instructors it produces by sharing time-tested concepts for teaching and competing.
Login to the USEA website and look at the directory of available certified teachers found there, all able to verify their experience at any given level and in every phase of our sport. How great is it that we have such an amazing resource?! It doesn’t matter whether you’re a newbie showing GAG on an overweight 22-year old pony or an advanced level competitor on a $90K Irish Sporthorse with Olympic dreams. There is a certified instructor out there who is a perfect fit for your aspirations! (And wow, I’ve made the USEA website sound like a online dating service. eHarmony for Horseriding!)
With ICP, inexperienced eventers can feel assured that they will never have to “roll the proverbial dice” when choosing an instructor. It wasn’t so long ago that trying out new trainers was a painful trial and error process, wherein the unsuspecting rider followed instruction with vague hopes that this person wasn’t leading them down the road to ruin. You all know what I’m talking about. We are, admittedly, all crazy horse people… but some of us are just crazier than others. Within five years of its birth, the ICP produced 96 certified instructors, and now numbers well into the two hundreds. Each area can proudly claim ten or more certified trainers as resources for developing strong, successful competitors.
I have always been a believer that knowledge is perhaps the greatest powers a rider can wield in eventing. The ICP process has proven itself to be one of the most successful ways to spread that host of valuable knowledge from eventing champions, to trainers, to aspiring students. It takes into account new technology and regulations within the sport, incorporating relevant information into an already solid foundation. And you don’t even have to be an ICP candidate to benefit from the program! Workshops are open to auditors and (even better) invite riders to participate as the student body the candidates must practice teaching. There is no limit to what you could learn, no matter what your goal!
Ok… Slow your roll, Lacy. I’m starting to sound like a spokesperson for the ICP.
Perhaps the Instructor Certification Program isn’t perfect, but its continued growth and adaptation is incredibly promising. I find myself more excited over what the future might bring for this system, how much more we might learn through it. And if I am ever accomplished enough to pursue a certification through ICP, I know it’ll be a rewarding experience that will stay with me throughout my career in the sport.
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Chesna Klimek:
Bio: Hi EN! I’m Chesna, a psychology grad student and horse junkie who hails from the Pacific Northwest (Area VII). I dabble in most anything equine, but carry a special kind of love for eventing, ponies, and long rides on the beach.
Entry: The long and the short of it “What’s the most important eventing development in the past ten years?” I can’t help but wonder, is this a trick question? Did EN intentionally pick this so all 12 of us write about the same thing? Isn’t there one particular development that stands high above the rest (that’s not a reference to William Fox Pitt’s stature). To risk pointing out the obvious… obviously the most important eventing development has been the shift from the long format to short format.
It’s not every day an Olympic sport gets a major makeover… You don’t hear about marathons getting shortened by 6 miles, for example. To some this may sound like an over-told history lesson, but traditionally phase two of eventing was a four part “endurance” day, not just the “cross-country” of today’s short format. This transition didn’t happen overnight, but history books–and wikipedia–will probably point to the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Greece as the catalyst for the long-to-short format transition. The Olympic Committee took one look at our noble sport and bemoaned “too much space, too much cost, not enough popularity!” In an effort to keep eventing on the Olympic roster, the short format was born–a brainchild of the FEI (if applicable, insert FEI joke of choice here).
Many of the younger generation, myself included, might not have had the chance to experience a long format event. In a nutshell, phase two under the long format had four parts:
A: Roads and Tracks – Think of this as your warmup at medium speed–a time to psych yourself up (or down!) and get the blood flowing without any solid objects in your way.
B: Steeplechase – Like a scene right out of National Velvet! Well, minus the stampeding herd of horses. But still, this was a fast-paced assault on gallop-friendly steeplechase jumps.
C: Roads and Tracks – Here pairs took advantage of a cool down trot leading up to a 10 minute vet box… A moment to make sure you were rubber side down and still breathing!
D: Cross Country – This is the same hair-raising adrenaline rush that keeps all of us coming back to the sport–but not quite as we know it today under the short format. Courses tended to feature more galloping fences and less technical stadium-esque combos.
The moral of the long format is that you and your horse had to be fit, and there was no way around it. You can take a peek at the old Burghley videos EN recently posted to see the differences between the long format and short formats. FYI, Burghley 2005 was the last four star event to offer the long format.
The shift to short format eventing has undoubtedly changed the face of our sport. It’s influenced the way we train and condition our horses, and even what type of horses we compete (WB breeders rejoiced!). It impacted cross-country course design, more facilities are able to offer upper level events, and it set the stage for other important happenings, like a 14.2 hand pony making it around a **** in style and the creation of those someday-I-hope-I-can-afford inflatable air vests.
Of course, a change like this hasn’t come without controversy. Even still we eventers like to hash it out on this topic, it’s almost as heated as our national politics or sports team preferences. But no matter which side of the fence you fall on–or better yet, land on–I hope we can all agree that the transition from long to short format is the biggest eventing news of the decade.
Happy riding!
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Elyse Gonyo:
Bio: Elyse Gonyo is a 27-year-old eventer from northern Virginia who is currently horseless and living in Boulder, Colorado with her two dogs. She’s excited about the possibility of blogging for Eventing Nation because it will mean she can finally tell people she’s using her college degree.
Entry: This past summer, I spent several weeks volunteering at a beginner riding camp. My first week, since I was new, I was placed with the arts and crafts group for half of the day. Once the kids got started making their collages, I ended up looking through old issues of Practical Horseman circa 2000, having saved the eventing issue from their scissor-happy little hands. While many things remained the same (George Morris still thought eventers’ “garb” was detracting from the natural beauty of the horse), one of the most surprising aspects was how positively quaint the advertising was. They were still mostly in black-and-white, for heaven’s sake.
To be fair, horses in general, and eventing in particular, have always been a business. But over the past 10 years, we’ve truly started to look and act like one. 2001 and prior was a different sort of eventing – it was a time when the long format was still the norm, USEA was still called USCTA, Philip Dutton still rode for Australia, and there was no such thing as a half-coffin on a Novice level cross-country course. Back then, when my pony dumped me in front of a fence, it was at a nice, plain stone wall – not a hand-carved sea serpent sponsored by Bit of Britain.
It’s now uncommon to see professional riders, events, and event series without multiple sponsorships. The United States Eventing Association’s website currently lists 32 corporate sponsors (back in 2001, there were three), and other countries’ eventing associations and teams are no different. Saddle pads, horse trailers, jumps and jump complexes, stadium arenas, and clothing are all fair game for equine corporate logos of some form or another. Events have followed suit, particularly the larger ones, and for good reason. No one who knows anything about eventing will ever say that there is anything inexpensive about this sport and “sponsorship” has always existed in some way, though primarily through ownership of top-level horses. While these corporate sponsors have allowed us to keep events going, supported our programs, and allowed us to expand our sport dramatically over the past 10 years, it has also changed the landscape of eventing forever.
Now, obviously the expansion of sponsorship isn’t limited to eventing – one needs only go to any professional sporting event to see its prevalence. When done well, sponsorships provide a win-win between the corporations and the organization or event they support – the event gets necessary funding support, and the corporation receives exposure to an already-interested group of people attending the event. There are obviously some great examples of this (SmartPak and Bit of Britain) and some not-so-great examples (I still am not quite sure what Alltech does. Sorry, Alltech).
That said, eventing today has a very different look than it did 10 years ago. We’re a little shinier, and a little less rough-and-ready than we used to be. A little more camera-ready. But, then, George Morris never approved of our attire anyway, so what exactly does a logo on our breeches change? Maybe nothing.
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