As a quick note, Sharon’s surgery went well Monday afternoon and she is expected to be released from the hospital later this week. Sharon, of course, is based out of Last Frontier Farm in West Virginia and will be back at the farm soon.
Now, let’s chat about frangible pins, especially as they relate to the falls at Fair Hill. Mick Costello, who is the Rolex course builder, WEG course builder, and one of the most knowledgeable jump safety experts on the planet, was kind enough to chat with me over the weekend and help educate me about the latest jump safety information.
It is a common reaction to view any situation where a horse and rider are injured as a failure of the safety device used in building the jump. After all, the safety devices are there to protect us, right? I confess that I have had this reaction before, especially at Rolex earlier this year. The important thing to remember is that a device is just a mechanical object that will do certain things under certain circumstances according to its design.
Consider a standard frangible pin hanging log, where the hanging log rests on pins in front of the support logs. If you look at the above diagrams, you can see that these pins will only respond to downward force. You could drive a truck into these jumps and the pins would not deploy if the force was purely horizontal because horizontal force does not apply any stress to the pins. But, if there is a vertical component to the force then the pins will break at a certain magnitude of force. Please note that the force does not need to be only vertical (pointing straight down) to break the pin. The force can be at a downward angle–there just needs to be a vertical component to the direction of force.
The frangible pins are especially designed to deploy during a slow rotational fall, where the horse rotates over the jump and puts a high amount of force directly down on the pins. The pins then break and help prevent the horse from falling on the rider. With that in mind, let’s consider the Fair Hill falls.
Sharon White’s fall at Fair Hill was rotational, but it was not slow and the horse rotated after the fence. If you have seen Oliver’s fall from Rolex, it was a similar situation and both falls were such that not enough vertical force was applied to break the pins. This doesn’t mean that the pins failed, just that the accident conditions did not fit the circumstances under which the pins were designed to break. My understanding is that pins were used on the jump where Jennifer fell, but again the circumstances did not fit the deployment of the pins.
Reverse pinning: We have mentioned reverse pinning several times before, but, as a quick overview, reverse pinning is a new technology where the hanging log and pins are placed behind the support rails. Reverse pins seem to break under a wider array of impact circumstances and they may not require as much of a vertical force to deploy as conventional pins. Mick said that reverse pins are often used when there is a drop or downward sloping ground behind the fences. Reverse pins were used into the later water jump at Fair Hill and that jump deployed twice on Saturday, causing brief holds on course.
One thing to remember is that according to FEI rules, 25 penalties are given for “breaking a frangible obstacle/device.” A recent update to the rule gives ground juries the discretion to decide if these 25 penalties apply. From accounts I have heard about the Fair Hill pins breaking at the water jump, the rides that broke the pins did not seem to be particularly severe. As a rider, I would be pretty frustrated if I was given 25 penalties because my horse slid over a log into water. Needless to say, I doubt Exponential needs to worry about this happening to him.
Foam logs: Another leading technology are foam logs or Prologs, developed by Kyle Carter and Mike Winter at Safer Building Materials. We all remember Jeff Curran’s experience at the Head of the Lake during Rolex. Foam logs were not used at the WEGs, and the primary concern is that they break too easily. One last safety technology that deserves mention is the collapsible table. These are just starting to be used in the US, such as at Chattahoochee Hills, and they show promise but have not yet been tested in the field as thoroughly as pins and foam logs.
The Cattahoochee collapsible table
Ultimately all of this safety discussion will come down to how our sport decides to balance the “breakability” of jumps with the notion of solid XC obstacles. The extreme version of maximizing breakability would be just putting show jumps in a field. No one wants that, but how much risk is worth the loss of a certain amount of breakability? In my mind, the fate of cross-country rests on how we answer that question. Go eventing.
