A lot of my inspiration for writing these posts comes from the Chronicle of the Horse forums. Once you scroll past the “at my horse show last week, I had this incident with this TD aka Satan” or the ever-so-popular “train wreck” threads that either involve Parelli or a scandal with “an event rider who shall not be named”, the threads are often filled with poignant thoughts from very wise and knowledgeable people. Part of the reason I like the COTH forums is because you can get a sense of what the community of eventers’ thinks about current issues or events as a whole. One of the posts that caught my eye this week was written about how eventers don’t really have a defining characteristic like those of the “Hunter Princesses” or “Dressage Queens”. Although some suggestions, truthful they may be, such as “A drunk with a riding problem” (courtesy of an EN favorite, LisaB) or simply the prefix of “crazy”, by the end of the thread it was clear that there was no agreement in the defining characteristic of an eventer. I think the ineptitude at finding one shows what a diverse cast of characters eventers really are. You could go watch any event in the country and it wouldn’t take long before you found the “princesses”, “queens”, “crazies”, and yes, even the “drunk with a riding problem” all riding at the same event.
Part of what makes eventing in the United States unique is that, geographically, it is very spread out. Events are clustered into “areas” depending on their location, and many event sites will run more than one horse trials per year. Especially at the young rider level, there is a lot of camaraderie and competition that goes on between the area teams. The east coast is probably the area with the most events and most competition, as many of our professionals are based there. The east is also where the big three-days such as Fair Hill and Jersey Fresh are located. I think that a lot of riders from the smaller areas tend to feel as if they are not quite up to the standard of competition of the big east coast eventers or believe the common mantra that “you have to be in the east if you want to event seriously” to be true. I’ve been lucky enough to experience Eventing in several different places in the United States both in the Midwest and the East Coast. What I’ve noticed most is that eventers demonstrate the same qualities no matter what area they are in. It doesn’t matter whether you are riding at Fair Hill or a small, local event in the middle of nowhere; you can count on a friendly hello from the ring-stewards and politeness from your fellow competitors. Eventing is probably the only sport where you could walk up to most any professional and ask them a quick question about a certain line on the cross country course, or how they think the footing is, and more often than not they will probably give you a very knowledgeable and well thought out answer.
Eventing is a community based on exactly that: the community. I think that a lot of the reason our amateurs spend so much of their time, money, and efforts to event outside of their normal job and family life is largely because of the camaraderie and team spirit that eventing offers. There’s nothing like the first event of the spring when you live in an area that doesn’t hold events during the winter. There’s a great sense of anticipation leading up to it, and not just for the actual competition. Getting to catch up and hang out with all of your friends that you haven’t seen since the previous fall’s events is almost as much fun the competition itself.
All of these pieces, the unique and interesting people, the team spirit at the competitions, the professionals closeness to the community and willingness to help others, all of those things make up the sport that we know and love. Especially in the year of a major international competition, it’s easy to forget about everyone else except for those special six team riders. Let’s not forget vital the “grassroots” members are to keeping our sport the way we want it to be.
