It's never any fault of the officials, never!
In horse sport, organisers and officials dodge accountability while riders are left to shoulder the fallout. Here’s one more example of how that story plays out, and why the status quo is finally starting to feel unbearable.
About a month ago, a few meters after the final fence at a national championships in showjumping in one of the Nordic countries, a horse stumbled on a makeshift arena barrier. The was injured so bad it had to be put down.
After the event the elite riders, some of them world famous praised the organiser. While the little people questioned not only the makeshift arena barrier but quite frankly a lot of the organisational mishaps that occurred over the week.
The incident itself was investigated by the national federation.
Their conclusion? No one did anything wrong.
Let that one sink in, no one did anything wrong. Not the officials, neither the organisation.
For the rider, the loss is still impossible to comprehend. That horse wasn’t just a competition partner, he was family, history, and home. And to lose him in such a senseless way is something no one can prepare for.
A death trap!
What caused the injury wasn’t a normal, solid arena wall. It was a temporary curtain hiding a wooden pallet underneath.
When the horse slipped, he stepped into the fabric, not onto a solid surface. But instead of sliding off the wall like horses normally do, he caught the pallet, and ended up with the hoof basically severed from his leg.
Anyone with basic horse knowledge knows the difference. A horse can brush off a proper barrier.
A hidden pallet under a loose cloth? A death trap!
And yet, after reviewing the incident, the federation repeated the same line they always do: Nobody is at fault. Sometimes accidents just happen.
But here’s the question I keep coming back to. If the safety was supposedly “good enough,” how does a horse end up dead in the first place?
The Swiss cheese model
Federations love to talk about horse welfare.
But somehow the responsibility always seems to start and end with the riders, even when the problem is something as avoidable as a pallet shoved in under a curtain.
This isn’t about pointing fingers at individuals. It’s about acknowledging that bad setups, sloppy preparations, and avoidable hazards are faults, even when federations prefer not to see them.
In all they are classic human errors that fits straight into the Swiss cheese model.
The Swiss cheese model of accident causation illustrates that, although there are many layers of defence in between hazards and accidents, there are flaws in each layer that, if aligned, can allow the accident to occur.
In aviation one refer to these hazards as the human factor, and do everything they possibly can to avoid them. In equestrian sport not so much.
Cause it's been proven over and over and over again neither officials nor organisers rarely, if ever, get the blame for setups and hick ups just about anybody could figure out were not a good idea.
Which in turn means that if we keep referring to everything tragic as an accident, nothing ever changes.
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