⁉️ Why Are We Even Running the CCI5* in Maryland?
There are only seven 5-star eventing competitions in the world. Badminton and Burghley (GBR), Lexington (USA), Luhmühlen (GER), Adelaide (AUS), Pau (FRA) and Fair Hill (USA).
At Fair Hill Maryland there were 23.
TWENTY THREE combinations competing on the highest level of the eventing sport. What a joke!
If not this is considered the ultimate proof that we should have stuck to the amount of 5-star events that were, or reduced them even, instead of expanding the amount of so called 5* events I don’t know what is.
Making things even worse is only 8 combinations out of the 23 finished!
This makes a finishing score of 34.78%. Which also proves the combinations heading there were not even close to have the qualifications, and I am not talking about the MERs here, to be there!
Food for thought.
At Military Boekelo NL, who had quite the few eliminations along the muddy and wet cross country track, the magic finishing percentage still ended up over 70%.
To be more precise the finishing percentage at Boekelo landed on a 71.13%. Out of 97 combinations, which includes the combinations that disappeared already during the first horse inspection, 71.13% managed to cross the finish line in the show jumping on Sunday.
If eventing wants to stay on as sport something has to give.
First thing should be to take a good look at the amount of 5* competitions around the world. Maybe the time has finally come when we downgrade most of the current 5* competitions down to a 4*-L level, and go from there.
Cause truth of the matter there are plenty of low level 4*-L out there that also would benefit the sport if they were removed as a whole!
What do you think?