Start before you're ready...
Consequences of starting something before being ready vary by the situation but commonly include a higher risk of failure, substandard results, and negative impacts on well-being such as increased stress and burnout.
A couple of weeks ago a friend, the kind of friend that did ride five-star-eventing and lived to tell the tale, sent me a print screen from the social media account of my favourite [not so freakin' much] eventing influencer.
The message this moron [sorry for phrasing] sent out in cyber space was to start before you're ready.
This is a person who makes [I presume] money giving people advice how to launch their eventing career, and or take it to the next level.
Us normal people, who knew the sport before she probably even saw the light of day gasp for air seeing the advise that roll out from this account.
Never mind the rider don't even understand the very foundation of the concept of MERs in the eventing sport. Ever so often the advise handed out could get lethal consequences.
Start before you're ready
Then last week, drama in Florida.
Where the CCI3*-L class at Myakka City, Florida became a brutal reminder of something nobody in this sport likes to admit, at least not out loud, that a lot of horse and rider combinations simply weren’t ready for the level they’d entered.
Which in itself would be the foundation of living by the motto "start before you're ready".
Out of 36 starters, a handful [10] made it around the cross country phase without jumping faults.
Half the field didn’t even finish.
Almost all of the errors came down to one coffin combination early on course, a perfectly legitimate question for a prepared partnership, but clearly far too much for many who showed up.
Officials had inspected it.
Alternatives were available.
Visibility was improved.
Ground jury members stood there all day.
No one asked for changes.
No rider raised concerns beforehand.
And yet, when things went wrong, fingers started pointing everywhere except inward.
We've seen it before, I wrote about it before.
Riders come under-prepared.
Horses lack of experience.
Watch-list combinations enters anyway.
In other words, the course did not expose a problem. but only revealed one that was already there.
For when half a division can’t answer a standard three-star question, the issue isn’t the fence. It’s the readiness of the people tackling it.
These are the riders that start before they are ready, and so far the system let them.
But if we truly care about horse welfare, then “being ready” can’t be optional. It has to be the standard. Otherwise, we’ll just keep replaying weekends like this one, for all the wrong reasons.
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